all the tears that never fall

Once, a few years back, I found myself in a counselor’s office. It was my first experience with therapy. I made the appointment because I wasn’t sleeping well and I was experiencing chronic nausea that had just been diagnosed as gastritis. I was in grad school at the time, and the doctor recommended that I make use of the counseling center at the university, which was free to students. I had wondered for a long time if my mental health was bad enough to seek professional help, so I agreed and took the necessary steps for an evaluation.

I felt like a fraud, then. I knew I was not okay, especially after my gastroenterologist ruled out every cause for my gastritis except for stress. I was experiencing limited-symptom panic attacks periodically. I felt unequipped to deal with my life. At the same time, though, I was functional. I was taking care of myself and my responsibilities. I was making progress (slowly, at this stage) toward my degree. I couldn’t acknowledge that I was experiencing a high level of anxiety and also some depression. Those words didn’t apply to me, I thought. Not really, anyway. I was okay, after all, because I was functioning. Some part of me believed that only people who were more or less paralyzed by these conditions had a right to use the terms. I didn’t even need medication, I thought, and I was afraid that the counselor I saw would feel like I was wasting her time because surely there were more severe cases requiring her attention. I was worried that I was the mental health equivalent of a hypochondriac.

But, of course, my counselor didn’t scoff at me as I nervously tried to strike a balance between being open about what I was experiencing and maintaining control of myself. I wanted to be good at therapy, meaning that I wanted to say the right things, answer questions in the right way, indicate an impressive level of introspection, make appropriate progress toward some nebulous goal of “better” or “fixed.” So I came to therapy with my usual approach to dealing with my life: identify the problem and devise an actionable solution. During one session, I was talking about an upcoming situation I expected to be highly stressful. She asked me how I was going to deal with the stress, and I confidently laid out a strategy for mitigating it. It involved confrontations and boundary setting. I was pretty sure I had aced the question. When I finished, my counselor kindly said, “Or, you could just feel your feelings. Try to be curious about them instead of problem-solving them.”

I was floored. Not only did I give the wrong answer, the correct answer was something I couldn’t understand. What did it mean to feel my feelings? Isn’t that why I was in therapy in the first place–because of these inconvenient, uncomfortable feelings that kept disrupting my life? Isn’t feeling what got me into this mess in the first place? And anyway, how does someone not feel their feelings? With some more work, I understood a little better that the goal was about actually processing emotion instead of trying to avoid it or suppress it. But I didn’t really like that answer. As Andy Bernard on The Office says, “So, life gives you lemons, and you just have to eat them, rinds and all.” Not only do I have to have uncomfortable emotions, but I have to just sit with them instead of fixing it. Rinds and all.

I didn’t like it, but I accepted it and I began to understand that I have a very strained relationship with my emotions. Grace, my friend and roommate, affectionately calls me Spock because sometimes I seem half-Vulcan (emotionally shut down, for you non-Trekkies). It’s more joke than anything, but the reality is that for most of my life I have worked hard to control and suppress my feelings, sometimes knowingly but more often not. I tried to purge what I thought of as “bad” feelings, which apparently for me is anything that is not happiness or compassionate sadness on someone else’s behalf. And both of those are only acceptable in small, controlled doses. I won’t get into why I’m like this because that’s a whole post on it’s own, but I will say that as an enneagram type 1 (wing 9 for those of you playing the enneagram game at home), one of my deepest drives is to be good, so those emotions I labelled “bad” along the way are off limits.

Of course, I’m not actually a Vulcan, and I don’t have some Jedi mastery of my emotions (I know, I’m mixing universes. #coexist). My mom, by virtue of being the safest person I’ll ever know in my life, has witnessed emotional outbursts of a variety of kinds from me and could tell you stories. (Seriously, she loves to tell stories about me and my brother. If you ask, she’ll tell.) And I remember trying to figure out how to be a Real Girl in middle school and trying to internalize the old stereotype that girls are hyper-emotional. If I were going to be a Real Girl who behaved the way that girls are supposed to, I needed to be emotional. That mostly meant that I cried really hard at movies like Romeo + Juliet (the one with Leonardo DiCaprio, or as I thought of him then, Luke Brower from Growing Pains) and Titanic (there’s a theme here, apparently), or more embarrassingly, Armageddon. But that was a short-lived phase and I soon went back to my default state of emotional semi-detachment, and I’ve only gotten more buttoned up as I’ve aged. For a long time, that seemed like a virtue to me. I never thought of myself as unemotional, but I did think that I had a lot of emotional fortitude. I thought I was strong.

So it took me by surprise to discover earlier this year that I was dealing with real, life-diminishing depression. Not the “low-grade” kind of depression I experienced (and wouldn’t acknowledge) for almost all of my time in Atlanta. I couldn’t ignore it because it was making decisions for me without me even knowing it–decisions not to do the dishes or the laundry, decisions to lay down for naps in the afternoons instead of grading or class prep, decisions to watch the entire Netflix catalogue of The Great British Baking Show like it was my job. I could still do the things I had to–I was always prepared for my classes and I did a good job teaching. And let’s be honest, I’ve had worse semesters in terms of keeping up with grading. But it was hard to do those things and anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary was nearly impossible to do.

