EMBEDDED THINGS

The days surprise me and not always in a manner of my desire. Still, even the hard news teaches something, though I am not always convinced that the lesson is worth the loss.

I have owned six Danes…each as necessary and omnipresent as breath, each leaving a hole in their departure as immense as their hearts. Ron’s words, reminding me that Poet will be our last, provoke me to make room for an additional 180 pounds on the bed even when doing so is contrary to my orderly nature.

In so many ways, Big Love has become my mantra informed by the awakening of my own shocking reality a year ago: Our days are not only full of surprises, but numbered like the hairs on our heads.

This last Thursday [my 22,914th day alive] was particularly harrowing. You would have marveled at the sight of me, bare-handed, clawing up a thirty-foot embankment of ice. I don’t recall even a thought about the damage to my favorite jacket nor concern about the tips of my fingers freezing as we climbed. Mine was the singular focus of pulling this enormous, despondent creature to the jeep in time to save his life.

There are some moments we can never prepare for, like receiving a call from the doctor that you have cancer, or learning the ultrasound reveals an 8” hemostat embedded inside your beloved dog’s chest.

In response to these gasp-out-loud moments, wedged between making coffee and getting the mail, I have marveled at the nature of my strength, my will. We imagine ourselves falling to pieces with the onslaught of the unexpected. The truth of our humanity is, in all things, we are inexplicably able to gather ourselves.

I am in awe of myself in those instances, entranced with how every cell of my being knows precisely what to do, and does it, with the organic precision of an Eagle diving for its meal.

In context of Poet’s symptoms, I am compelled to ask myself if the flashes of life we define as “surprises” aren’t somehow parts of a larger truth being slowly, evidently revealed—

In our lethargy and disinterest in things that used to bring joy.
In the body’s inability to meet us in what we ask of it.
In our unusual cravings or unhealthy appetites.

Our ability to survive—catastrophes, disappointments, abuses—for days, months, years on end, sometimes gives the illusion, even to us, that we are stronger than we feel.

Our tendency in struggle is to define “need” as weakness, when through our neglect we are, in truth, slowly and most assuredly weakening ourselves.

Days collected over lifetimes should teach us that there is so much more to all of this than merely “making it through.” Poet’s condition commanded attention but his is not the only lesson I am awakened to—

There are unidentified and unrelenting odds and ends embedded in each of us that leave invisible scars…things that get under our skin and, if left unattended, gnaw away the best of who we are.

Sometimes surgery is necessary. Most often what is needed is taking stock—

What belief or misunderstanding could be holding me back?
What disappointment has been too great to overcome?
What warning signs, even tiny ones, am I refusing to listen to or see?
What conversation am I avoiding that may unleash truths that need to be spoken or heard?

When the sum of every hurt left broken becomes too much to bear, we may find ourselves surprised at the reckoning. Yet even unexpected and uninvited it will come.

The burden carried is mostly ours—we may search the world for hours on end for some answer to our restlessness, pain, and want. But the sharp object, the thing that tears into and apart, is nearly always embedded.