Doggone: Muddling My Way Through

Eight shoes abandoned by the door. Eight soles crusted with fresh mud—surprising, considering it’s nearly January. This is what grief looks like at my house today, my dog Hobbes freshly buried in the garden.

I woke in the middle of the night last night to the sound of steady breathing, listening intently for the slight wheeze of a tired dog’s lungs. This morning, the sun still snoring miles to the east, I slipped out of bed into the crisp darkness, my feet moving gingerly, so I wouldn’t wake Hobbes, who sleeps in our room.

Past-tense verbs are slow to roll off my tongue this morning. I cannot seem to shake “slept” out of “sleep,” without my throat tightening up.

So I let the grief pour out of me. And, like the pull of plunger to clogged drain, I am surprised by all of the things it brings up with it. Faces of people I have loved and lost, missed opportunities now dusty with time, the strange longing for a past fuzzied and skewed by softening memories.

I remember when a former student, Mindy Papenfus, finally succumbed to leukemia midway through her sophomore year of college. It was over 15 years ago, but I can still access even the tiniest details of that funeral. I was sitting to the right of the altar, three rows back. Wearing a green-and-black flannel dress, accented by the bulky silver bracelet my grandmother had forged. I remember being struck by the outpouring of love for Mindy, who’d dug her roots deep into the St. Olaf women’s soccer team, most of whom made it back to Lincoln for her.

And I remember being unable to hold back the flood of tears that swam over me. Tears for Mindy, to be sure—a life cut short but so well lived. But tears also for my dad, who had died two years before.

That’s the surprise of love and loss—the way both can creep up on you, like a hyacinth suddenly awash in tiny flowers, where seemingly nothing had been just a day before.

Maybe the hyacinth is what I need to focus on today, the surprising beauty that nudges its way through cold earth. Through the soles of muddied shoes that lay abandoned by the back door. Through the silence, where clicking paws once punctuated the air.

The flower, deep in the earth, remembers what it is. And it is patient, trusting in the future.