And all the while, I was grieving the loss of Spur, a feeling which I couldn’t do anything but feel. Grief is an unsolvable problem. There’s no getting around it. You just have to feel it all–the love and loss, the empty spaces. Even if it wasn’t too big to stuff down deep inside of yourself and avoid the feelings, grief is physical, too. And not just in the way that the emotions cause that compressing ache in your chest and that tired feeling around your eyes. It’s also there in the places where you live and the objects you own. It’s the leash that hangs unused by the door. It’s the spot on the bed where a dog used to sleep. It’s where she used to lay down to wait when she followed me into the bathroom. It’s the phantom-limb feeling of knowing, still, the exact weight and shape of her body in my arms, or the sound of her bark.

Is it normal to grieve this way for a dog? I don’t know. People don’t really talk so much about their pet grief. Nobody writes songs about it, even though there is that baffling stereotype about dead dogs being a staple lament in country music. (Having never heard a song about a dead dog, I doubt that’s an actual trope, but either way, can we not make fun of it?) So on top of my grief was shame and an impossible need to explain myself to people, to let them know that Spur was special and unique, and that I understand this grief isn’t the same as losing a beloved human family member.

And my grief for Spur stretched back and entangled with my grief for my Aunt Janice, who died just over a year ago, and for my Uncle Max, who died about five years ago, and for my grandfathers, who died when I was 9 and 13, for friends, for other animals. All deaths that I never fully mourned. All of my life’s losses would merge and cascade, at times, and there was nothing to do but feel my feelings. To be curious. To pay out this great cost of loving.

I think, now, that for all these years Spur was a ballast in my life, her presence and love helping to stabilize the emotions I tried not to feel. I knew that I relied on her, but I don’t think I understood how much. I am unbalanced without her, though I am learning to find a new balance with River, who brings a whole new kind of joy and magic into my life.

And so in the wake of Spur’s death, I am processing through so many hidden feelings. Old griefs are fresh again. It feels like every wound is finding its way back to the surface, and all the tears I never cried gather behind my eyes and wait while I try to learn how to feel without labeling any emotions “bad” and try to release myself from the confines of perfectionism out into the open spaces of being human. Almost everyday, I recite to myself the opening lines from Mary Oliver’s beautiful poem “Wild Geese”:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Oh, how I loved my Spur. I love her still, and my grandfathers and aunt and uncle. And for as much as I wish I could skip over this grief that comes at me like waves crashing and receding, I am grateful still for this last gift from Spur–learning to let this soft animal of my body love what it loves. And feel what it feels. And to love myself not because I’m good or because I’ve done everything right, but simply because I am worthy of love. Maybe when I’ve learned this lesson well enough I will be able to, in Mary Oliver’s words, hear the world calling to me “like the wild geese, harsh and exciting / over and over announcing [my] place / in the family of things.” Only maybe instead of the honking of geese, it will sound more like a dog barking, and I will know that it has been calling to me all along.

To Spur, on her last day

Dear Spur,

Do you remember the day we met? I came to your first home looking for my very own puppy. You were the smallest and the prettiest in your puppy pack, and when all the other pups jumped on me and mouthed my hands, you stood back and watched. When the man threw the tennis ball and all the other pups stampeded after it, you sat still in front of me, looking right at me. I think we both knew then that we belonged together. You picked me as much as I picked you. So we climbed into my old red truck together, and on the drive home, you rested your tiny chin on my chest and fell asleep.

You probably didn’t know then how much I needed you. I had just finished college. My friends were all getting married, moving away, starting jobs. My lifelong dream of being a professional horse trainer was slipping away, and I didn’t know what to do with my life. I felt stuck and stagnant, and although I didn’t really acknowledge it then, I was experiencing my first minor depression. Or maybe you did know. I wouldn’t be surprised. You stepped right into your role as an emotional support dog (a term I didn’t know then). You took to your new job with aplomb.

I know that you were sometimes difficult as a puppy, but I can’t remember why anymore. Even then, though, I knew that you were exemplary. You slept through the night almost immediately. You house trained in about 2 weeks. You never chewed up anything that wasn’t given to you for that purpose. Well, almost never–there was that time you destroyed one of Mom’s new shoes. But you brought us all so much joy. You were my dream dog, Spur.

Do you remember when you discovered the joy of soccer balls? Oh Spur, your acrobatics as you snatched balls out of the air brought us all so much joy. You delighted everyone with your gravity-defying feats. I think you delighted yourself most of all. You loved playing ball so much. Even after your vision had mostly gone, you still wanted to chase the ball. You taught River the joy of it. Whenever River and I play ball, we’ll think of you.

