Dawn King

Today is Dad’s 81st birthday.  I was walking at the mall this morning and a smallish man was walking ahead of me, built quite a bit like Dad, baseball cap on, and if I squinted he could a sort of might have looked like Dad.  But not really.  Funny how I keep looking for him.

A week or so ago I was corresponding via email with the mother of a young woman named Channing who was killed in a crash a year ago.  She was struggling at the one year anniversary with the fact that she felt worse now than she did at the time of the crash.   She also said she felt bad that she had been “taking” and not giving anything back, as she knows we have suffered a similar loss.  This is what I wrote back to her.  I didn’t mean it to run on the ways it does, or get so philosophical, the words just came.

“I don’t think it’s unusual for it to be more difficult for some people after the first year.  I think at first you’re running on adrenalin, getting through the first day, the first week, month, first holiday, first birthday without them.  And sometimes you think that if you can survive the first year that it will all go away.  But it doesn’t go away and that causes you to be even more depressed.  Because you start to believe that you’re facing years and years and forever feeling just like you feel right now, and you feel pretty horrible right now.  And the pain is so intense that sometimes you can’t breath and you can’t imagine not being able to breath for the rest of your life.  And you feel hopeless and you want to crawl away somewhere and cry forever.

But I’m here to tell you that though the pain doesn’t go away entirely, it will eventually recede to a manageable level.  I don’t know if the pain actually moves away or if we just learn how to manage it better.  Your counseling sessions with your family, if led by someone you connect to, will help you learn, will give you hope, will teach you tools to make some days better.  And then a few more days will be better.  And someday you will laugh about something and you will be surprised because you don’t remember the last time you laughed.  And then you will fee guilty.  And than later on, maybe days or months, you will laugh again, maybe even at a memory of something Channing did, and you will realize that it’s alright to laugh.  That you’re not dishonoring her by being happy.  Her life is not discounted because you have moved beyond the pain.  That making yourself stay in the pain is not going to bring her back, and that the way to honor her is to do good works, tell her story,and love her forever.

Someday you will be there, I promise.  And then you will be able to take some newly injured family and hold them close to your heart and they will say, “we’re taking but we’re not giving.”  And you will know that they are in fact giving, they are giving you the opportunity to do something good with your pain.  And then you will have completed the circle.  And Channing will smile.”

I tell you this, dear blog readers, not to tell my story all over again, because I’ve done that here many times, but to let you know how much I appreciate your patience when I head down this road again.  Because it’s here that I can lay the pain and let some of it go.  For whatever reason, if there is something sad hanging onto me and I put it down in writing it loses some of its hold.  And though I know that it’s not fair to spread that pain among all of you, especially those I’ve never met and aren’t related to, it does help.

And so I thank you for reading and listening and caring and helping me remember my Dad.  On his 81st birthday.  Tonight.

Tuesday evening I attended my first in a series of Hatha yoga classes offered by a local community education program.  It is taught by a man who has a PhD in pharmacology!  He’s given up that career and now teaches yoga full time.  He was very accommodating to all of us newbies, telling us (appropriately) that it was all about the breath and not about how we did the poses.  Good thing.  However I often found myself holding my breath, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what was supposed to be happening!  I’ll work on it.  I didn’t think we had exerted ourselves too much, but two days later I could hardly move.  And I still can’t sit up after reclining on the sofa without pain.  Guess that’s the “core” he kept talking about!

Wednesday night Katie and I as well as her dad went to Agility class.  We’ve been working all week on “walk it walk it walk it!” across her board, first flat on the driveway, then elevated a bit on bricks and finally sloping down from our front porch.  She runs across her board, then turns and runs right back, looking for a treat, as long as it’s level.  And she’ll run down the sloping board all day, but wants nothing to do with walking up it!  At school this week they didn’t have the dog walk set up.  DRAT!  They did have the A-frame the and teeter set up, neither of which she initially wanted to deal with.  We did get her to “touch!” them and get a treat.  Eventually we used Marie’s idea of bringing the tall table over to the A-frame.  Katie jumped right up on the table,  and with a treat to entice her, stepped onto the A-frame and walked down half of it!  Later I got her to put all four feet on the bottom of the A-frame and streeeetch up to reach a treat.  But she didn’t like it. She likes to keep her back feet safely on the floor!   Finally at the end of the class her dad could pick her up and place her just below the tip of the A-Frame and, with me at the bottom holding chicken, she’d run down the slant.

Katie does everything fast.  Jumps, tunnel…and this week, the chute!  Who knew!  Last week we ran the chute with someone holding open the end, and to Katie it was just another tunnel.  This week they dropped the chute fabric on the dogs as they went through.  But Katie was always through the chute before the girl let go.  So after the second time like that they just left the fabric on the ground.  Katie never hesitated, bursting through the chute fabric looking for me and her treat.  I was so surprised, because she’s always balked at chute before.  But I was also very very proud of her.  One of the instructors asked if I had brought the same dog, because she was coming along so well.  This week the tunnel was set up at a 90 degree turn, but when we tried it the first time Katie was running so fast I don’t think she noticed the corner, and had no trouble with it all evening.   Until we did a series of 3 jumps then tire, THEN  had to turn 90 degrees, right at the ring fence, to  go into the tunnel.  I didn’t have enough room to get her going, and she walked into it, then turned around and walked out each time.  A couple of things might have caused that, the slowness of her entry, and the fact that it was the end of class and she had pretty much shut down.  So I didn’t worry about it.  Everything is fun in agility, and that’s the way I want to keep it for her.

Yesterday morning was our Obedience/Rally class.  This week the course was much more difficult, filled with things I had never seen before.  The instructor had thrown in a lot of excellent level stations.  We bumbled our way through it, but I’m not worried as I’m a long way from competing in excellent!  Katie did really well on most of her heeling and of course she was perfect on her sits and stays.  She was also perfect on her stand for exam, so I’m happy.  I need to get her registered to do a rally trial.

Last night I went to my first Spanish for Adults class.  I’ve always wanted to try to learn another language; I took 2 years of French in high school and was terrible at it.  Maybe it will work better as an adult, and with no grade!  But I don’t know.  Most of the other 7 adults in the class had someone in their family that spoke Spanish and they heard it spoken a lot.  I don’t, though I heard it at work quite a bit.  And it’s clear that I have to think about things a lot longer than they do.  And that I’ll probably have to work harder to get it.  But that’s not unusual, after going back to grad school at 50 I am used to being slightly behind and working harder to keep up.  Which means I need to get offline and start on my Spanish homework.  Can’t blame the dog for errors in this class!

My favorite sentence from last night?  “El perro es inteligente.”  The dog is intelligent.   Well…she is… but how did they know?