Fifty two days…

because I count them.

[Note: if this comes to you via email, because of the data size that includes the pictures, it may be truncated. Hit the “view entire message” button to read the whole thing. And if you do, thank you.]

🙏🏼 💙

Meet the newest plant to our garden: The Splash Daphne. Though we didn’t know it was this plant in particular, we’ve been waiting for it for a while now. Almost like, for 52 days.

When it says “profusely accented with wonderfully fragrant blush pink flowers,” they aren’t kidding. It is, in other words, perfect. Perfect for our occasion.

I’m ready now to close a loop that might not ever be able to close for us, here in our family, but at least moves us further along to an idea of closure.

Fifty-two Days Ago

Our little Sammy, a Yorkshire Terrier, was in our lives for close to 14 years. I chose him from among his litter sibs on a day I’ll never forget, though he wasn’t yet old enough for me to take from his mother. I introduced him to our family on another day we’ll never forget—keeping him a secret wasn’t easy. But it was worth it. It has to be explained to absolutely NO dog lover that dogs quickly become family.

We won’t forget, either, what happened 52 days ago.

Tuesday, May 14 was in no way unusual. The morning started just as it had every other morning. Sammy moving from couch, to his dog bed next to Kristin’s workstation, to his water and food bowls. It was a nice day so we left the front door open for air circulation—we leave our doors open, often. All three of us, Sammy, Kristin (my wife), and I going about a typical morning of doing our own things, coming and going through the house and our yard and our deck not paying attention to each other because we know each other’s around—taking normalcy for granted. It was a normal day. Nothing unusual at all except about mid morning Kristin said aloud “I haven’t seen Sammy in a while.”

Usually, this is not cause for alarm. I was outside a lot of that morning tending to yard and garden tasks; Sammy usually stayed in the house. We casually looked about the house and yard in all his usual lounging spots—spots that were becoming more and more indoors as he became more and more infirm. Of course you know we didn’t find him.

So our search radius grew and I looked through and around the entire perimeter of our home and plot of land—even the land that extends into a protected native growth forest adjacent to ours. It’s not easy to get into that space—we do have fencing as a border and in the few areas without fencing, there are other natural boundaries that had always kept his little Yorkie legs from exploring down there. We would let Sammy out of the house, always, with never a worry that he’d run away. He was definitely a home body.

I hiked for a few hours. Would come in for water and a rest, then would go out and walkabout once more.

But he just vanished!

There’s that unique but awful dread that begins to surface in one’s stomach and heart when you have an intuition that something dreadful has happened, but you don’t yet have evidence of it. I think both Kristin and I started feeling that about 5 minutes after she wondered where he was. A larger part of that dread hasn’t left yet for a very important reason—and it is THAT reason that I think helps answer the question I have been grappling with:

THE Question from the post “Magical Processes:”

How can this unexpected death, not his life with all the joys and laughter and wiggly-butt silliness, but his death, in the most unexpected and confusing and disorienting of ways, of this beloved soul who was an intimate part of our lives for the past almost 14 years, how can his disappearance from our lives, and in this way, be of any kind of benefit FOR me?

I truly believe every experience is an ingredient in the alchemy of my life. I’ve chosen to see this as my journey. I’ve said this many times over the span of this Substack’s life. But I’ve been struggling with this question in the context of the inexplicable death of our pet dog, Sammy.

[Note: It’s not meant to be a selfish question, that everything has to benefit me—if you think it is, you’re not thinking deeply enough. “The things in life don’t happen to me, they happen for me. I benefit from it all—sometimes the benefit is known immediately, sometime it takes longer. And some things might take a lifetime to understand. There are no accidents in the Universe.” That’s the spirit in this asking. One needs to think on a spiritual realm to understand the spiritual aspect of it. It’s a question not of selfishness, but of Soul. I’ll trust you to understand.]

---

How Loops Ideally Close

Because we humans are story tellers, we love our stories to have definite beginnings, middles (the more dramatic the middle the better!), and endings. Endings are vital—even when the hero or heroine dies. Even when the story is sad. Endings do bring a certain amount of closure because the endings you know about bring with them “the ending story,” the tying of loose strings, and the closing of loops.

If we were honest with each other here, the ending story we were preparing ourselves for with Sammy is one that most pet owners face as a fact of life among pets and pet ownership—when the time comes to make “that” decision, what are we going to do? How will we be? And how can we make it so that he won’t suffer? You know the decision I’m talking about. Some make the decision to simply let life play itself out to its natural end—if there is no suffering involved, this may be an ideal. Some might call that a “natural” death—but in Nature, there can be suffering. Pet owners almost always have a choice at “the end.” And it’s never easy (well, it should never be easy).