You saw me through so much, my sweet girl. Three graduate programs–two master’s degrees and a PhD. A total of 10 years of graduate school, and you took care of me through it all. You listened to me explain complicated theory and difficult ideas. You looked at me with love and adoration while I wondered if I was good enough or smart enough to do this work. You reminded me to stop and play. You were patient while I read and wrote endlessly. You got me out of bed and took me walks everyday, even when I didn’t feel like it. You kept me healthy. When I started work on my PhD, I told you that you had to stick around until I was done. I didn’t know if I could do it without you. You kept your end of the bargain, and really we both deserve degree and title.

And you have been with me through all of my big moves. When we moved to Boston 8 1/2 years ago, it was the first time I had moved away from my hometown. I was excited and a little scared, but you were with me. You always made me feel safe. You always made where I was feel like home. That move was a huge change for you, too. Your world contracted from 20 acres to 825 sq ft, and you handled it like a pro. I never had to worry about you, and that made it easier on me. You were always taking care of me. When we moved to Atlanta, I faced a lot of lonely times. But you were always there. You were always happy to see me. Oh my love, I could not have survived those years without you.

I’ll always remember our road trips, my road warrior companion. Boston to Texas and back multiple times, Atlanta to Texas and back twice a year for six years, Texas to California and back this once. I think we drove around 20,000 miles together all told. Oh, and the miles we walked together. Thousands of miles covered in 13 1/2 years, one step at a time. You were the perfect walking companion, always in stride, always calm and moving along as if it were your job.

Spur, I cannot possibly chronicle here the million million memories, the unquantifiable small joys, the warmth and happiness and relief you brought into my life. I’m going to miss you so. One of the things about your death that hurts the most is how ephemeral your life is in the end. What legacy can a dog leave behind? Who but me will remember you and all the stories of your life? I will whisper your name in the dark and feel out the contours of the absence you leave in my life. I won’t forget you.

It’s a strange grief, a liminal sort of grief, to mourn for a dog. I don’t know how to explain it to other humans. I know a lot of people who think of their dog as their child, but I never did. I was never your mom. You were my friend, my whole family while I was away from home, my anchor in a wild world, my home. Whatever you were, you were never just a dog to me. There isn’t a word that I know in any language that describes my relationship to you, and that makes it difficult to explain how hard this loss is.

So I find myself trying to express something of value here, something that will both bring comfort to myself and explain this hurt to others, using this epistolary conceit to write to you, who, being a dog, cannot read. But there is no language or extralinguistic performance I know to adequately render tribute to you for what you meant to me. Your small life kept my whole life lifted. You carried my whole world for 13 1/2 years. There should be monuments in your honor. But this is all I have to offer, these words along with the hope that you knew all along that you were one of the finest things life has offered me.

Goodbye, babydog. I’ll love you forever, and I’ll never stop feeling grateful for you.

Your loving friend,

Shanna

aftermath

We returned home after the fire a week and a half ago. Our apartment didn’t smell smoky inside, but the outside smelled like a smoker’s hotel room. It’s getting better now, but it’s still strong in the mornings and evenings. We cleaned out the fridge and freezer and began to resupply staples. We cleaned the house and did laundry. We tried to get used to transformed spaces all around us, the blackened hills, the charred remains of trees, the scorched telephone poles.

We went back to work. I stood in class with my students as we carried on. I was relieved to hear them laugh and see them take comfort in the normalcy of homework and tests and papers, however disrupted those activities continue to be. I was moved to see their joy at being back together with others who also felt the weight of this past month.

And we’ve had some hiccups. Last week, we got some much needed rain that also posed a terrible threat of mudslides and rock slides from the newly bare hills. Class was cancelled one day. And it’s rained for most of the last two days, causing problems as well. We still had class, but the roads felt treacherous. Many of my students didn’t feel safe driving. I didn’t either. We all feel a little less safe these days.

On my drive home today, I had to take an alternate route because Malibu Canyon was closed due to rocks falling. My new route took me further north, through a much more damaged area. I saw the remains of houses that had burned to the ground. I saw the singed remnant of a vineyard on a hillside. It was devastating. This evening, as I walked the dogs, I realized that we no longer hear coyotes crying from the now barren hills by our house.

So we do the math after this compound catastrophe; we tally up all that has been lost. Class time. Events. Friends. Homes. A sense of safety. Normalcy. Order. Peace. And what else? How do we quantify the scars we do not yet understand?

But even in the midst of it, I find myself also counting blessing–my home that didn’t burn, the resilience of my students, Christmas decorations and music, my dogs, Grace. And to my surprise, the tender green grass that has already begun springing up from the scorched earth all through the canyon has moved me almost to tears as I remember that the world always moves toward restoration and renewal. Even in ashes, life goes on, begins again, revives.

