The Idea of Grief

Yesterday, we drove out to Lake MacBride, where Stella's buried, and made a flower garden out of her grave. It felt good to dig in the dirt after a year of academia and chainsmoking nonexistent cigarettes, hunched over my laptop like a freaking mugwump. Digging in the dirt feels encoded in my DNA, deep down on the ladder of my brain stem. Of course, I have no proof to back up that claim, except that I feel more aliveness covered in dirt than any dirt free, sanitized institution's ever been able to afford. So yesterday was a good day. I felt a little extra movement in the grief process, which, I'm remembering, has all the complexity and nuance of a female sexual orgasm. Except it's not an orgasm at all. It's grief. It's running your finger along the edge of something too profound to even name. It's loss. It's sorrow.

I'm aware that in mourning Stella's death, I've been mourning, also, the passing of time itself. The loss of a certain phase in my life - the Stella Phase, which was a considerable one. It happened to be the Phase wherein my heart actually started to grow. And did Stella play a role in that? Most definitely. She got me used to the idea of caring about/for somebody else. She taught me all kinds of lessons - the kind that if any human tried to teach me, I'd have told them to eff off. But because she was an animal, my ego didn't get engaged. I just took what she had to offer, which was unconditional dog love and a total embrace of the present moment. Stella was a magic zen dog, and maybe we all are.

It felt good to make something good out of Stella's grave. We planted some hostas, vinca, and some marigolds. Eleanor laughed and ran and played. It was a glorious sunlit Spring day. A dog named "Aisha" kept running over to frolic with us. Lake MacBride shined like a billion dimes. When we were ready to leave, I took down the little bone mandala I made a long time ago (just before I moved to Colorado, actually), but had hung above her grave the day we buried Stella. I tied it to our rear-view mirror as we drove away - cranking a little Neko Case - and it flew in the winds of May that came streaming across all our bodies.