The Well

Every so often my husband can’t do anything right.  After a few days of berating him for every move he makes and everything he says or fails to say, I finally remember that he probably isn’t really any worse than usual and it’s more likely that I am back in that state of profound insecurity that is part of grief for me.  I don’t know I’m feeling it until I start finding fault with everything, which I guess is my misguided attempt to set the cosmos back on its axis where it belongs.  Eventually I have to go to the well of grief I’ve looked away from and pull up a bucket of whatever’s in there. 

So it was that Steve once again became impossible to live with around the 3^rd anniversary of Jeanie’s death in January.  Ironically, I was stressing over preparing for a Compassion Stress workshop I was offering at the Marin Humane Society for their Animal Care Department.  These are the people whose job includes euthanizing animals they have been working so hard to rescue from that very fate.  You have no idea, until you give them a chance to tell you, what this is like for them and what a toll it takes on their well-being.  It’s another form of “disenfranchised grief.”

I woke up the day of the first workshop with a migraine, so I took some Tylenol and ibuprofen, put some Leonard Cohen on, and lay down.  I wasn’t expecting it in the least, but two songs in I was sobbing, and Jeanie was there, and Martha and Lois, and all of them together, breaking my heart.  The spell of irritability melted away.  Leonard Cohen’s voice is as deep as his songs and I rode them down to where I needed to go.

You wouldn’t think someone in my line of work would be shocked each time at how intense the feelings of grief are when I let myself go there or they break through on their own.  I’m not afraid of those feelings – the nature of them or the intensity of them – but they aren’t fun and they do take your full attention.  So I think I just live along not bothering with them too much unless they demand my attention.  I should know better.

The migraine abated and I spent the afternoon with those beautiful, amazing people who love animals so much they are willing to do the hardest job there is.  I bow to them.

I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.  Who would have thought?  And yet – there it lies, just a few feet below the surface.