All Who Live to See Such Times

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

JRR Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

It’s been just over a week now, though it feels like a month or even more. A week ago yesterday, I woke up and saw the headlines about the mass shooting at the bar in Thousand Oaks. That’s so close to me, I thought. The closest I had been to that kind of tragedy. Next I saw the emails from the university that a number of our students had been at that bar. It was college night. There were line dancing lessons. My first thought was of my students, the twenty-seven I have gotten to know and love over the course of this semester. There was no information to let me know that they were okay. Then I remembered that the ten I would (hopefully) see that morning had just finished reading a novel that ends with a mass shooting, and I started praying. How do you walk into a classroom to teach a novel about a mass shooting to students who may have just witnessed one? Who may have just lost friends?

When I walked into my classroom at 8:00 that morning, we still didn’t know for sure what the situation was. Through word of mouth, my students knew that a group of Pepperdine freshman had all gone to the bar together. One was still unaccounted for. Our conversations were heavy and strained. My students were stunned. We didn’t really talk about the end of the novel. Instead, my students chose to share with each other what they are writing their papers about. We talked about the role of art during times of crisis. We discussed some of the broad themes in the novel that connect back to our course topic. I told them to get in touch if I could do anything for them. I felt helpless.

By noon, we knew for sure that the missing student had been killed in the shooting. Her name was Alaina Housley–not in my class, but a freshman English major. Is there a word that describes the kind of grief you feel when someone you’ve never met dies? Is there a word for that communal kind of grief that covers an entire group of people like a dense fog? I reached out to all my students via email to remind them of the university’s counseling center and to let them know how much I care about them. I worried especially about my freshmen. Were any of them there? I still didn’t know. Were they friends with Alaina? Were they coping? And how would I manage class the next day in the face of it all?

I left campus and went for my regularly-scheduled ride on Mikey, my lease horse. I had a lovely ride, even though the wind was whipping. I had a fleeting thought about being glad there wasn’t a fire because the winds would be a huge problem. It turned out that only half of that sentence was true. As I left the barn, I noticed what looked like smoke in the distance, but there was so much of it and it wasn’t there at all a couple of hours before so I guessed it was an unusual cloud formation. When I checked the news on my phone, I saw reports about fires in Ventura county. It was a long way from my apartment, but it was spreading in our direction. I kept an eye on it through the news and social media while I ate ice cream and felt sad.

When I realized that the fire had spread to the open space bordering my apartment complex to the north, the rolling hills and hiking trails that I have spent countless hours exploring with my dogs since I moved here, I started feeling more worried. How many times had I looked at the parched vegetation of those hills and seen only kindling?

What I saw when I went to the trailhead

It has only rained one time in the area since I moved there in July. I have always known that if there were ever a fire in that open space, it wouldn’t stop until it was all ash. So I leashed up the dogs, who needed to go out anyway, and walked the three minutes from my apartment to the trailhead. The city had issued a voluntary evacuation notice, and as I walked I saw many of my neighbors in the complex walking their dogs and checking their phones–like me, trying to assess the threat. When I got to the trailhead, a firetruck was there and I could see the bright glow of fire against the twilight sky as it creeped over the hills. Hills that I had walked. Hills that were close enough for me to walk to and back in just over an hour. Too close.

I went back to the apartment and woke up Grace, my roommate, who had come home from work (also at Pepperdine) and opted to sleep off the grief of the day with a long nap. As calmly as I could, I told her that there was a fire in the hills and we needed to pack up in preparation for an emergency evacuation. By the time we had packed up, the fire was only growing, moving faster, consuming the dead grass and dry tree limbs. We decided not to wait for the mandatory evacuation notice. Our supervisors would understand if we missed a day of work on Friday. We would go to Grace’s parents’ place in the mountains up north. We would be back to work on Monday. We packed light, loaded up what we needed for ourselves and the dogs, and started our six-hour drive at 7:30 pm. We ate fruit and nuts and cheese in the car–what we could grab for a quick dinner–and reassured each other that we were making the right decision.

The next day, we knew it was true. Not only had our area been evacuated, but the Woolsey Fire had roared through the hills and leapt the six-lane 101 highway, making its way through the canyons toward the coast. The winds continued to fuel the blaze. While the city of Malibu evacuated, our Pepperdine students, along with faculty, staff, and administrators who live on campus, all gathered together in the most secure

This is an area view of Pepperdine and how close the fire got

buildings in the heart of the campus, following long-established protocol recommended by the fire marshal. They were safe, but I kept thinking of what a horrific 48 hours it was for them to go from the shooting to sheltering in place while a historic wildfire raged around them. Between the trauma and the smoke, administrators made the call to close campus until after Thanksgiving. As soon as the immediate danger of the fire passed, almost all students went home. Faculty are conducting class online in various formats through next Tuesday, when the school will go on holiday for Thanksgiving.

The fire has been devastating. As of now, the Woolsey fire has burned almost 100,000 acres and is only 62% contained. Over 600 homes, businesses, and other structures have been lost. My apartment is safe. The fire scorched the hills that surround the complex on three sides, but the buildings are unharmed. I have a home to go back to. All my things wait for me there. My campus is safe. After the holidays, I will go back to my office. I will walk back into the classrooms I’ve taught in all semester. And every one of my students will be in class, because they all survived.

