The worlds leak into each other sometimes… Most often when our lives are surrounded by people who are facing life and death challenges, we don’t want to burden them with sorrows going on in our own lives. So I was thinking.

…until July 1st of this year, when, on Freecycle ads, I saw “WANTED: Christmas wreath.” I had one. I contacted. The son of a father who is dying quickly wants to make one more Christmas for his dad. In July. No better place my Christmas wreath could go. But too, when this stranger, this good son wrote back to me, copying my email back to me, I saw I’d made a huge Freudian/ Jungian/ Adlerian typo in my email to him. Instead of writing “Christmas wreath,” I’d accidentally or otherwise instead written, “Christmas grief”…. I’m a shrink. I get the picture. The worlds leak into each other sometimes. Being a shrink does not insulate; if anything, it sandpapers the senses all the more, right down to the walls of the arteries.

This summer, in my family world, there are waves of “know it’s coming, try not to think about it right now.’ Pepino, our family “big boy,’ is a 13 year old Dalmatian who last week was just a crazy bitey, grabby, wacko-grinning pup jumping all over, mistaking all of us for a fun trampoline. Today, Pepino is a brave elderly dog who sleeps most of the time and has cancer throughout his whole body. So far he is not in pain, but my family has known for months… “time, time time keeps slipping into the future…’

I know. I do. I’ve been here before over these many decades, with my team of Huskies, with our “found on the road’ dogs… all of them, “throw yourself into the grave with them’ times… but I’ve never been here before in “this way,’ not since a hideous “watershed event,’ took place in our family’s life… an event that all things of our lives are now measured against forever, as “before’ that event, and “after’ that event. I’ll get to that time in a moment; it’s a place in the psyche that I have to circle to build courage to look, not for the last time… there’ll never be a last time.. but for one more time…

In the meantime, there’s Good Boy Dog Pepino. God, if I describe this, I know you will be able to see him vividly: he had big heavy black balls that swayed so much when he walked that he swaggered instead of prancing…. just like you see some big lug human guys doing, walking down the sidewalk in full braggadocio with their feet widely planted apart… It made me laugh with joy. In dogs. And men. Both.

This big boy Dalmatian was a glory of a male. Still is, even though he’s sicker than a … yes, well, right. Protective, a great male consciousness; raising his big bony head still, to bark at that sound of footsteps on gravel a block away, sound only he can hear. Got to protect my pups, he thinks; he, the alpha dog; we are his pups. Not guard dog, but Guardian dog. Dear dear dog. And darn irritating/endearing dog who early on, could never sit in a car like a proper person, but that you wound up wearing him like a trembling and huffing polka dotted muffler across your shoulders, chin and chest.

I sense Pepino readying for this final trek; I think he’ll let us know for sure; this last walk yet to come will be slow, measured. We’ll take our time. His time, not ours. It doesn’t matter if we’re ready or not. We wont let him suffer. I know each soul in my family will have their own way to say goodbye to Pepino. I know. I do. It’s just that there are very few times in life that make me want to just stand with my forehead against a cool wall and just stay that way for a long time. This is one of those.

And so, to “the event,’ the ragged core that rises around the very thought of walking Pepino the Good to his end on earth… well, it’s a situation, though “situation’ isn’t the right word, there are no right words I know… it’s an “event,’ which is also not the right word, “an event’ that many other families have walked through, our family also, a time in my family’s lives that I’ve been reduced to trying to explain by saying, “Remember when Rachel wailed on the hills at Ramah and could not be consoled?”Those who know the passage, know exactly what happened in our family…

A handful of years ago, we lost our firstborn grandson. A perfect so perfect little boy. Now, having just emerged in recent time from walking, no, crawling, ugly mouth howling and dead sitting with blue skin on Persephone’s ice throne in places where fire does not melt snow… after being in a grief that cut down everyone in my family til we all were wandering skinless everywhere, and yet the sun still shined… on others. People laughed…others did laugh. But, we were buried behind the glass wall of grief ; we could see life going on all around, but we could not touch it, nor live it for a long long time.

Somehow each of my family in their own ways, learned to, as my daughter put it, not “get past’ it, but “learned to live with’ it… “it’ again needing a million words and no words at all to explain the kind of grief you can only speak of to those who are utterly trustable; those who can hold such crystalline Tezcatlipoca, smoking mirror of memoria-sorrow… without breaking the mirrors, without harming the ones already so broken…

Well, now we look at Big Boy Pepino and wonder, who among us is strong enough to be able to bear taking Pepino to go to sleep forever, to do what is right for him, yet without crashing backward right through that glass wall again and down into that pit of pain that renders even the marrow of the bones. Bone pain. Not purple prose. Real descriptors. For those who have been there.

We’ve just begun the discussion about: Who of us is sturdy enough, healed enough to be there for our valiant Dog, for his/ our last goodbyes which will be so many hugs; those paws on shoulders, his nails biting through our shirts? Who is able enough to bring the toy, be the familiar beloved voice, be the arms, rest the loving hand so these are the last things Pepino will remember as he goes… this creatural dog who in so many ways is a more perfect human being than any of us will ever be: loyal in love, sheltering of the vulnerable, more far-seeing, more all-out brave, more decisive, bold, forgiving, more funny and heartful. Which of my family can bear this, can best take the chance?

I have offered that it be me. I asked my sister yesterday would she come with me if this is the way it goes. She said yes immediately. That together, as my family decides, we would take Pepino. When it is time. We are the oldest, the elders of the family now. We have tucked in all of our beautiful and dear mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, and too, some of our young, to their last bedtimes, and rocked so many through their living slow while dying fast, and rowed so many across that final divide where living spirit is freed from worn body.

I didn’t want to become “old hand’ at these matters. But, I have. Even though the instructions on the box “How To Be An Elder,”are simple: “Be there for others as much as you can. Be there, and be there some more.’ It sounds so easy, but it takes cojones y ovarios. Big ones. Funny isn’t it, being an elder takes being more like the valiant creature: what did I say a brave “pet’ was made of? “Loyal in love, sheltering of the vulnerable, more far-seeing, more all-out brave, more decisive, bold, forgiving, more funny and heartful?”Yes, like that, in human proportion. No one is sprung full-born elder, like Aphrodite on the half-shell. I’m can see that I am working on it, finding the ways. Probably all the rest of my life long.

So, we’ll take it one day at a time, as it is said. We’ll keep Pepino as long as we can without harm to him, as long as his life is decent and he is not in pain. Then. Well whenever ‘then’ comes. I’ll try to ready my family, myself. There is no justifying, no rationalizing that can hold this as utilitarian; Pepino is our relative. That’s all there is to it. There are hours when I think, deep breath, I can do this. I can. There are other moments when everything I do, uncap my pen, fill a note page, wash black cherries, drive my pickup, sit in my chair, and still, no matter what, as Dana Patillo the poet wrote, “my eyes weep without me.

And I wonder if that email that was a leaking between the worlds’ was prescient, that maybe we still have six more good months left yet with Pepino. Its still a good long time until Christmas, but my heart knows too that some dear souls, in necessity, are having Christmas right now, in July… that somewhere in time, Christmas, that time of The Return of sacred life out of darkness, is not pinned to December; it can free-float anywhere it is needed.

In that spirit, of new life returning, this comes with prayer for those who are grieving in any way… prayer strong enough for you to lean on. May we all be healed, strengthened, learn, and find meaning that matters to us.

©Creative Commons Lic. Dr. C.P. Estés, 2007