Endless choices in the face of loss
Just this week I had giggled to my partner that I was starting to feel quite normal again. No big emotions to talk through, no exhaustion to take to bed with, no anxiety lingering in the background… but then as we all know, the moment we say this aloud is always the moment life gives you something totally unexpected.
Without going into the details, because frankly I don’t have any to give yet, yesterday I received a really scary diagnosis about my beloved dog. If we’ve connected in the world of Instagram, you’ll know that Willow is pretty much The Grief Space muse. He is my one constant, the first thing I think about in the mornings and a constant wellspring of joy and comfort. He feels like a very extension of me.
If you’ve had a relationship with a dog then you get it, and if you haven’t then just bear with me, because what I actually want to talk about is something entirely universal. The age-old question… how can we live and love in the face of loss, fear and uncertainty? Or as Florence would say… to exist in the face of suffering and death. And somehow still keep singing?
As I’ve been digesting and integrating this news, I’m taken once again to the edge of what it means to be alive. Everything we love we will lose. Everything – our loved ones, our pets, our homes, our health, ourselves. Everything we love we will lose. We know this. Life and death are built into the fabric of every single expression of life.
And yet, we forget it. Daily. We walk around with what Francis Weller calls ‘the amnesia of our times’. We have forgotten that our very existence is a sacred miracle that will one day cease to be. We have forgotten that everything we love we can lose.
In the face of this simple, stark and somewhat confronting sentence we have choices. I have choice.
I can face this truth with fear. I can get angry and defensive, looking for something to blame. I can try and control the situation, spend hours questioning what I could have done differently or furiously researching what to do next. I can contract and tighten, constricting my joy and spinning in my own narrative. I can collapse and fall apart. I can see life as the perpetrator and me the victim.
Or,
I can choose to love harder. I can pause and take in the absolute miracle of waking up this morning with those that I love and who love me. I can bathe in the beauty of life expressing itself and linger to watch, listen and smell. I can raise my eyes to the sky or take my hands to the soil and say thank you. I can let my heart love everyone and everything around me with the full appreciation that tomorrow is not guaranteed.
Grief, loss, uncertainty, and death can make us contract or allow us to expand.
This morning I lay in bed going over the events of yesterday. I had choices. This time I chose love. I chose to still get up early and do my yoga practice. I chose to reach out and connect with a couple of friends and share how my heart was. I chose to look up at the sun and feel its warmth. I chose to linger after my meditation practice and just let myself be held in the stillness.
As I sit writing to you, the couple next to me are telling a woman across the room that their beloved dog died five years ago and that they planted a tree for him which they still visit every day. And I remember, that their grief is my grief.
I remember that grief is loss is everywhere for everyone. I remember that everything we love we will lose. I remember to let it break my heart, open.
We have choices, endless choices.
But in the end, there is just one choice.