And we’ll all carry on. We’ll adapt. I’ll learn what I need to do to get the smell of smoke out of my clothes, linens, and rugs. I’ll figure out how to teach students, both online before the holidays and in the classroom after it, who have faced back-to-back traumas. I’ll find a way to help them understand that, even though it all seems so hard now, even though the tragedies currently looming over our community are just a drop in the ocean of violence and disaster and sorrow that threatens at all times to drown the world, what we are doing matters. When we continue on in the face of adversity, it matters. When we laugh together, it matters. When we learn together, it matters. All of this is what hope looks like.

I keep thinking of something that one of my dissertation committee members said a couple of years ago during a panel discussion on postcolonial literature and climate change. Deepika Bahri said, “The work we do is a prayer for a better world.” It’s a statement that resonated with me profoundly. Indeed, it has shaped me as a scholar and a teacher since. In the aftermath of a mass shooting and a natural disaster, it’s easy to question why it matters to continue teaching and studying literature and composition, but Deepika’s comment is exactly why it matters. Showing up, being present for students in this moment, believing in their future–this is my prayer. Believing in the power of language–both what we write and what we read–to bring comfort, to inspire change, to open our hearts and minds to the experiences of others. Knowing that both the material we cover and continuing to work toward our goals will make my students more able to deal with the challenges they’ll face in a world that feels increasingly unstable. This is my work. This is my prayer.

I wish my students hadn’t had to deal with either of these tragedies, let alone both at the same time. I wish the same for myself. “So do all,” as Gandalf tells Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring, “who live to see such times.” But the only choice available to us in these moments is to decide what we will do. I choose to do hope. I choose to do the work that is my prayer for a better world. I hope that I can help my students choose to do the same.

What if we danced instead?

The dancers form a circle on the outer edges of the dance floor, in exactly the way that the instructor asks them to with the men on the outside and the women forming a second circle on the inside. The pairs introduce themselves to each other, and then the women rotate counter-clockwise around the circle, each new pairing shaking hands and exchanging smiles and names until everyone has met everyone else. This is the first week of a swing dance class that my friend Grace is taking, and I am watching from the sidelines of the dancehall. It’s an intermediate-level class, so the instructor quickly rattles through a few steps and gives some pointers on how to do them, and then the music starts and the paired dancers are all moving in time–rock step, swing out, spin. The dancers smile and laugh, enjoying the dance, forgiving missteps, helping their partners, working together to create through ephemeral movement a lasting feeling of joy and connection with another human being.

I am reminded as I watch of something my first-year composition students read for our class this week. We are learning about rhetorical analysis, and I assigned a few chapters out of a scholarly book called Metaphors We Live By. Originally published in 1980 by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, this book argues that metaphors are intrinsic in the way we think, use language, and understand our world. For example, in the introduction, Lakoff and Johnson explain that we understand argument as a concept through metaphors of war. They write:

ARGUMENT IS WAR

Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument’
His criticisms were right on target
I demolished his argument.
I’ve never won an argument with him.
You disagree? Okay, shoot!
If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.
He shot down all of my arguments. (4)

These metaphors, they argue, are completely inseparable from the way that we understand argument. Just try to imagine argument, they urge, as something other than war. What if the point wasn’t winning? What if winning and loosing were not even conceptually associated with argument? What if argument was completely different:

Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. (5)

As my students and I discussed these ideas in class, we talked about how angry people seem these days as they argue about political and social issues. I could tell from their faces and comments that even as eighteen-year-olds, they are already wary about even voicing their opinions in a public setting. And it’s not just them; an upper-level student in my other class confided in me at the beginning of the semester that she’s worried about being attacked for expressing an unpopular idea. I also find myself shrinking more and more from commenting on issues online. The angrier and more polarized our discourse becomes, the more we see that argument is war, especially as we come to regard each other as enemies.

So I find myself reflecting on Lakoff and Johnson’s imagined concept of argument as dance, a verbal rock step, a rhetorical swing out. What would that look like? Making eye contact with your partner, acknowledging the dignity of their humanity? Working together to create rather than destroy? Building a connection and trust with someone you disagree with? Feeling joy instead of anger? Would we even recognize it if we saw it?

Imagine the possibilities, though, if we engaged in arguments with partners instead of enemies. Imagine if every time you prepared to disagree with someone on social media or in person, you thought of your words as a step rather than as ammunition. Imagine if you saw the back-and-forth of your words and theirs as a collaboration rather than conflict. How would that change what you say and how you say it? How would it change the way you understand your partner’s words?

It’s a compelling idea. Argument as dance is far more intimate and far less intimidating than argument as war. I’m not much of an optimist anymore, but most of the time I still hope that the world can be better than it is. I still hope that my country can find a way out of this cesspool of toxic discourse that we’ve mutually created. But to do that, we have to change the way we argue, and I think that argument as dance might be a place to start.

