A bit more about Gracie, gratitude, and you. . .

“A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can’t get it by breeding for it, and you can’t buy it with money. It just happens along.”

– from E.B. White on Dogs

I almost didn’t write about losing our beloved dog Gracie last week. My grief felt so raw, so private, and so painful. I wasn’t sure I could put it into words or share it in public. Our family was in mourning, tender and sad. My first impulse was to turn inward, to hunker down in my house and have a long cry.

On the other hand, for the last four years I’ve made a practice of writing here about both the joys and challenges of my life, reflections that are always personal but that also, I hope, touch something universal. I had written about our Gracie while she lived. It seemed only fitting to let you know she was gone.

Each day this week, I lit a candle in the midst of a makeshift Gracie altar in the middle of our kitchen. We have taken some solace in having lots of photos of her propped up along the shelf. Her empty collar is here. Her leash. Her tennis ball and ball flinger. A bit of her white tail hair, tied in a ribbon. It feels both good and sad to have these things, and to have a place to go when we wonder why she isn’t where she belongs, curled up in a tidy oval shape on the rug or sitting, alert, on her favorite rock in the back yard.

And each day this week I’ve also read your beautiful, wise, consoling comments — some of them several times and through tears. And so, on this Thanksgiving evening, I simply want to let you know how much your words have meant to me and to all of us who loved Gracie.

I am still a bit stunned by the depth of caring and compassion that can exist between people who may not know one another in person but who share a bond. Everyone who’s ever lost a cherished animal knew exactly how to reach out and exactly what I needed to hear. You understood, too, just how bleak and quiet life can feel. How empty a house can be and how long and lonely the nights are when there’s no one snoring softly at the foot of the bed or scratching at the door at dawn.

Reading your words over these past days, I’ve felt less alone. I’ve loved hearing about your lives and your special pets. With each story and condolence, you helped me remember there will surely be another dog for us to welcome into our lives and into our hearts, not to replace Gracie but to love in a different way. And you reminded me that the beloved dogs who bring such joy to our days also teach us much about letting go.

I wish I could write a personal letter back to each and every one of you who took the time this week to write me or to leave a comment. But I couldn’t have done that and also managed to teach my yoga classes, clean the house, get the laundry and grocery shopping done, and make Thanksgiving dinner for my family. So, instead, I will simply offer my heartfelt thanks here and hope that it’s enough.

This year, for the first time, the Thanksgiving baton was passed to me. After more than 50 years of hosting our family holiday dinner, my parents were ready to be guests instead of cooks. These are huge shoes for me to fill. Till today, I’d never cooked a turkey in my life (Steve and my brother, on grilling duty in separate households,  began texting about times and temperatures at 7 am this morning).  I’ve never coordinated a meal with so many required dishes, or used all the burners on my stove and every rack in my oven at once.

“Start tomorrow,” my mom advised me on Sunday night. And then she read me her recipe for stuffing. Henry arrived home on Monday afternoon and the two of us got busy. All week I kept meaning to sit down and write a blog post, but there was never a moment.

Now, the dishes are done, Steve has put his mom’s silver back in its wooden box, the left-overs are stacked in the refrigerator, and everyone’s gone home. It’s too late, and I’m too tired, to write any more tonight.   But I’ve just read a beautiful essay about gratitude my friend Pamela posted this morning. I don’t even remember writing the lines she quotes from my blog from a year ago but they seem almost prescient now, certainly just right for today. This, I think, is why I write in the first place — to tell myself what I most need to hear and to remind myself of what I already know. Which is simply this: Life will always offer us our share of losses and challenges. But it also offers countless opportunities to pause and give thanks for all we have.

From my blog, November 20, 2012:

For gratitude, as we all know, is not a given but rather a way of being to be cultivated. It doesn’t come packaged like the Stouffer’s stuffing mix nor is it ensured by the name of the holiday. No, real “thanksgiving” requires us to pause long enough to feel the earth beneath our feet, to gaze up into the spaciousness of the sky above, and to stop and take a good, long, loving look at the precious faces sitting across from us at the dinner table.

Life can turn on a dime. Not one of us knows, ever, what fate has in store, or what challenges await just around the bend. But I do know this: nothing lasts. Life is an interplay of light and shadow, blessings and losses, moments to be endured and moments I would give anything to live again. I will never get them back, of course, can never re-do the moments I missed or the ones I still regret, any more than I can recapture the moments I desperately wanted to hold onto forever. I can only remind myself to stay awake, to pay attention, and to say my prayer of thanks for the only thing that really matters: this life, here, now.

Signed books for Christmas.

I’ll be joining 19 other local authors on Sunday afternoon, Dec. 2, from 2-4 at my local independent bookstore’s Holiday Fair.  If you’re in the area, stop by the Peterborough Toadstool and say hello.

Happily, you don’t have to be my neighbor to get a signed, personalized, and gift-wrapped book for someone on your list.  Just click here.

And of course I’m always honored to receive a request for signed bookplates.  Click here.  I will mail yours right off to you.  

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