Learning to live with death

It’s been quite the month and didn’t turn out at all as I had anticipated. I had an editing job on tap and a working session scheduled with my web designer to update my site as well as various other plans.

Even though July tends to be a rough month for me, I was looking forward to what lay ahead. Perhaps I was lulled into a false sense of confidence because, last year, July passed with relative ease.

But no. This year, the July funk hit early and hard. The July 4th holiday was one of the most melancholy I’ve experienced. By the 5th, though, the funk already seemed to be passing, much to my relief.

That relief was short-lived.

Our dog Henry suffered a seizure on Sunday the 7th and then another two days later. (If you’ve never experienced a dog in seizure, it’s very disturbing.) It ended up being a week overshadowed by fear, worry, and sadness as we navigated two trips to the ER vet, one that resulted in an overnight stay for Henry, and a consultation with a veterinary neurologist.

Henry is fine and now taking a twice-daily anticonvulsant medication. The drug won’t eliminate future seizures but will (hopefully) minimize the frequency of episodes as well as their length and severity.

It’s likely a matter of when Henry will have another seizure, not if.

By the time we returned from the ER vet (without Henry) after the first seizure, I knew that the uncertainty of the situation wasn’t going to allow me the time and energy I needed to tend to my other commitments. So, I reluctantly bowed out of the editing job and rescheduled or cancelled my other plans.

And all of this filled me with grief. Grief at the death of happily anticipated plans as well as the life we knew before having a dog who now needs daily medication and regular monitoring.

But rather than give myself the time and space to acknowledge these deaths and be with the grief, I let life push me onward. It felt as if there was a pair of hands on my back shoving me forward. At a time when I needed to grieve the losses, life kept cracking the whip to keep moving.

I should have (and wish I had) allowed myself to slow down, to stop even, and just be with the grief. I didn’t, though, and that left me feeling untethered.

What I forgot about myself in the chaos of the experience is this: Grief keeps me grounded.

In Human Design, my unconscious earth is in Gate 28, also known as The Darkness Whisperer. I am most grounded and spiritually connected when I face the darkness of life with courage and tenacity.

So, it’s really no surprise that Henry would have a medical emergency that would force me to face the grief I had been ignoring in the days preceding the first seizure. This isn’t the first time Henry or McKenna has had a medical issue that forced me to put my plans on hold. It’s always a sign that I need to pause and get back into balance by acknowledging what feels dark in my life and tending to my grief.

It is also not a coincidence that my theme this month is flourish. Sure, things were flourishing outside of me (e.g., the editing work) but not within me, which I didn’t realize until it all came to an abrupt halt with Henry’s seizures.

Something was missing.

Then it dawned on me: Death is what I need to flourish, as odd as that sounds.

Life likes to hurry me along, rushing me past the uncomfortable and unpleasant bits, and keep me focused on the bright and shiny objects. But when I am not in relationship with death, allowing myself to acknowledge the darkness and tend to the grief, life becomes lop-sided and eventually comes to a stop. Much like our washing machine, which stops working and flashes an error code when the load becomes unbalanced.

There is no life for me without death. So, to flourish, I need to spend time tending the grief of life in order to live.

That’s me.

What about you? What do you need to flourish in life? And how do you go about tending to it?