The Veil Between Worlds

Light snow.

It was falling Thursday morning when I took our dog, Otto, to the vet. It was there, on the x-ray, all over his lungs. And it was falling Sunday afternoon when he departed this realm.

Sunday morning we had brunch at our dining room table with beloved houseguests, the kind of people who make you feel deeply rooted in love and the hard-won beauty of being alive.

The middle of the day was like a cloverleaf highway of loss.

Towards the end of it, my sister Kristin and her family showed up at our door with homemade cards, brownies and love. Once again, deeply rooting us in love.

Sunday night we watched Guardians of the Galaxy wrapping up our three week Marvel superhero educational extravaganza. In the last fifteen minutes, as the guardians are under crushing enemy attack, the boldest scene in superhero history takes place.

Groot, an extraterrestrial being that has the appearance of a tree, sacrifices his life in order that they may defeat the menace known as Phalanx. His last act is not to go down in flames or be blown into bits. It is un-superhero-like. It is quiet.

He spreads his branches thin and long and weaves them into a cocoon for his friends creating a magical twilight scene filled with fireflies, grace and kindness.

He roots them in love.

This is what Otto did for us. It was quiet, deep and personal.

His loss feels the same.

Our dog family members give such different gifts, being the personally assigned four-legged superheroes they are. The way we feel without them is like an inverted grief mirror of how we felt with them.

Our dog Wally was about unlimited JOY and pure enthusiasm for life. His presence was magnificent. His loss felt the same.

Our children’s reactions to death are different too.

It depends on so much– age, temperament, birth order, frame of mind, relationship…

Some are immediate and frenetically piercing like high pings of piano rain that fall hard and fast and then fade off like a summer storm. This was how Finn took Otto’s death.

Some hover like a thin fog, not sure whether to settle into density or lift effortlessly into the day. This was Leo’s reaction. It straddled between profound acceptance and understanding for what needed to happen next and a noble effort to be too mature too fast.

I keep going in and out.

This is what he said later, when we put him to bed. I keep going in and out of what happened today. It doesn’t seem real.

No, it doesn’t, I said. I couldn’t agree more. And there were so many parts to the day that all live side-by-side.

He asked me if there are really nine dimensions, like in the Marvel movies. I don’t know, I said. Maybe. Who knows? I think sometimes, it is a thin veil between worlds.

When we are in the middle of grief it feels impossibly separate.

But, I think the worlds inside us are actually closer to the worlds beyond us than the tangible world in front of us.

And some things you have to access sideways.

Grief is like that. There is no way to describe it head-on. It becomes flat and one-dimensional. To access all of it’s dimensions– pain, beauty, elegance, emptiness– you must, as the mythical Irish Tuatha De Dannon people did, turn sideways into the light, and disappear.

When you look at it sideways, it disappears as the thing you knew and returns as something different. Something closer to hope.

Hope is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all – Emily Dickinson