For the past year, Sammy was slowing way down—he was losing his eyesight and hearing, he was having difficulty jumping and going up our stairs, he was needing to “go outside” at least 2 or more times each night, and he was sleeping a lot more. There were times when I’d be outside and I would see him come out of the house looking for one of us; we’d be in his line of sight and would be calling his name, but he’d not see us. Often, we would have to walk toward him to get him to notice. So the thoughts of “quality of life” were creeping in. The Sammy that was in front of us was not the same Sammy from a year ago (well, okay, who among us is!). Though he still had an incredibly happy life and was among the best cared-for and loved dogs in the entire world, seemingly with each passing day, he grew further away from his true dog nature even though he wasn’t experiencing a lot of physical pain. I’d catch him often laying upright in our walk-in closet, just staring into space or into a mirror not knowing if he knew he was staring at himself or “some other dog that was simply there, quietly, to keep him company.” It was kind of a sad sight to walk upon—because young Sammy would have heard the footsteps from a hallway away and would have come running.

We were still far away from having to face directly that final question, though. We would say that he could be with us for yet another year or two and were already making dog care plans for the upcoming summer. But with each notice of ailment, and slowness, deaf and blindness, and memories of how he was but was no longer, each of those served to become a part of the end story we were starting to create. Pet owners do that. Pet owners do that to help justify and plan the final decisions that compassionately need to be made.

For the next three or four days following May 14, we kept our front door, the one we always used for him, open. Night and day. We kept it open for, you know…. But he never came back to walk through it again. In truth, I think we knew the evening of the 14th, when that dread really settled in, and as our tears came, that he wasn’t coming back. But, we owed it to him to keep hope alive, and the door open, just in case.

Our Loop

The loop of his life’s cycle, of his story, remains open. Because we don’t know his ending. His ending as it happened, by his vanishing, raises a forever “not knowing.” And for those who have experienced a death like this, where there is a “not knowing,” this is likely the most painful way to end a story, faced as we are with this new burden of memory.

Side Note: you’ll remember this blog started over two years ago as a chronicle of my dad’s final months and days with us as we took care of him 24/7 through his dementia and Parkinson’s, through his dying, his death, and his burial. In comparing these two deaths, there is no doubt which one has been the most painful. And I’m not embarrassed or ashamed to say that—and like I said above, if you are a dog or pet lover/owner, THIS should also go unsaid.

With my dad, we were writing and living his ending story right along with him. And his entire family has taken appropriate pride in having given him the ending he truly wanted: to be with family, to be pain free, to not suffer, and to know he was safe and loved and never, ever alone, all the way to his end. And THAT is the story we have of our Dad’s death because that’s the story we created as we lived it. With Dad, we have his complete story with an immediate closure that involved the entire family as well. Of course we miss Dad, but the memories really haven’t included pain.

With Sammy, it’s truly been painful. For each of the past 52 days, there remains twitches of pain—tho they might have eased some, the emptiness of the non-closure is still raw to the touch of memory.

So we are faced with the only choice we have to make everything less painful: we get to create our own ending for him. And sometimes, as I discovered, you get a little help to do just that. And I’m also discovering this has helped me to answer that question I’ve been struggling with.

A few weeks after his disappearance, Sammy appeared to me in a dream. The dream was unusual for me. In the dream, Sammy appeared briefly with a pack of other dogs—he saw me from a distance and ran to me. He began wiggling his butt like he always did whenever we’d come into the house no matter if we were gone just to the store, or for a few hours. And he began licking my face as he turned excitedly in circles. And I thought I could hear his thoughts.

“Hey dad, look! I’m so happy! I can see and I can run and I can play with all these new friends now. So don’t worry about me any more. Okay, I gotta go. My friends want me to play! Bye!”

And then I immediately woke up. It was the kind of “waking up” where you knew what the dream was and you didn’t want it to end but you knew it had to because you also immediately remembered what was real.

My Answer:

I was starting to come to the usual answers to my question of benefit, the ones we might naturally grasp for at death’s time, whether the death is expected or not. Those kinds of possible answers to “How could this death, and this way of death, be of any possible benefit for me?” were along the lines of:

• Everything, even love and existence, changes.

• All things are impermanent.

• Life includes death.

• All lives have meaning.

• All goodbyes matter.

• All deaths have meaning—but sometimes one has to work hard to discover it.

• You too can experience pain—but there doesn’t need to be suffering.

• His life meant something—we gave him an amazing life, and he returned that love simply by being who he was. And by loving us unconditionally. That love, remains.

• Sometimes you just “don’t know.” And Not Knowing is okay too.

There were more answers I was forming, but you get the gist. You’ve heard many of these yourselves. Maybe you’ve used some.

But then the dream happened.

