“We pray that we may
not fall into the error of pride by considering ourselves as exceptional, alone
in all Creation in having Souls, and that we will not vainly imagine that we
are set above all other Life, and may destroy it at our pleasure, and with
impunity.”--- Adam One, Founder and Leader of God’s Gardeners.
From: The Year of the
Flood, by Margaret Atwood*
Absence from, or loss of family is the saddest thing we
humans experience. At my current stage
of life, loss becomes quite frequent. I
have lost my parents, aunts, uncles and cousins, and other people that have
been very close to me. Along with the
loss, permanently etched on the heart part of my brain, is the feeling of guilt
that frequently pops up in my thoughts.
What could I have done differently?
Could I have prevented something from happening? For me, and I think for a lot of women, the
most profound loss was my mother.
Of course I still do have family: my two children, a daughter-in-law and a
son-in-law, my grandson, my brother, his wife and daughter and of course my
husband. Some are further away than
others and all are important to my life.
In addition, there is my four-footed family.
Pet losses are more frequent, generally speaking; our pets
have a shorter life span and tend to be more accident-prone than most
people. As I write down the names of
those I have lost, from childhood on, I realize they have also left tracks on
the heart/brain as well. Thinking of
each one, I feel the tears forming and the pain—and the guilt—that comes with
them. Those who come to mind (over a 50+
year period) are Blacky, Tuesday, Happy, Rhett, Spanky, Miss Kitty, Chloe,
Penny, Irish, Rocky, Daisy, Rosie, Trooper, Howie and Cash. There have been others with shorter stays,
strays and visitors, but the ones I have listed were truly family. The circumstances of the losses were each
different, but all painful to remember.
My definition of family rests on the belief that it consists
of beings to whom you will always feel a connection and sense of
responsibility. Neither time nor
distance totally erases that from that brain place I mentioned, whether the
time is days, weeks, years or forever.
When my children were young I sometimes had to go out of town for my job. Days took care of themselves, but nights I
lived with a sense of anxiety about leaving them at home. Not anxiety that they were not cared for,
just anxiety that it was wrong to be away from them.
My current “nuclear family” consists of my husband Lamar and
Arty, Johnny, Murphy, Lili and Henry—the four-footed family members. It feels wrong to be away from them as
well. Again, I don’t have the anxiety
about them being cared for—I have a wonderful substitute Mom, Dawn Cox, who
understands my anxiety and texts me regularly to let me know that all is
well. Which circuitously brings me to
the topic of “Vacation Verity” which didn’t make any sense to me when Tom
Strait listed it as a topic, but I have now figured it out: Are you really having a vacation when you
leave home if you’re carrying everything and everyone with you all the
time? For me the answer is that I rarely
ever actually “vacate” for any length of time.
I have a dim awareness that not everybody thinks this way and an awful
lot of people don’t think of their pets as their family.
Maybe I’m tying two things together that don’t belong—but in
my scribbled up brain they do. Family is
not a static entity, the center shifts over time and it is what you feel it to
be. The dogs meet my definition of
family. My view of the world of animals
mirrors the quote at the beginning; we are all part of the grand design, no
matter who or what you believe created it.
I don’t think I really need a vacation from that.
*The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood, copyright 2009
by O.W. Toad, Ltd, published in the United States by Nan A. Talese, Doubleday,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
