When Grief Guides Your Dreams

Active procrastination is something I perfected decades ago. I would work on things that needed to be done, just not what was due the earliest. Turns out I process grief the same way.

My dog is aging. We have seen him slow down, but there comes a point where he really can’t get any slower before he just stops. We’re at the him just stopping point. No one can tell me how to process the emotions of dealing with the death of an emotional support animal. He has seen me at my absolute worst. Raging with anger because I was hurting and seeking control. Broken underneath a kitchen table feeling like the universe was too small. Hiding in closets, driving too fast on rainy nights. I feel everything intensely. I don’t know how to hold him dying.

So instead, I am in a cold room listening to The 1975 and trying to dance. My hips rock and pop and energy flows. I know how to work the energy up and out of my body far better now than I did a decade ago. I pause at times and work on unpacking boxes… which I am realizing is a practice in active emotional procrastination. Three years ago we were set on moving to the Pacific Northwest. So set, that I began boxing up most of our stuff. Pictures came off of the wall and were carefully wrapped in paper to protect their contents. Office items, books, altar items, herbs for medicine making… all were packed away with a promise of opening them in a place somewhere away from here. A place with land large enough for my pokey little puppy to roam free by my side as I foraged wild mushrooms.

I’m sorry, Rex, I lied. 

I am opening them on my bed nestled in the Central Valley of California, a place where I have felt stuck for a very long time. There’s a show that portrays a town called Modesto as a type of purgatory for souls whose ultimate destination is unknown. I feel that in my bones. I am here in a place where I'm miserable because over the decades I have grown comfortable in my misery. It’s familiar. I know it well. I don’t want to be comfortable here anymore… but instead of putting more things in boxes, I am trying to find homes for things in this house and once again, the universe feels too small. 

It feels too small to hold the grief I am in; an active grief this time. A grief that nudges me to move, to think, to feel, to speak, to create. A grief that guides my dreams in ways I am trying to more fully understand… and not control. Instead of hiding in closets with a dog who loves deeper than the canyons of ache, I am clearing and releasing all of the things that are tying me here. 

I always knew he would be the one that made us decide when it was time to say goodbye. And for this moment, I am going to hold on a little longer until he lets me know that it’s okay to let go. Until then, I will unpack boxes knowing that, somehow,  it’s the first step in leaving home.