So what do you say? Shall we dance?

---

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2011.

Christmas Pony

Twenty-one years ago, my best friend Kristen got a horse for Christmas. He was a flashy black and white paint named Cowboy, and I was so happy for her. And I was so jealous. Even when she told me, sweetly and earnestly, “He’s our horse,” I was equally touched by the sentiment and painfully aware that her generosity did not make my dream of owning a horse come true. Sometime in the aftermath of that Christmas season, I asked my dad about buying me a horse, and he responded that he had no plans to do that. No problem, I thought. I’m a problem solver, so I decided that I would earn money and save it and buy my own horse. All of that year, I did odd jobs and extra chores along with my regular job mowing the yard at my dad’s office building. I saved all my pennies. I bought a saddle. And by November, my bank account and my heart were both ready. And while my bank account was flexible, my heart was set on a horse I called Tigger, a two-year-old stallion that belonged to one of my parent’s clients.

It had been love at first sight with Tigger. He was so beautiful, and the lop-sided snip on the side of his nose was so unique. He was, and is, a horse with loads of personality. I knew it would be a long, uphill struggle to get him because he wasn’t even halter trained. But I was fourteen, with no real sense of my own mortality, and where I was insecure about almost everything else, I believed I could do anything I set out to with a horse. Even so, I knew it wasn’t an ideal situation, but I believed in my heart it was Tigger. I was sure that he was supposed to be my horse. So I asked my mom to talk to their client to find out if Tigger was for sale, and how much. I held my breath. All of my dreams hinged on the answers to those questions.

When my mom told my dad that I wanted to buy Tigger, he was surprised to find out that I had saved enough money to make the purchase. Surprised, and pleased. He decided that if I was responsible enough and dedicated enough to work hard and save up, then he could buy me a horse. So he did. And for weeks before Christmas, I kept asking if they had an opportunity to find out about Tigger, and they kept putting me off. Not yet, they said. They hadn’t been able to get in touch with the owner.

Finally, Christmas Eve rolled around. My family always opens presents on Christmas Eve. That year, after all the presents had been opened, my mom pulled out one more, for me. I opened the box and found a stuffed Tigger doll, which I loved. I thought it was a nice way for my parents to show support for my dream. I was delighted. But my parents and my brother were all looking at me with expectation, as if I had missed something. Finally, my mom said, “There’s more.” So I started looking through the tissue paper in the box to see what else was in there. “No, not in the box,” Mom said, and I was totally confused. “Tigger the horse is yours,” she announced. “Dad bought him for you for Christmas.” I screamed. Did I cry? I don’t remember, but it seems likely. In terms of raw emotion, I think that was the happiest moment of my life.

Twenty years later, Tigger is still my Christmas pony. How things have changed! We’ve both learned so much, though certainly he taught me more than I taught him over the years. He’s been my go-to horse for whatever new skill I decided to learn. He’s done everything I’ve ever asked of him, including not dying a few times when he seemed on the brink of it. He’s made me a more confident rider, a gentler trainer, and a better person. It’s hard to say what moments in our lives are the most important, the most meaningful, the most impactful. But the year I got Tigger must be near the top of the list for me. He changed my life in immeasurable ways, and I am so grateful to him and for him. And I’m grateful to my parents for trusting me and supporting me.

Twenty years ago today, Tigger was my dream come true. He still is today.

This year I’m battling a nasty cold, so I won’t be able to take him on our annual Christmas Eve ride. But I went out to the barn to see him anyway, to tell him thank you, to remember what it felt like to be a 14-year-old girl seeing her very own horse, the horse that made everything seem possible. I went to remember that wild happiness I felt when I knew he was mine. How lucky I was, and how lucky I am, to be gifted with such a special animal.

Savoring this long goodbye

At first, just for a second, I thought she had tripped over something. Spur’s eyes aren’t so good anymore. Her peripheral vision in all directions is completely gone, so she trips over things often. Almost immediately, though, it registered that she had not stumbled but fallen, crashed onto her side. Just for a second, I thought she had died suddenly. She was rigid, all limbs sticking straight out, but she was breathing. When she lost control of her bladder, I realized she was having a seizure. As I knelt over her, I wondered if she was dying.

The seizure wasn’t severe. It didn’t last long–probably not more than a minute. When I took her to the vet, her vitals were good and there were no red flags in her blood work. With no obvious cause and no concerning aftershocks, we came home and I am to keep an eye on her in case it happens again. I have instructions for how to proceed if it does.

It’s been an emotional day. I cried all the way to the clinic, trying to avoid imagining how it would feel to make the return trip alone. I cried silently in the waiting room while the techs at the clinic checked her vitals and drew blood for labs. I cried on the way home while I told my mom the details of what happened. I sat down to watch some mindless tv, but found myself sobbing when one of the contestants on Dancing with the Stars danced to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” and again during a commercial, though I can’t remember what it was about. I discovered that even at the young age of 18 weeks, River is a dog that comforts with snuggles.

