Death: An Epic Love Story
It’s seared into my memory: the first moment I saw her face. It was the spark that began the slow thawing of my wounded, frozen heart.
My dog Bailey came into my life when she was just a few months old and during a time in my life that I was so lost and depressed that I was drowning. I didn’t realize it at the time, but she was the gift of a life preserver. She was my guru.
As I sit here, on the day of her death, I look outside at snowflakes slowly and playfully dancing through the air as they fall gently to the earth…the silence of winter permeating all. I listen to and feel this silence, for I now know it viscerally to be what I truly am, what she was, what we all are. It is in this silence that she still resides — the same silent presence of my own being. The silent presence of God. Of That.
I write this to pay homage to my teacher. It is the great love story of my life. It is the story of my liberation, and of my heart’s coming home to itself.
Bailey was put into my life to reflect me to my own self, and it took me until the last precious years of her life to see this clearly. She helped me carry the burden of my own secret suffering, and she invited, through her modeling of true presence, the courage to feel and let go of each layer. And boy howdy were there layers.
When she came into my life when I was just 21, I was running. I was running from grief, from pain, from trauma, from abandonment, from heartbreak. But mostly, I was running from myself.
I unknowingly projected all of my images onto her, and she carried them with a fierce and unconditioned heart. I unconsciously made her my mother, my father, my aborted daughter, my family, my dying sister, my fantasy husband, my best friend. She was on the receiving end of every unhealed and unconscious pattern that came down to me through my family line and made up my false self: rage, violence, criticism, emotional unavailability, over-giving, martyrdom, perfectionism, control, helplessness, helper, victim, perpetrator, and fear, among many, many others. She carried it silently, without complaint or judgment. She saw in me the deeply wounded child desperate for love and presence. My how she loved that child.
She taught me to be myself. To be real. To be vulnerable. To be witnessed. To be held. She loved me in my rage, my sadness, in the moments I was suffering so deeply that I wanted to end it all, and even in my mistreatment of her. She loved me in my confusion. She never asked me to be other than I was right then in that moment. She never tried to fix me or change me. She allowed me to be lost, to be asleep to the truth of myself. She allowed every part of my conditioning to be just as it was. And, in that way, she was God in form. She was the ministry of presence in my life.
We also had many, many adventures together. She got to be a city-dwelling dog, a van-life dog who adventured with Henry and I across the great and beautiful expanses of the United States, and a good-old country dog. She lived in apartments, condos, in a home with open land, and in a 20ft trailer. She saw the Rockies, Appalachia, the Sonoran Desert, and the ocean. She played in snow and sand and streams and rivers. We hiked the National Parks of White Sands and Yosemite and Canyonlands and Smoky Mountains and Saguaro and Zion, among others. We spent time with our feet in the Gulf of Mexico and in the clear streams at 12,000ft in the mountains of northern New Mexico. She met cows and goats and pigs and chickens and birds and snakes and llamas and deer and a miniature horse named Peggy and even befriended a Komodo dragon in Arizona. Her nearly 16 years on this earth were immensely full and rich.
But the thing I feel most proud of was my ability, in the final year of her life, to see her as she truly was. To see her without the lens of my own ego or self obstructing the complete wonderment and perfection of her. That was my sincere prayer: to see her clearly. To set down all of the filters I had collected, knowingly and unknowingly, over a lifetime of conditioning, and love her with a pure and present heart. And as I did the grueling work of meeting every wretched part of my own self, I watched our relationship transform and deepen. And I see now that was the greatest gift of all. That was the real gift. I gave back to her the gift of presence that she had spent all those years silently modeling to me.
Bailey was the grounding rod that made the liberation of all my secret (and not-so-secret) shadows possible. The completeness of my love for her was the final push I needed to jump off the cliff and into the Mystery…to finally let go of the person I took myself to be and die into the realm that lies behind both no-thing-ness and every-thing-ness. In hopes of repaying the profound gift she had given to me in every moment of her precious life. And I did. In her final weeks and days and moments, my heart was pure: no regrets, no guilt, no shoulds, no could-have-beens, no if-onlys, and, most importantly, no masks. Just two incarnated beings standing completely naked in front of the other, in and as the silent presence of That.
The moment of Bailey’s death was the final teaching of my guru. She freely laid down, relaxed, closed her eyes, and dissolved peacefully and effortlessly back into the Mystery.
I can only hope to embody the presence she taught me, and to carry it and share it with authenticity, with love, and in Truth. With a heart as light as a feather. And, in that, carrying my teacher with me.
