Loss Comes In A Shape Of A Box
Dog Chronicles #6
If you landed on Tarantula: Authors and Art for the very first time or are a new subscriber, the Dog Chronicle is an editorial piece that looks at the world through the POV of a teenage dog and hints the theme of the month. What kind of a dog are we talking about? A very curious chocolate toy or miniature poodle; he still isn’t sure of his real size. If a friend forwarded you this article about our hero, welcome; if you like it, share it or think about subscribing.
The dog took me out for a walk this morning; he started to sense when I needed a break and to just breathe. He is turning one this month. Despite being bark-y and destructive at times, his presence brings joy, he interrupts what ever stream of consciousness occupies my mind, sometimes preventing a disaster in the making.
Each walk for the last nine months with the dog made me more aware of the natural world around us: the cycles, the transitions, the joy, the losses. This morning, he took me on a walk on a tree lined streets where helicopter seeds spiralled down to their last destination. Unfortunately, as we live in a city, the seeds didn’t fall into earth, instead they hit the concrete of the sidewalk. Thud! And when we turned into the park, fall leaves already covered the ground. The end of a season was on full display.
After a short break at the end of August, I thought that I would come back to you with new ideas about how to embrace creativity. What I could not predict, as an atheist, was that instead this fall I would be chasing ghosts or starting a search for evidence that souls continue to exist in the afterlife. When death knocks on your door or is fresh on your mind, things quickly become philosophical.
When the death of a loved one, in my case a parent, unexpectedly arrives, the wheel of life ruptures, the ground below your feet opens and you fall down into a side pocket, a sort of a parallel world - a universe you knew nothing about.
Just a few days after my dad passed away at the end of August, I found myself in a shopping mall in Belgrade, a city my father passionately loved despite living on three different continents. Together with my brother, I walked behind my mother to photocopy my father’s death certificate. We walked into the mall feeling like kids no older than 10 years old. I felt my prepubescent arms dangling by my sides thankful that there was a grown up, another parent, capable of leadership throughout the crazy bureaucracy that waited upon us after his death.
Still getting used to being ten again when one’s whole body seems out of place, I sat helplessly on a round white leather ottoman in the middle of the mall. I felt as if I entered some big invisible box that suddenly slowed down my world. Being in the invisible box no-one noticed me or knew what I was thinking, but I became aware of how the world just rushed by. People walking up and down escalators unaware of one another, talking on the phone, kissing, invisible vectors pulling them towards the seemingly right direction. None of them seemed aware at that moment, that some people were not among us on this planet anymore or that others were sitting in an invisible box trying to figure out how to start walking again, breathing and living …
As people passed by me, I would suddenly, in the middle of their step, imagine them turn into a pile of sand on the tiled floors. Puff! Leaving nothing behind in the space which just a few seconds ago they occupied with such vigour. One by one, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. All that was on their agenda at the moment, loosing all meaning.
After the funeral and a lot more paperwork, I continued living in my own parallel world that now become the real world. The world I left the minute my father died was so obviously fake, created in the image of our egos: surrounded by phallic shaped sculptures, images of men made out of concrete spread throughout our parks, stories of men-made wars on the lips of more men sitting in cafes, different schools of thought, division, poverty, all created by some men. But when a man, the creator, dies, what is left behind?
Slowly, the invisible box around me moved inside of me. The breath became square and heavy, the box was impossible to digest. Instead, each day, the box just like an Advent Calendar opened a new window in search for where did 78 years of my father’s existence disappear. The question did a soul exist hid behind one window, the next day, my Google Search wondered what do Buddhist say? Biologists? How can Transcendental Meditation help, etc? I desperately wanted a sign that something happens after life because right now, in grief, with my daddy’s body saved in a white pink marble urn of my own choice, life seemed to loose its magic.
In searching about grief two things show up most often: regret and not saying “I love you” enough. I regret nothing. My relationship with my father could’ve been many things, but at the end it was the two of us who created it and it couldn’t have been anything else with the tools we inherited. The only regret that I have is that because of a new wave of corona in his home town, I couldn’t visit him in the hospital; and because he was in a “strange” state of consciousness at the end, he thought that his phone was broken, obviously communications started breaking down. The doctors unaware of how to deal with dying patients didn’t care when I asked if they could help me by putting his phone next to his ear.
“But he can’t talk back,” they said.
I didn’t need him to talk back, I needed him to hear me. And silently, all I wanted was not to tell him that I love him, but I wished that I could read some poetry to him to make him think of something else, or play him one of his favorite songs, Boney M’s “The Rivers Of Babylon.” I wanted the doctors to show some kindness. Instead, it felt as if some man-made system hijacked his body and decided how he should die.
I assume that the invisible box will shrink over time and memories will fall into their place. Photographs, postcards and technology where our loved ones still continue to live virtually will help remind us that there once was a man that made the most of his life in the best way that he was equipped to, crossed the Seven Seas plenty of times, was a member of plenty of man-made organisations and showed his kids the world, thus turning them into open minded humans; a man who definitely didn’t like death. When death knocked on one of his friend’s doors, my father would just continue living with an unprecedented speed, hassling and keeping as busy as he could. In my own grief, I am learning to be still and let memories roll out as a good old film.
Thus, on September 24th, we will celebrate the dog’s first birthday. We will go to the ridiculous hipster dog bakery down the street that we have been avoiding for the whole year. We will buy dog cakes or ice creams for a few dog friends, and take a few photos to remember because we have a new career at the beginning of this fall season. Our vocation is to create as many memories as we can as well as to be kind towards ourselves. It is our conscious thoughts that create the world and we all know that our thoughts can turn dark pretty quickly.
As I transition into this new stage of grief, I am abandoning my search for afterlife for now and instead I will focus on living today. As we go back to work/school this September, leave some room in your agendas to contemplate how can we make a better place for all beings, human and non human, on the planet? Ponder if a city tree really need to be planted in concrete, so that when a seed falls onto the ground it doesn’t have a chance to survive. How can we use our creativity to design a gentler place?
The dog is barking. I apparently need another walk. A pause to breathe. Just to breathe and be still.
A POEM
Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep
by Mary Elizabeth Frye
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.
❤️❤️❤️
This touched me deeply. My dad died of the virus in a hospital. The isolation worsens the grief. But I love your observations of how your young dog keeps you in this world, all of it, nature and body. I wish you well on this journey. May you find comfort and light each day in whatever form you can.