Pre-grieving

By CKWilde

An Army Chaplin, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, once told me that “Every new grief touches every old grief”. As Ive grown older, and more of those I love have passed away, I have found it to be true. I have found too a different awareness of the fragile, fugitive, and ephemeral nature of relationships. The Japanese have a concept called “Mono No Aware”; it is a “sadness or empathy for the transience of things.”. I feel it acutely these days. It has sharpened my perceptions of each moment, clarified the air and light, heightened the smells, made me feel the moment of a sound and its dying away into silence. A certain wistfulness or sorrow commingling with the simple joy of any moment. Sometimes it is unbearable, like being stuck in a torrent of loss, a cataract of helplessness. Other times it is a lushness, overwhelmingly saturating the moment; suffusing me with a sense of just how very lucky I am to be alive at all, experiencing all this beauty. The experiential stakes are raised by this sensation of loss, and with each death close and far from me I experience: the more profound becomes this sense of loss while in the midst of fullness.

Is this the wisdom of age?

My companion Lou is getting older. It has been said that one day for a dog is like a week of human life. I see this intensity in him: his alacrity for each smell, taste, nap, and caress. As his vision dims, and hearing fades, each smell, taste, and touch is heightened for him. He is like a refined oenophile with each bush, pile of leaves, and peed on rock. He runs the molecules across his palate, softly chuffing and gently licking. A snort, cough, or sneeze to clear the way for the new scents. He is very diligent about reading his Pee Mail from the neighborhood hound cohort. He takes his time, and I wait patiently. He is my bodhisattva Dharma teacher on patience. I can see my own spiritual fitness in how impatient I am on any given day with his concentrated careful explorations. Our walks grow slower and longer in duration, shorter in distance. He is still game tho, his tail jauntily aloft and wagging, juking to fake out a directional shift, looking back over his shoulder at me as if to say “ C’mon! There’s miles to go and things to smell on the wind! And perhaps a rotting thing under a bush…” As we experience these moments together but differently I wonder sometimes how he perceives me… a leaning tower of man, an unsteady biped blundering through the delicacies of the world, noisy and insensitive, tromping through the underbrush and treading on the microscopic life therein. We share our time together, he and I: me shepherding him through the dangerous human world, and he me through the natural world of beasts, stones, and plants. He experiences things I cannot fathom and I have moments untranslatable to him. I ponder the ephemeral while he knows it in his bones- it motivates his avid and boundless curiousity. Does he also know it means we two must part? That part of our journey is that we will separate forever, again? Lou has separation anixety, brought on by his abandonment as a pup and surely by my displacement of him from his place of birth. It has meant we have spent all day everyday together for over five years now. When I was getting to know him back in LA, he was living free and rough on the streets. When I would return from my studio in the evenings he would run along side my car as I sought parking; then frisk about as I got out of the car to walk home keeping a tight perimeter around me. He began sleeping outside my door, eventually in my bedroom in a little nest I made for him. We became friends at his insistence. I had never had a dog as a companion. His particularities are legion, and Ive learned him. How best to serve this princely being, how to take care of and for him. He has taught me a way of loving just by his being.

Generosity of spirit is a curious thing- there is no limit to it, except mortality.