Grief travels by my side
A contemplation on losing an old friend
6/5/20263 min read
for Betsy
Grief travels by my side the way time does. The difference being that grief has the ability to stop time in its tracks. I find it in my pocket, some trinket that I’ve been carrying, and in my shadow on a sunny day. It touches all of us, should we know it.
I live a small life. And one Monday night, Tuesday morning, while the universe continued its turning without ceremony, something immense happened in an upstairs room. As it is happening, right now, somewhere else. As it always is.
I have been contemplating grief. Not to master it, just to not flinch. When in grief, our eyes see what is real without the filter and, deep within that reality we find love. Love of the eternal kind. Which is paradoxical, and yet, it’s the contract we make by coming this way.
Love is everywhere, hidden inside the ordinary Tuesday. Inside the coffee machine making its horrendous noisy wake up call. Inside a collie resting in the deep summer grass.
Her name is Betsy. A collie with a beautiful smile and an unequivocal bark. She wore her own innate wisdom and grace without effort. She supervised everything. The horses. My mucking out the stables. My yoga practice. She found my guitar playing intolerable — that’s when the barking became protest. She shared herself fully, complete; no collusion. She drew love out of all those who knew her and those who didn’t. Jake, her brother from a later litter, grew up with her as big sister and is here with me still.
As her life here on earth was coming to its close, she would stroll with feeling to a place across the field where the horses live and simply lie down. I would watch her as she absorbed the world around her. More in it, perhaps, than any of us allow — we’re too busy making statements. That was her nature, and she never lost it.
On her last night she asked to come upstairs. She’d been sleeping downstairs for quite a while though tonight was different. I felt her energy and her precision in asking, the way animals ask things. She couldn’t manage the stairs so I picked her up and carried her.
Jake and I stayed with her through the night. A night filled up with love and exhaustion. At one point irritation at being so tired, and then letting that go, and then my hand on her back and Jake beside her and the three of us in that room while the universe continued its Tuesday entirely without comment.
Choosing to stay. Not once, dramatically. Over and over, in small unremarkable ways, all night. Clear eyes. No filter. Just here.
Her gentle whimpering, my reassurance, adjusting her position so she was supported and grounded. My hand resting on her as we lay together drifting in and out of sleep.
In the early hours she was gone. What I witnessed I can only call strength and surrender. She knew what was happening, she had prepared for it. That resting in the field, distancing herself, taking in the last of the light, readying herself for that one time aloneness journey. She was unhidden — warts and all, right to the very end.
This morning the coffee machine made its horrendous noise and I laughed, and then I thought of Betsy, and then I wondered where she is now. Is she at source?
And then the reply: I don’t know.
And I held that.
Because “I don’t know” is not a failure. Mystery is real. It has weight. Certainty is the killer. It closes the door to curiosity, the letting go of a breath trusting a new one will follow.
Emaho told us about ‘dying alive’ — the mind-shattering astonishment of it. Eternity, unending. The wonder that we are here at all. That a collie can lie in a field absorbing the world and break you open with the sheer beauty of simply being alive.
She was never my teacher. She was herself — entirely, naturally, without effort — and I, as a student of life, noticed. Life meeting life. The same and not the same.
So, our relationship has changed. No longer physical yet it carries weight. It beckons infinity, eternal grace.
Betsy — that well of love.
Grief oils the rusty hinges of the heart. The door opens. We walk in love.
