Grief in Motion
Reflections on the passing of a best friend and packmate
Two weeks ago this Thursday our nearly 7 year old packmate - Bart - a beautiful red, gold and black, medium sized German Shepherd was badly struggling with what we thought was a bad bout of tick disease that seemed to flare up over the summers. We had gone through months of ebb and flow where he would get sick, not want to eat, and be low energy and then bounce back again. But on Thursday it got bad - so my partner, Drew drove him the hour to the Virginia Tech Emergency Veterinary hospital in Blacksburg at 11pm when he wasn’t getting any better. In the middle of the night Drew learned that Bart was dying of cancer of the spleen. He had 5 of his roughly 9 liters of blood in the cavity between his lungs. We needed to pass him on immediately. And so Drew picked me up at 4am and we drove down together to pass on our beloved packmate - years earlier than we expected with no notice whatsoever.
The grief hit hard. We are a pack over here. Two humans and two Shepherds. The balance suits us. Something has shifted over the years living in a family that is equally balanced between humans and very sensitive, present, energetic dogs. Mornings and evenings walking around with them freely running and sniffing and investigating the property while I move through the grasses, I find myself shifting into the quiet sensing place they inhabit. Less talking and thinking and more moving and taking in the world through my senses.
Bart is the last Shepherd that bridges our time between Durham, North Carolina and West Virginia. Indeed - Bart accompanied us on our voyages to West Virginia - and we ultimately decided when we purchased our property that it was “Bart’s Farm.”
A few years ago we passed on Brosef, our older German Shepherd with a lot more time to plan and prepare and learned how important it was to celebrate death. We dove into this whole heartedly. You can read about that here. And so we did this again - doing everything we felt moved to do to celebrate and pass on our pup. Drew used his tractor to set his body on a giant funeral pyre of branches, brush, grasses that he had built over months of yard work on the property. He lit it on fire and we watched as a giant column of fire leapt up towards the sky. (for those readers out West or in fire prone areas, it is still very safe and common to burn brush piles out here in West Virginia - something that I am still adjusting to after being raised in California). It was a great, powerful symbol of transformation from life to death, something that has been on my mind a lot lately. Our puppies bones were intermixed with years of grasses and brush and branches and ash was falling back over the land. And then we gathered what remained and set him in a plot next to Brosef with a funny metal pig to mark the spot - playful and goofy like Bart.
I admired the caldera of ashes Drew carefully tractored together, the care with which he placed Bart’s body onto the stack of branches, the perfect hole he dug under a staghorn sumac casting dappled light onto the dirt for the small pile of bones that remained. I carefully cleaned Bart's bowl. Grief in motion. It gave us space to create beauty from the grief, to do Bart justice with the care of our actions.
And it also gave me time to reflect on how these dogs seem to shepherd us through different phases of life - Brosef keeping us faithfully together in Durham to follow through on our dream to move to a small rural mountain town and helping us settle into our new home in West Virginia. Bart taught us to learn how to love and support each other in this new environment that is so terribly challenging and beautiful all at once. They shepherd us through those epochs. Looking back - we see that the steady, patient flow of life events for our family are much more in keeping with the chapters of shepherd time than the impatient human time our minds create. And so with a heavy heart I see that at this ending with Bart is a new beginning of a yet unknown epoch already underway.
We will miss Bart very much. Thank you for sending love and support.
Reid
