The winter of our grief

It follows the summer of love, like night follows day

Photo by author

---

Loving Attachments

Our strongest bonds of emotional connection are forged with certain places and living beings. The beings we are most powerfully attached to include our parents, children, other blood kin, life partners, close friends and companion animals (“pets”). You can feel the power of those bonds simply reading those words.

When a loving attachment with a cherished being is threatened or broken, we experience strong emotions of anxiety and sadness, the function of which is to drive us to rebuild that sustaining connection. When we succeed, we experience deep relief and happiness and gratitude. When the object of our affection is no longer physically present in the world, all efforts to reconnect are doomed to fail. When we fully realize that truth, we enter the state of grief.

Grief is a deep form of suffering we wish to be rid of. But grief is not something we “heal” from, because it is not an illness. It is not something we “recover and move on” from, because wherever we go, there we are. This is what I learned about grief, and the bearing of it, from a special visitor at a dark time.

Losing Tundra

The special bond we form with certain non-human beings (especially dogs, cats, horses and other mammals) is deep and emotionally intense. We care for them. They never say a bad word about us! So we can expect the breaking of those strong attachments to set us up for significant suffering, and they do.

Tundra was 16 years old, which is a good long run for a sled dog (Siberian husky). She was suffering from some significant joint pain, but was mobile and alert and able to eat … until she wasn’t. We agreed as a family that we would spare Tundra unnecessary suffering at the end of her life, and our veterinarian understood that and was prepared to come to our house to ensure a safe and comfortable exit when the time came.

Sadly, our best laid plans began to crumble when Tundra took a sudden turn for the worse while our vet was out of town. Fortunately, she recommended a colleague who agreed to come immediately to our home to release Tundra from her suffering. When Dr. Liz Fernandez arrived, we were of course all in tears as we anticipated and grieved the imminent loss of our dear companion. What we didn’t know was that Dr. Fernandez was not your “average” veterinarian.

As Liz (she insisted that we call her Liz) prepared the instruments and procedures of her profession, she spoke quietly and gently with us about grief and how it is fundamentally an expression of love. What she said and the manner of her delivery gradually transformed our grief (up to that moment a source of only pain and suffering) into a memorializing tribute to the love we all felt for Tundra and her life with us. We continued to cry as Liz completed her mission of compassionate release, but the tears were softer and suffused with an unexpected light-ness.

Right Attachment

It took me some time to fully comprehend the gift that Liz gave us at such a difficult time. I now realize that with her wisdom and loving-kindness, she helped to transmute our grief over our broken attachment to the impermanent “physical” Tundra (who was now forever beyond our reach) into our enduring love for her which we will hold as long as we live.

Liz enabled us to be fully mindful of our current reality: unable to see/touch Tundra ever again, deeply saddened by that loss of contact, and forever able to feel our loving connection with her. She helped us to hold onto our truest feelings for Tundra while at the same time separating/letting go of her physical presence in our lives. We were freed from our desperate desire to hold onto something we no longer could. This transformation felt like enlightenment.

And it was.

---

While you may not have the privilege of meeting and working with Dr. Liz Fernandez DVM, you can access some of her wisdom about love and the loss of a companion animal in her book Sacred Gifts of a Short Life.

---

I worked with a woman whose young son had died many years previously. She was suffering from an “unresolved” grief reaction, and had seen a number of therapists and tried various antidepressant medications. Her impression was that her treaters and family and friends were all impatient with her and believed she should spend less time ruminating about her lost child and focus on the present/future (“move on”). She felt ashamed and defective in addition to her grief.

I suggested that she in fact needed to spend MORE time with (memorializing) her beloved child, and recommended she devote one full hour per day exclusively to thinking and writing about and mentally connecting with her son. Her “depression” lifted rapidly as she did this, while her sadness of course stayed with her as it will for the rest of her life.

The same principle applied to my work with people who were grieving the loss of a cherished career, and is related to the phenomenon of nostalgia.

---

I hold it true whate’er befall
I feel it when I sorrow most
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

— Alfred Tennyson

---