On grief.

[for the time being, this is going to be a blog about grief and mourning and losing a dog you love. i know that’s not what everybody signed up for and it’s fine not to read it or to ubsubscribe.]

I have a weird relationship with grief, in that I have never really done it before. I have experienced loss, and I’ve felt that loss in the same dull, distant way that my brain has long processed pretty much every other emotion, good or bad: as an ever-present sense of discomfort that I could never quite identify. But actually recognizing what I was feeling as grief, and feeling the emotions that come with it—doing something like sitting quietly and crying because I lost something or someone precious to me—is not a skill I have possessed in the past. (Unsolicited advice, if you relate: go to therapy.)

I learned my own ways to move through those feelings, and they worked a lot of the time. I started writing when I was a teenager because I felt grief, but I didn’t know how to process it any way other than to write it down. Over the past year or two, I’ve tried to learn how to do it differently—to feel my feelings instead of thinking them, to notice where they are in my body and to let myself sit with them, to not try to turn them into rational, articulated thoughts—because I need that skill, too. Turning all of your feelings into words is good, sometimes, but if that is the only way that you can experience them, then you will miss some, because that is not always how they manifest. When they are big, heavy feelings that demand to be felt, you’ll still end up experiencing them at some point, and maybe by then those feelings have calcified into trauma, and then it is all much harder to process.

Anyway, that’s all stuff I learned from therapy, which I started in earnest about a year and a half ago. I haven’t seen my therapist since May, because that is when she went on a long-term sabbatical, and while she recommended other therapists, there is still a global pandemic going on and trying to start a new relationship with a therapist over zoom sounds terrible to me. So I am doing my best to use what I have, to feel my feelings and then write my feelings and then see what happens.

My dog died on Saturday. It has been a really difficult past few days, where I sometimes feel like I am in a healthy and emotionally mature place, smiling as I remember all of the joy he brought into my life. In those moments, I feel gratitude above all, and feel—even though I am not the sort of person who ever says anything like this—his spirit nearby, can imagine some version of this dog zooming around the yard when I look at out over it. That comes with its own sadness, too, but it’s more like the smiling-through-the-tears kind. And when I feel that way, I find myself doing the impossibly dumb thing of thinking oh, good, I am doing grief right. As though that is an end unto itself. As though there will be a reward for it. As though, if I grieve in an emotionally healthy and mature enough way, I will get my dog back at the end of it.

That sounds like a very normal bargaining part of grieving, my friend says when I tell him that I caught myself thinking that. And it’s helpful to know that, right, yes, there are steps to this, this has been studied for a long time, I am not crazy for thinking that, even though it is not a rational thought. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—I’ve done all of them, at least a little bit.

I’ve also done a lot of rationalizing, because it’s what I’ve done. I’ve thought about grief like it is a construct, something outside of myself. I wonder if we feel our feelings so deeply when we are young, when every minor heartbreak can devastate us, for developmental reasons, to give us experience at feeling grief that we will want to have when we are older, when we will enter the part of our lives that will involve more death. I’ve teased it apart in my head, thinking about the grief of missing my sweet dog actively, with the triggers I could have anticipated, like when my podcasts refresh on my phone, and I think, “Oh, I’ll listen to this when I walk Dio,” like I have done for the past twelve years, and then remember that I won’t be doing that. I tell myself that is different from the grief of recognizing permanence, the kind that leaves you stricken suddenly, when you realize that your life and house and family has changed, and you can’t change it back, that there will be a different version of all of those things and no amount of doing things right will restore it. I’ve thought about that grief as distinct from the grief that comes with missing someone’s presence, and how this kind hurts in a way that feels different from losing even a family member you love but didn’t live with, where the loss isn’t something you’re reminded of every time no one rushes to greet you when you open the door.

I don’t know what the point of thinking about any of that is, except that I am feeling all of these things all the time, and all I know how to do is write things down when I feel them. It is all big and heavy and sad, and a part of me wonders if I’ve got old grief, the kind I did not know how to feel for pretty much my entire life, tangled up with the grief I’m feeling now, and that’s why I’m taking this so hard. But also, a few days ago, after I sent out the last edition of this newsletter, a colleague of mine I don’t know well but who I admire and respect a great deal called me up. It was out of the blue, just him being kind during a hard time, and we were on the phone for just a few seconds before he started sobbing and talking about how he had been through this with several dogs in the past, and it never gets easier. He was embarrassed, like he was dooming me to feel bad forever, but it makes me feel better to think about it, because I know that I am not being crazy feeling this so much. I don’t expect to feel differently anytime soon, not really, but it’s a gift, in the end, to just be able to feel.