It's a strange impulse, to do a thing, knowing it will destroy you. We recently adopted a giant-breed puppy and he is the light of my life. I often walk him in the morning with our thirteen-year-old rescue who is the last of another group of dogs, the original three pups from my twenties. I've already said goodbye to two of them, watching their gentle passage from debilitating pain and the haunt of old age into something peaceful and quiet and not here.
But this boy, he is in his beginning. The world is fresh and new and startling and full of wonder. I recognize his silliness and impulse from having watched my other pups in this stage. But unlike then, I adopted this boy knowing I will likely watch his slow passage into the next place, too. Adopting a dog is an agreement that you will explore the planet together exuberantly and with limitless abandon, knowing all the while that this love will, before you are ready, leave you behind.
And it is this way with human relationships, too, though the timeline is less urgent. We will be left and leave a hundred times between now and our own departure. We will watch the light fade from the eyes of so many we love deeply. We have so many goodbyes in front of us.
It is courageous to choose to love despite our impermanence. It is risky and wild and adventurous to open one's heart to inevitable fracture and to know that the joy of being together is worth the oncoming grief. It is brave to drink the richness and warmth of togetherness while we can, to savor companionship while it is present and seek it out again and again despite the pain of its loss.
It is a strange thing to have children because it likely means they will watch as the light fades from your eyes and you will hope that you have equipped them to exist here without you. You will hope that they will live extraordinarily courageous lives despite the pain you leave behind. You wish desperately for them that they have hundreds more loves than you did and that they forge ahead in spite of the heaviness of missing people and places and feelings and innumerable almost-moments.
Love and grief are so raw. I am not sure that, at their core, they are so different. They both leave the heart terribly vulnerable, open and soaring, exposed to the light and the dark and the infinite expanse. They are reminders of our connection to something universal and infinitely larger than ourselves. They are a reminder of our own mortality and our own propensity to shatter. Love is the door that opens and allows us to build something of immense value. And grief is the celebration of all that we have loved, a commemoration that we were courageous enough to leave our front door, to open our wings, to love in a hundred different ways, and to muster the courage to do it again with the foreknowledge that everything will ultimately be lost.
Impermanence is our inevitable truth, but the time before should be filled to bursting with fire and light and love and pain and the richness of everything. I wish for you, above all, a life overly full with love and grief and grief and love.
