Death (Public and Private)

There have been a lot of deaths this summer. Many celebrities and politicians. Personally I have known the following folks to die:

• My college roommate Denise lost a long battle with cancer. She first got cancer at age 30 and was in remission for 20 years before it returned. She fought it off for seven years.
• Lawrence Jackson’s wife Sherryl. I only met Sherryl once while we were attending a Keep America Beautiful affiliate convention in Atlanta last summer. She had a variety of medical ills, but seemed vibrant.
• Dorothy Bronk, a fellow docent at the Nashville Zoo, died of cancer last week. She had only been diagnosed for a few weeks, but the prognosis was not good. Dorothy’s husband supplied us with candies when he was a distributor for Jelly Belly. I still hear her voice at docent meetings.

Two significant dogs in my life passed away within three weeks of each other. The first was my dog Neyland, who had suffered from violent seizures that happened more and more often. The other dog was my sister’s Ariae, a full blooded golden, who died suddenly at age 8. My sister is having a hard time with his death, as her son departs for college in a few weeks.

Do I miss Neyland? I expect to see him when I come home, when I wake up. I still expect to let him outside each night before bed time. Pet deaths are particularly painful because there are no memorial services to grieve them publicly. Pet death is a private suffering. I hope that Deborah and I can celebrate and grieve our pets’ lives when we travel together later this month.

Granted Neyland or Ariae were not public figures to mourn. Their brothers and sisters have long been removed from their lives. Did they have nieces or nephews? If so, they never met. Neither had offspring. I did not go to funeral home as I did for Denise and Sherryl to meet with their grieving families. I did not watch public tributes on MSNBC.

Neyland gave me something each day of his life that is not measurable, not significant, in the world. He was a pal and a pest. He was a mess a lot of the time. He just had a joy of life each day and found pleasure in small things like a small treat or a pat on the hand. Going for a walk was a major event, something he loved to do even when the arthritis was hurting his body. He would lie and bake in the sun or just sit and stare into space. I often wondered why. Was he seeing the Virgin Mary? Was there a dimension that he had access to that humans did not? I’ll never know the answers, but I still have the simple joys of life that he taught me.