Mourning People

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Normally, I am a morning person. By 9AM most days, I achieve more than many people do all day long. Each morning, I thank God for a good night's rest, for protection from intruders, and for my beagle. Last Christmas, I awoke and heard him snoring and thanked God for my first Christmas gift- that my beautiful beagle buddy was still there with and for me. It was a great morning. On my birthday this year, I awoke and found him curled up, for one of the last times, in a pile of my jeans beside the dresser waiting for me to wake. That was also a great morning. Mornings, however, feel much sadder than they used to be, and Friday mornings are worst. Most people look forward to Fridays, but each Friday morning marks another week since I last saw my beautiful brave beloved beagle buddy, and when I wake, I think about that last morning together. I also find that I cry the most on Friday. Yeah, I know men aren't supposed to cry. So sue me. I actually loved this dog. And I'm not the only person I know mourning. I walked in the building for work this morning and thought of all the other people around here who are mourning and who, consequently, called in sick to work this morning and others I know who are mourning those they lost. Just about everyone you really get to know changes your life, and every life around you changes according to opportunities, trials, circumstances, events, and other living things. When they change you for the better, and then they leave, you often mourn. Often, they just move away or cut you off, but when they also die, the mourning takes a different form. Everyone mourns, and everyone mourns their own things in their own way. How and why we mourn, when we are truly weak enough to be our true selves, tells us alot about ourselves and about those we watch mourn.

Mourning for people you love is part of life. Everyone and everything you know and like eventually leaves your life or is left behind when you die. Materials and bodies decay, and consequently eventually what was must give way for something else. Some people don't make or take much time for mourning, and other people seem to never get over a loss. Since you must lose someone or something at some time or another, most people acknowledge that there is a time for mourning, they just may not like spending time with you while you mourn. I think we know very little about how to help people mourn, and the only thing I can really offer is this: "you didn't always know what to say, buy you knew to listen, and that was helpful". Usually the degree to which we mourn is proportional to how much we value what we lose, and it helps to be able to talk about it aloud even if nobody has any useful ideas. In discussing them, we show that we still value them, and to what degree, and it may be that this helps us realize that they never really leave us per se. I will always carry part of the dog with me. I learned I was a dog person mostly because I'm allergic to cats and that I liked having a pet who considered me a god (dogs) more than I liked a pet who considered me a slave (cats). Maybe the worst thing was that I had a pet late in life. I mean I never intended to have one in the first place and ended up with beagles because of my ex wife, but if I'd lost a pet when I was younger, when my parents were there to shield me from the loss, when I could learn to deal with it, this one might have hurt a little less. At the very least, I learned that, if I get another dog, I'll lose him eventually too, and it changes what I plan to do with another dog if applicable so that parting is less sorrow.

Many people around you mourn. In the midst of my sorrow, I noticed that a wave of death and loss crashed around me. A department secretary died when her cancer returned, another secretary's husband died, and a friend of mine lost one of his inlaws. Just in the last few weeks, several people have died at church from cancer. Then there are people with wayward kids, with sick family, with financial struggles, with substance abuse problems, etc. It's interesting when people can see on my face that I'm sad. I can tell on their faces too, and I think they're surprised and relieved when I ask and they have an outlet. If we were supposed to face life alone, we'd all be on our own planet, but one of the major purposes for us here is to be with and for each other. My dog helped me when I was sad, and now others make an effort who also know loss, albeit of different kinds, and heartache, albeit for different reasons, and we feel less alone in our loneliness.

How we mourn shows us much about ourselves. Some people mourn a lost chance to spend time with someone and show they that they loved them. Other people mourn the loss because their life just changed forever in a way where they feel as if they died too, at least in part. Others don't seem to mourn at all. I don't pretend to know with certitude why, only that it's true that some people feel callous. Just because we don't see people mourn doesn't mean that they do not. We are taught to be strong and that mourning equates with weakness, and some people just sit silently and miss those they lost. Then there is a somewhat unconventional way to mourn. For years, I have told my sister that I don't want a funeral; I want a party with only desserts and a piñata of me (so that anyone who likes can take one last swing at me) filled with candy so that my death will send everyone home with sweet things. I think that's exactly the kind of eulogy my beagle would have liked. Whenever I was sad or bored or lonely, my beagle was there, and I know that he would not want me to be sad. If he were here, he would come and try to make me smile or laugh, because he was joy wrapped up in a beagle. Sometimes, when I suddenly feel calm, I wonder if he is there, especially in the mornings when I used to thank God each day that the beagle was still with me and I inexplicably become calm. He would want me to be happy. I sat Friday night and watched the videos I shot during our last week together; I'm glad I shot them. They remind me of good and tender moments together with a beagle I loved, and I am so very grateful that I captured some good memories of the greatest blessing God ever gave me in mortality.

This morning, like every Friday morning since 3 May 2019, I was in mourning. When I returned to my bedroom following my run, I caught a whiff of his scent. As I left for work, I paused briefly to look back at the carpet in the living room and glance up along the staircase, because that's where he would be when I left each morning, either resting or searching for the treats I threw around the house to distract him from following me out the door starting in summer 2017. It's so very odd to not see him in one of those places. Sometimes, he would look at me longingly, as if wondering why I had to leave, and it was very hard, especially in the last few months, to tear myself away and leave him for work knowing that I might not see him when I returned. That Friday night, I returned to find him dead, and it was the most painful day of my life. I know he's not a person, but I am, and I'm mourning him because he was part of me, my life, my day, my routine, and I will carry him with me wherever I go for the rest of my life, in my heart, and in the ways in which he changed me because he lived. I am still a morning person, and I look forward to the morning of the first resurrection, hoping for the restoration of ALL things, especially the things and people we knew and loved and mourned. Hopefully that will include my beagle whom I love, because that will be a great morning.