All the while, I am watching Spur, who is behaving totally normally now. While she sleeps, I watch the rise and fall of her rib cage, just so I can be sure. I have to resist the temptation to give her all the treats and food she wants, and also to hold her in an endless hug, which she absolutely does not want.

At 12 years old, Spur is in decline. She’s a healthy dog and she’s in great shape. She can still outrun the pup (though probably not for much longer), and she can still outlast me and River on a long hike. But her vision is going, and so is her hearing. In the dark, she is completely blind, and she can’t hear the doorbell anymore, or the word “treat.” Sometimes she can’t hear my voice, or she hears something, but she can’t figure out where it’s coming from. Her energy has changed too. She just feels older, heavier, more tired. I see it in her face and in her body. I feel it.

I know that we don’t have much time left. At the beginning of the year, I felt like we had a few more years. I thought she would live to see 15, but as her eyes and ears have gotten worse, I’ve doubted that, wondering if the loss of her senses would cause her too much distress and sadness. Today, I realized that we have entered the zone of “any day.” It could be years, really, but at this point, any day for my old, blind, deaf dog could hold a calamity or a diagnosis that would bring it all to an end. I don’t want to go on here about what that would mean to me. I know that when she does go, I will want to write about her life then, about the way that she’s taken care of me for all these years; about the way that she is so beloved, even by people who have only seen pictures of her; about the way she has often helped fearful kids feel more comfortable around dogs. I’ll want to write then about the impossible, simple beauty of being loved by a dog and the rich gift it is to care for an animal.

But it’s not time for that yet. I wish that I could say that I will spend whatever time we have left just as we always have. In some ways we will–daily walks, playing ball in the backyard, hiking in the woods, trips home to Texas. Really, nothing about the structure of our days will change until Spur needs something different. But I know–have known for a while–that I am in the long process of learning to say goodbye to this beautiful creature that has been my best friend, my family, my anchor in the world, my healer for the past 12 years. In the time of “any day,” I need to be prepared to let her go when the time comes. I have to be able to see the needs of the aging dog she is and not be hoodwinked by the young dog I remember and wish she still were.

I’m trying to learn how to savor this long goodbye, to take in all of the remaining moments with joy and gratitude, to store up warm memories. I hope that in years to come, I will remember how much she loves it when I lock River away so Spur can get some belly rubs that don’t come with a side of puppy bites. I hope I remember the way that she looks at me when we get home from a two-hour hike as if to say, “That was fun! What else are we doing today?” I want to remember those moments when River is on the floor playing, so Spur comes and sits right against me on the couch–always unusual for her–as if she wants to make sure I know we’re still close. I want to remember the funny way she looks when I accidentally sneak up on her because she didn’t see or hear me, and then the way her ears go back and she grins that dogface grin because it was a pleasant surprise after all. These days, River is the flashy dog. When we meet people, she’s all wag and bounding excitement. Everyone loves her, but especially for the kids, it’s Spur’s gentle, quiet, patient presence that they really want. “I like this dog,” they say, as they gently stroke her soft fur while she stands perfectly still except for the slow wagging of her stubby little tail. I want to savor all of these moments because I don’t know how many more I will get. And I hope that she’ll know, in whatever way dogs know things, that all of our moments are special. I hope that she’ll feel how much I love her.

 

witnessing

To address violence discounted by dominant structures of apprehension is necessarily to engage the culturally variable issue of who counts as a witness. Contests over what counts as violence are intimately entangled with conflicts over who bears the social authority of witness, which entails much more than simply seeing or not seeing.

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

I’ve been reading the above-quoted book as research for my dissertation. I’m working on a chapter that looks at how Indian authors write about environmental issues in fiction. In the broader context of my dissertation’s argument, I’m thinking about how these authors represent the natural environment as a sort of archive–a repository of historical and contemporary evidence for the non-dominant histories that are (sometimes intentionally) excluded from institutional archives.

Institutional archives are always exclusive. In fact, Derrida argues in Archive Fever that while the primary function of archives is preservation of memory, they are also always sites of forgetting; for everything that is preserved and saved for posterity, other things are lost, left-out, broadly forgotten. This is how we come to have unilateral views of history. This is how we, culturally, come to think of History, with a capital H, as something incontrovertible. We conflate history with the past, as if the stories we tell about the past are accurate descriptions of what happened rather than a cobbling together of a limited picture based on what is preserved in archives.

This isn’t to say that there’s anything particularly bad or wrong with archives. Obviously it would be impossible for any archive to collect everything. The problem is that the exclusive practices of archivists in the past often disproportionately–many times entirely–omitted the voices and perspectives of people and entire cultures who simply didn’t count as valid witnesses to governments and academic institutions. In colonial archives, for example, keeping records, documents, and other materials from indigenous populations was not a priority. For postcolonial scholars, those archives are as notable for what’s missing as they are for what is present. In the United States, the same is true in regard to Native Americans and slaves, many groups of undesirable immigrants (such as the Chinese, Irish, and Polish) as well as the dispensable poor whose labor industrialized this nation.  The witness of these people typically did not count in the construction of archives.