Sammy’s death and the way it happened allows us to create his final story. A story in which, because of his love and compassion for us, saw him make one-heckuva decision himself that took our final decision out of our hands and placed it firmly in his four paws. We knew having to ease his suffering with the ultimate act of compassion, with a veterinarian’s help, was going to be beyond devastatingly difficult. If you’ve been there, I’m telling you no secret. And this new story of ours has it that Sammy knew that too. And he didn’t want that for us. He likely knew “just leaving and never coming back, without saying goodbye (dang him!), was going to be incredibly hard too, but maybe not as hard. So he made the decision himself. The ending to his story was one he made out of compassion for us.

“Look Dad, honest! I can play and I can see and I can hear just like I used to! And I’m so happy—just like I always was whenever you both walked through the door and I saw you as if for the first time. Don’t worry about me now Dad. I’m free. And I’ll never forget you and mom and Connor and Cassidy. Ever.”

But even still, as this new and final story of ending becomes more vivid and actualized for us, there remained one loop still left open. And that one needed to be closed.

Enter Splash Daphne.

Alone with being storytellers, we humans also need rituals for certain parts of our lives. Ritual helps to transition one from the way things were to the way things are about to be. Many claim, as I do, that our growing lack and loss of ritual is one important reason why our society as a whole is experiencing a deep malaise. Traditions and cultures who still practice strong rituals can tolerate pain and chaos, and move along with them, in a much more healthy way. Rituals are vital to our wellness. Funerals and burials, even cremations and scatterings, are rituals. So are celebrations of life. They bring a necessary and healing closure.

With Sammy’s disappearance, we had nothing tangible with which to close the loop. We did not have a body to bury as we would have had the story we were initially forming, while he was among us, happened. Having lingering questions, even the good story we had been creating about his ending, wasn’t yet providing for a final closure. And that is a closure that does need to come. So, we created that too.

We went to a local plant nursery with the intention of buying a plant we would bring to our home and set in our landscape as a memorial. This Splash Daphne immediately spoke to us—and that was that. In the hole we dug, we placed this photo of Sammy, dressed to the nines in his snappy black tux bowtie, along with the bowtie itself. We also placed the flowers that we bought immediately following his disappearance as our attempt to bring some color to some rather dark days—those yellow flowers stayed freshly in bloom for weeks in a vase on our counter. I think they knew their purpose too.

The Daphne we planted, in a spot that seemed just right…? That is “Sammy’s Splash Daphne,” now.

The lovely plaque was bought for us by our dear “adopted” daughter Shayla. Shayla’s a dog lover and parent of dogs; she, herself, was faced recently with that awful and ultimate decision of compassion for one of her sons. Shayla gets it. And now we have the perfect memorial. Now we have a way to end Sammy’s story, and to bring some closure. Some.

Now we can begin to focus on all the happy memories we have of his personality, his laugh (yes, he could!), his love, his passionate defense of his peeps and his home (okay, look—if you happened to have met Sammy, and he didn’t take kindly to you at first, maybe even nipping at your heals or chins, know that he meant no offense. Defense, absolutely! But no offense.), and we’ll remember his life among us as one of our beloved family members. There likely will always be something that lingers amidst the wonder of it all, but at least now we have a place to lay such remnants of pain. We get to water Sammy’s Splash Daphne with those tears now—both imagined and real.

The ingredients used in the Alchemy of one’s life hurt sometimes. But this is an answer as well to that question. All of life, which includes death, is Alchemy provided you intend for it to be so. THAT is how and why Sammy’s way of ending was of benefit—a stark reminder that love and grief and pain are intricately woven into the glorious and miraculous thing we call life. And to do his little life an honor, may it be of benefit for more than just me now.

We are grateful to have had him as one of our own.

---

Live, Laugh, and Love

Always and Ubuntu,

~ kert

And with Ahimsa!

🙏🏼

Postscript: Some words about pet “ownership.”

Some people acquire pets (buy them, have them handed to them, go to the pound or shelter, find them, save them, etc) to own them. Owning a pet can be easy—they don’t have to be too much trouble because as the owner, you can dictate how they are treated to minimize the “trouble” of having them (I won’t go into detail). Others adopt animals into their lives truly as members of family. This makes the human/pet relationship different. And not always easy. For those who allow such animals to enter into their hearts in such a way, there is no line between who is human, and who is other than human. For them, there is simply family. As an educator, I remain a strong advocate for families adopting pets into their lives, ESPECIALLY if the family involves young kids. If done skillfully, kids get to learn a lot about love, compassion, responsibility, life, and caretaking from pets; and also about death and grief—if they are allowed to. And they should always be allowed to.

We didn’t own Sammy. Sammy was our adopted son. He was family. That is how we lived with and treated him; and that will forever be how we remember him. And that is how we know he felt about us, too.

Mine and mine alone, such as there is.