I am a translator. An educator. Someone who takes experiences and translates that into what I hope is useful knowledge.
I can’t help it.
Maybe it is just how I make meaning — imagining that somehow the Bad Thing I endured can somehow make a similar Bad Thing less awful for someone else.
As if finding the right words, the right ways to convey what I learned — maybe I can help one person. And if I help one person, then this meaningless thing has meaning.
In the past eight months, two of my beloved girls left suddenly — first, Claire and then Harper. I had no time to prepare. No choices were left to me. My MT vet said that what happened to Claire was so unusual that it was like she was struck by lightening.
Indeed.
Here — and then just gone. How does that even happen?! And it did. Twice.
And now I have the opposite — a slow, devastating, confusing march to the end of a beloved dog’s life. So many decisions. Complicated decisions. Hard decisions.
Sometimes I tell Sparkle that it would be okay if she needed to die in her sleep. She just wags her tail.
I have had months to prepare.
And I am not prepared to lose this dog. I never will be.
This morning I have been thinking about which way is worse — that struck by lightening ending or this gradual loss of Sparkle’s sparkle. I have decided they are both awful but in different ways.
April 19, 2025
I will have more to say about this process with Sparkle but today I want to take this opportunity to speak from The Dark Place of loss and grief — my second home for the past 3+ years — about what to say to someone like me who is about to prove that bad things come in threes.
Super important and first on my list — there are no bright sides. No “at least…”
When we move to a place of “at least she is not suffering” or “she had a long and wonderful life” we have left the bereaved person alone in The Dark Place because of our retreat to the bright side.
When your heart is shattered, nobody can take you to the bright side, and they should not try. When they do try — and people always do — it makes it worse because you realize two things: 1. This person does not see me or my shattered soul. 2. I am alone here in The Dark Place.
Did you know I have a website about all this grief stuff? Here is a page from that website: Skip the Platitudes
The truth is that offering condolences is hard and tricky and we might get it wrong — but trying our best to offer support is better than saying nothing at all. All any of us can ever do is to try.
I don’t know which of these days will be Sparkle’s Angel Day.
But it will be soon 💔
