Opening the Heart in Hell

Growing up in the Appalachian mountains, I often heard the old wives tale that death comes in threes. I never thought much about it until the year my little brother died.

After the heart attack that took his life in the first days of March, 2014, I experienced even more loss that broke me in a way I have never known. Six months to the day after I lost Dwayne, my sweet Angel had her first major seizure. She was mixed with a Dalmatian, and despite having a full Labrador personality, body, and bark, her fur was purest snow, but with one black ear and one black patch around the opposite eye. She had a few faint spots down her spine and one big black dot on a front paw. I called her my soul dog. Despite having others during my life, she was the canine that worked her way into the deepest parts of me, and she slept by my side for more than fifteen years.

While waiting for the bloodwork to come back to my vet's office, Angel kept having seizures almost like clockwork - every twelve hours. The doctor told me to keep a record of the events: date and time, intensity, how long it lasted. He said that Labradors were notorious for seizures in their old age and that we could start her on medication to help, but somehow I knew something worse was wrong. She had never been sick a day in her life. Suddenly, almost overnight, she began slipping away.

When I went back two days later, notes in hand, I winced when the doctor came into the room. He'd been my veterinarian for a lot of years. His face never masked his heart. He held up a file and said - I had the lab run these tests four times. I've never seen anything like it in all my thirty years of doctorin' - his Virginia drawl thick with emotion.

Her liver enzymes shouldn't show a readin' over 160. Angel's is close to 5,000. The only reason that dog is alive is because she loves you so much.

The entire time we were standing and talking, Angel was trying to force the window blinds open with her nose, slats that were suspended over the one very low-hanging outlook in that tiny space. It was the 5th of September and a tender rain dotted the view. In all our visits, she had never paid a bit of attention to that window. The doctor was telling me that we could do much more in-depth testing. He suspected cancer, but at her age, the odds of surviving any treatment was almost zero. Since each seizure had become more violent and it took longer and longer for her to know herself again, I made the impossible decision.

While my vet went out to get the medicine that would stop her life, I sat down on the floor by the window. I pulled up the blinds so she could see whatever place she was so desperately looking to find. I nuzzled my face into her neck and began to cry. Then, I tried to comfort both of us.

I'm sorry, old girl, but this is where we have to say goodbye to each other. I cannot stand to see you suffer any more. I won't do it. I want you to know how grateful I am for all the love you've given me, for teaching me what that even means. I'm so sorry. You're my heart.

Angel stood unmoving at that window the entire time I talked to her, looking past me and out into the distance. But, when I said, You're my heart, she suddenly turned, licked me right in the face, and then moved back towards the glass pane.

My Blue Merle rough collie, Shay, was a full Lassie-size animal with a blue, white, gray and black coat. She was a Canadian champion, so beautiful and filled with grace. Angel was closing in on three years of age when I brought her home. Shay never knew a day that she did not share with her friend. When I came in without Angel, she changed, too. Every time she went out to roam our seven and a half acres, she ran to each of the four corners and stood there. Looking. Always looking.

It wasn't really a surprise that she finally found her companion, my Angel girl, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving of that same year. She was twelve years old.

From March 3rd to November 25th of 2014, I lost my little brother to a heart attack at age 37 and both my dogs. And I cursed the old wives tale from my youth.

A few months after my mother's death last March, 2019, I joined a class at a local Hospice organization. I knew I was in trouble and needed help. I thought I would spend the entire time talking about Mom. But, I was surprised that I ended up concentrating on the year I lost my three best friends.

The class is based on the teachings of John James and Russell Friedman, founders of The Grief Recovery Institute. They call it the action program for moving beyond death, divorce, and other losses, including health, career, and faith. Beyond that ambitious mouthful, the course teaches that there are dozens of other types of loss that produce

conflicting feelings and grief:

moving

starting school

death of a former spouse

marriage

graduation

end of addictions

major health changes

retirement

empty nest

financial changes/bankruptcy

legal problems

But, it doesn't stop there.

They discuss other types of losses and expectant issues of grief ... loss of trust, loss of safety, and loss of control of one's body (physical or sexual abuse). When you lose trust in a parent, in God, or in any other relationship, grief is a very real part of what happens next. I was reminded that my heart is broken, not my brain. And our culture recognizes none of this, let alone understands how difficult and long the journey can be to find some semblance of normal again. Of the self you lost, too. To put the pieces of your heart back together. To learn to live without what we still love.

This year, the old wives tale struck again.

My mother died in March, the man I grew up loving as my brother passed in August, and now, an irrevocable change in something I loved more than myself.

Stephen Levine, in his book, Unattended Sorrow, writes that loss is the absence of something we were once attached to. Grief is the rope burns left behind, when that which is held is pulled beyond our grasp.

The chapter I find most intriguing is entitled Opening the Heart in Hell.

When hope is wounded and life spins out of control - when we're stunned from bewilderment and dismay - our nerve endings seemingly burst into flame, and the chemicals in our brain become a witch's brew. When our old escape routes from pain have been cut off, when our grief is undeniable, we move like a blind person through a maze, feeling our way forward, slowly, mercifully, soft-bellied through our grief.

Soft-bellied.

When I think of soft-bellied, I see my dogs. That moment when they flip onto their spine, feet angled and sky-pointed, head flopping at an angle as if to say, Please pet me! I rub for hours, my blood pressure calming with each stroke, fingers becoming a part of their skin.

How do I see myself as soft-bellied through grief?

Broken glass on pavement. Shards gleaming in the hot summer sun.

Sliding across slow and slow and slow and face down on my belly

Softly bleeding with an open heart in hell.

But I try to remind myself, when I live in the darkest state of soft-bellied-ness, the words of Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi mystic (translated by Coleman Barks) ... just being in a body and sentient is a state of rapture. Just being here is a cause for celebration. It's a cause for grief, too. But grief is also a form of joy.

The rose celebrates by falling apart. Foil by foil falling to the ground. And the cloud celebrates by weeping.

Soft-bellied, I curl into a dog-like pose, as when my babies were in deepest sleep, their damp noses touching legs that twitched from running in dreams. I hear Rumi's words. What was said to the rose to make it open ... was said to me ... here in my chest.

I close my eyes to the vulnerable, soft underbelly of my grief.

And I pray to stay open.