Dont Talk to Me or My Dog Ever Again Dalmations

The Oak Tree at the Entrance to Blackwater Pond – Mary Oliver

Everyday

on my manner to the pond

I pass the lightening-felled

chesty

hundred-fingered, black oak

which, summers ago.

swam forward when the storm

laid one lean xanthous wand against it, smoking it open up

to its rosy middle.

It dropped down

in a veil of pelting,

in a deject of sap and burn,

and became what it has been ever since –

a blackness gunkhole

floating

in the tossing leaves of summer,

like the coffin of Osiris

descending

upon the cloudy Nile.

Merely, listen, I'one thousand tired of that brazen promise:

decease and resurrection.

I'm tired of hearing how the nitrogens will return

to the earth over again,

through the hinterland of patience –

how the mushrooms and the yeasts

will get in in the wind –

how they'll ballast the pearls of their bodies and begin

to gnaw through the darkness,

like wolves at bones –

what I loved, I hateful, wasthat tree-

tree of the moment – tree of my own distressing, mortal heart-

and I don't desire to sing anymore of the mode

Osiris came dwelling house at last, on a clean

and powerful ship, over

the dangerous bounding main, as a alpine

and beautiful stranger.

As I sit here writing this month's blog mail, I am nervously waiting to hear from the veterinary hospital.  This forenoon my love dog Cyrus collapsed as he tried to get up.  He had been sick for a couple of days, just my visit with the vet yesterday didn't fix me for this eventuality.  He was down and no amount of cajoling or leash-rattling or treat-promising was plenty to get him to even elevator his head; his heavily-lidded optics were devoid of the energetic spark that is the hallmark of Cy'due south personality.  I bundled him into the backseat of my auto and sped off to the emergency clinic, driving through tears.  After thirteen years of the best health whatever canis familiaris could hope to have, it felt like I was suddenly on the verge of having to say goodbye.

My friend Bonnie, a Methodist pastor, met me at the dispensary.  The nurse took Cyrus, over again awake and on his feet, back to be examined while Bonnie and I sat on blue plastic chairs, waiting to hear what my dog's fate would exist.  I recounted how Cyrus came to be a role of my life – equally a inferior in loftier school, just subsequently my parents told me they were separating and my dad moved out, my mom and I went to the SPCA and fell in love with him.  Cyrus hadn't had the best treatment in the first year of his life and his beliefs reflected it.  He was a mess.  I was a mess.  Nosotros grew attached to each other in our messiness.  And over the years, we both learned to trust and dear as we grew and healed.

Tears were rolling down my cheeks as I recounted this story; they are rolling downwardly my cheeks now.  I told her that, if Cyrus were to die today, I would be at peace with it.  And I meant it.  He'due south lived a wonderful life and merely two days ago was enjoying his favorite activities – leading me in an all out sprint as nosotros concluded our run and lying stretched out on the deck, soaking in the sunday.  I would be at peace if he were to die today.  But, I said, I would also be deeply distressing.

It was always my intent to write on grief this month, I but hadn't expected it to be so close to the heart of it when I finally put pen to paper.  On the radio concluding Wednesday I heard a written report nigh a high school football game team in a pocket-sized town in New York – they were cancelling the remainder of their flavour after ane of their players suffered a traumatic head injury during a game and died three days later.  The students themselves were in favor of cancelling the remaining months of play.  They wanted time to heal in individual.  Only the reporter said there were those outside of the community who were angered at the decision; 1 online comment read, "The lesson to the team should have been to confront a claiming head on instead of giving up.  Nosotros've get a civilisation of coddlers."

My stomach flipped when I heard those words.  I was sickened past the thought that someone could equate healthy grieving with giving up.  Because that's what this team was doing – they were engaging in healthy grieving.  In a world that often tells u.s.a. we should shrug it off and get back to work, they were taking the time to think and to mourn and to acknowledge that life isn't the aforementioned equally it was two weeks ago, earlier their friend died.  When did we get to the point of thinking that grief should be over when the funeral is finished and that to accept whatever more than time is to 'give up'?

If y'all recall that I'grand making this generalization based on a single news report, I'1000 not.  Also many of my congregants have lost spouses or children or grandchildren, and the witness that they bear is that people expect them to get over their sorrow in curt order.  They are expected to mourn for a proscribed catamenia of time and and then to be, quite simply, better.  Their friends are perplexed when they nevertheless grow teary many months or fifty-fifty years later on; these friends don't understand why the heavy weight of painful retentivity is still such a visible burden and so long later on the burial.  They offer platitudes like, "it'll get meliorate," or "y'all'll come across someone new," or "everything volition be fine."  They offer platitudes that exasperate and acrimony the ones who are grieving, leaving them utterly alone in their sorrow.

When did we become so uncomfortable with grief?  Even when the grief is pocket-sized, we desperately desire to soothe it away.  Yesterday, when I shared with some in my community what was happening with Cyrus, they sought to assure me that he would be fine, that the vet would take intendance of him, that he wouldn't die right at present.  I didn't want those comforting words, and I knew that they might not exist true.  What I wanted was for them to stand with me and simply admit that the point is not whether he dies or non; the point is that facing the loss of my dearest furry friend is deeply and heart-wrenchingly deplorable.

Sitting in those blue chairs, waiting – merely waiting – Bonnie interrupted the silence by paraphrasing a poem past Mary Oliver.  "Don't talk to me about resurrection," she said, "the thing that I love, what I love, is dead."  Yep.  These words ring truthful.  And I wonder where they have been all this fourth dimension.  I don't call back ever talking in seminary about the importance of those three days that Jesus spent in the tomb, descending into expiry.  In my ain ministry, I am all too guilty of speeding right past those entombed days to the resurrection.  And perhaps I have been guilty, too, of offering my own theologically-grounded platitudes to those in mourning – that the promise of the resurrection is that, fifty-fifty if they never go over the loss of their loved i, at that place will be a new kind of life, an abundant life once again.  I believe this to be true, and I agree onto this hope for each grieving person with whom I meet, but peradventure I've rushed in with these words too soon.  Because right at present, in my ain small grief, I need to be in this grave – if Cyrus dies, a function of my heart volition die likewise.  And though I trust in the resurrection hope, the hope that at that place will be new and arable life for me past this expiry, right at present I need my three days of entombment.  Right now, I need my three days of descending to the dead.  Correct now, I need to accolade that this is sad, and information technology is right that information technology is deplorable, and that it is right that I grieve considering I love Cyrus.  I grew up with him, and my life will be dissimilar after him.  It is right that I grieve because he is of import enough to take left a mark on me.

I don't know what they volition tell me when the phone rings.  I don't know right now if the adieu that I said this morning will be final or just one of many more to come up.  What I do know is that I will never over again skip over Christ'southward days in the tomb when I sit with the grief-stricken.  For those days are holy, also.

"The Oaktree at the Archway to Blackwater Pond" is from the collection: Blue Iris: Poems and Essays ,
 by Mary Oliver;
 Beacon Press, 2004.

Jennifer Barchi is serving as the Solo Pastor at Dickey Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, MD, where she lives with her canis familiaris Cyrus.

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Source: https://pres-outlook.org/2013/10/dont-talk-to-me-about-the-resurrection/

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