“That’s the great paradox of living on this earth, that in the midst of great pain you can have great joy as well.” ~Kathy Mattea
This is not my usual sort of blog post. But it concerns the stuff of life. You are forewarned. Read it anyway.
We hear it all the time: death is a part of life.
Doesn’t help much when someone you love is dying.
This is the paradox faced by anyone who bonds with a person, a job or role, or a pet: the front-end choice to love pretty much ensures the back-end pain of loss. It’s part of the deal. We forget that at the end.
But we treat our beloved pets, in my opinion, better than we treat our human family members at their end, watching our pets closely, attending to their every need as they begin their decline. And finally, exercising the most difficult of choices, carefully scheduling an humane end to their suffering, affording them a dignity in death that they had in life.
A needle in my arm, surrounded by my pack. Yep, I want to go out like Koda did.
Today.
Koda was a pure-bred Husky, black and white with ice-blue eyes that stopped folks cold in their tracks. He liked to wander. And run. A lot. He liked the woods behind the family cabin and the porcupines that lived there. He liked cookies and pizza crusts and the feel of the wind in his face. He was a walking paradox, evoking admiration and frustration in equal parts: a beautiful animal with a will of his own.
“When he was good, he was very, very good; when he was bad, he was horrid.”
He wasn’t my dog, he was my son’s, making me grandma by extension, and I loved him unabashedly, proudly, and completely. We shared many an hour together over the course of his lifetime, which was fourteen years, and as a large dag, a good life span. Lots of walks, lots of nights at grandma’s house.
Last week I travelled to Baltimore where my son lives and had a chance to say goodbye, to bury my face in Koda’s thick, warm fur and thank him for loving my son into adulthood and for teaching him so well so many important life lessons: independence, patience, resilience and determination, to name a few.
Today, Koda breathed his last. Today, my son’s grief—and my own—have reason to release, and we can rejoice, finally, to know that the coin of love, like all things, has two sides.
To choose to love is also to choose potential loss; they are inseparable. This is the paradox we must straddle, today, but there are so many others.
To choose freedom is to choose uncertainty.
To choose determination is to choose effort.
To choose leadership is to choose accountability.
There is no either/or, there is only both/and.
And today, in celebration of Koda’s magnificent life, I will attempt to straddle that bridge of love and loss, tears and laughter. The paradox of memories.
Because in the midst of death, there is life, still.
Whether you’re talking a dog, a spouse, an idea or an organization, we would all be well served to remember that.
It’s a choice.
“You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.” ~Wayne Dyer
