Friday, November 4, 2011

Random Musings and Commentary

Changes of note since October 20:
1.  Violet often sprawls between us at the foot of the bed like Tansy did.
2.  Zillah is now only content when BOTH Doug and I are home. (but she's hurt, mad, and lonely.)
3.  My shoelaces come untied EVERY time I run, and they NEVER, literally, NEVER come untied in all of these years of running.  (absolutely no connection to Tansy, but still, odd.)

And while I know all of the socially correct things I SHOULD be saying when people ask how I am, it's not in me to should on myself.  I should say that I'm doing better, that I'm fine.  I should say it's getting easier or that I find comfort in how happy her life was, and that I made it that way.  I should say I am finding peace.  But I'm not.  They want me to say it though.  Because no one really knows what to say.  I wouldn't either.  Saying won't do anything anyway.  Listening does, and people who really, truly get it, they give me solace in knowing they don't think I'm crazy.  I don't blame anyone who doesn't get it; their life experience is different from mine.  There is no blame in that.

But it does pinch a bit to see that my leave form that was filled out for me while I was gone has been coded with my only 2 personal days and my only 2 business days.  Not grievance days or whatever they call it when your child or family member dies.  Not family sick days, despite that fact that I have no children and never will be able to use those.  Not even kindly coded as personal sick days.  Because I was sick with grief.  I spent every day at the vet, the doctor for my girl.  I was mentally sick, sick at heart, sick to my stomach.  Why can't that be recognized?  It doesn't matter how many people say, "pets are part of our families", because society doesn't really believe that.  Not really.  My leave form proves that.

But I know I'm not supposed to write blog after blog about how much I miss and love my dog.  I know that people say she was "just a dog" and that people with children know an entirely different level of love and they cannot see this one as just as valid.  I guess I know that, though I haven't experienced it; I've only been told.  None of that changes the way it is for me though.  None of the shoulds and should-nots keep me from deep-hearted sobbing every time I wake without her, come home to silence, and go to sleep missing her.  I am weary of all of this.  I just want it to be over.  I get to the end of my work day and think, "oh no, not ANOTHER day without her to meet me at the door!"  as if it's going to end.  As if this will stop and one day she will be there again.

 I can, and have, said all the things that are true, that we had no choice, no regrets, and we did what was best for her.  I can distance my heart and just use words to say to people that there was nothing different we could have done and we had to let her go.  I am able to say that I might believe her spirit has dissipated into other things in the world, such as us, the cats, the earth... I have said and thought perhaps she is or will be part of the earth that I claim to love so much and so, I should be content if she cannot be with us, then at least she is part of the flowers, the ground, the nature that I love.  I could attempt to believe she is fully there in spirit, at my side in all things, but that would be false comfort for me. My brain doesn't work that way.  I can't be the hypocrite to my own belief system, or lack thereof.  I can't suspend what I normally believe just to comfort myself.  I don't believe in doing that.  I can't do that even if I wanted to.  I believe science though; that energy never disappears; it only changes forms.  And I believe her spirit, WHO Tansy was, was a type of energy.  But I lack the knowledge, or humans do, of what that energy is capable of.  And lacking that, I cannot supply faith in all the made up stories people tell themselves over the generations, to explain and pacify.  No can do.

I believe in love.  I loved her.  I love her still.  I still feel that the sheer force of my will, of my wanting her, should bring her back.  I can't think of a time in my life that I've wanted something so badly and not found a way to have it.  So my life experience has not prepared me for this finality.

Finally.
Finality.
Finito.
Finished.

No.
T.

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