This question of witnessing and who counts as a witness is at the heart of the stories my selected authors tell. The poor, powerless people and the voiceless non-humans (plants and animals) all bear witness to histories that are discounted by structures of authority. So when they cry out about social injustice and environmental devastation, their lack of standing invalidates their testimony. Their experiences don’t matter, because as Arundhati Roy writes in The God of Small Things, “only what counts counts.” Environmental damage, which as Rob Nixon points out always has a disproportionately devastating affect on the poor, is ignored because someone profits from the industrial causes of that damage.

As I’m reading this and thinking about my postcolonial novels, I am also struck by how the problem of witnessing and who counts as a witness continues to be a problem in America in this moment. While archivists are typically more diligent now about collecting materials from diverse and underrepresented groups, our national discourse hasn’t caught up. I keep thinking of the tendency of some people to claim that others are too sensitive and too easily offended whenever they register discomfort over artistic representations, tweets, callous speeches, etc. In those cases, what is really being said is that the offended, the sensitive, are not valid witnesses. Their expressions pain or discomfort don’t count. They are not, in other words, considered to be authorities of their own experiences.

The same problem is at stake when African Americans and other people of color protest racial injustice in this country. When both individuals and structures of authority in this country dismiss those concerns, the message is that those protesters don’t count, their witness doesn’t count, their experiences aren’t valid. The witness of white people and of the powerful counts as ultimately authoritative. When white people say, “I’ve never seen that kind of racism, so surely it doesn’t happen,” that’s a statement about witnessing. The white witness carries an authoritative weight that invalidates the witness of other races.

Maybe one of the clearest examples of that kind of invalidation right now is happening at Standing Rock. Native American residents of that reservation protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a project that has the effect of disrupting the past–by disturbing sacred sites and burial grounds–and the future through potential pipeline leaks contaminating water sources. But the validity of their witness has been discounted by the corporation building the pipeline, by state legislators, by national leaders, and even to some extent by the press, whose coverage of the conflict has been minimal. Their concerns, which are primarily about water contamination, don’t register as valid. However, the pipeline was originally planned to go through a different route that was ultimately rejected, in part, because it would be too close to Bismarck’s water supply. At some point, then, someone in a position of authority decided not to risk contaminating the water of the city. The witness of that person’s concerns for water safety counted. But as the President signed an executive order today supporting the resumption of pipeline construction, it is clear that the same witness of safety concerns from the Standing Rock Souix doesn’t count.

I hope that the pipeline isn’t allowed to continue. It seems unlikely, but I hope it anyway. For hundreds of years, white Americans and government authorities have discounted the witness of Native Americans. We have dismissed not only their voices, but their very right to life. Our histories fail to register that the actions the US government took against Native populations would be labeled genocide if it happened somewhere else. We fail to recognize that our historical and contemporary treatment of Native Americans is imperialistic. We shrug our shoulders at a historical witness that competes with the heroic narrative of manifest destiny.

We have an opportunity now to do better. We have an opportunity to acknowledge the authority of the Native American witness. I hope we will.

Eulogy for a Good Dog

She was someone’s refuse in the beginning. She found me and Spur one morning shortly before Christmas seven years ago while we were out for a walk. It was cold, and even from a distance I could tell this puppy was undernourished, all skin and bones and  belly swollen with worms. When we got closer, she was all wagging tail and eagerness, desperate to be loved. So I coaxed her into following us to the house and imagined finding her a happy home after getting her healthy. We treated worms, a respiratory infection, and then mange, and by the time she was healthy we couldn’t let her go. Mom named her Sugar.

The years we had with here were full of shenanigans. Like the time she time she bit the tire of a UPS truck as it pulled up to the house and got flipped. Or the time when she and Spur chased a couple of donkeys that had broken onto our land. At one point, Sugar had the little jack by the tail and was being dragged along behind him. Once, she spotted a snake on the road in the direction my mom was walking. Charging ahead, she snapped up the snake and flung it away. We always guessed that she was trying to protect Mom. Sugar and my puppy/horse Soldier were best frenemies; at feed time, they would run back and forth along the fence, snapping at each other with mock fierceness, Sugar barking and Soldier stomping his feet. But then Sugar would crawl under the fence to pick up the feed Soldier spilled on the ground, and he would turn a mostly blind eye to her presence.

We thought we’d lost her a couple of times in the past few years. Once she escaped a friend’s backyard–somehow managing to clear the six-foot fence–and was missing for a few days. Eventually, through the magic of social media, we found that someone had found her running along a busy road and picked her up. She was beside herself when Mom and Dad went to pick her up, and she had freshly painted toenails courtesy of her temporary caretakers. Then, just about a year ago, she ran out in front of the mailman’s car and was run-over by two tires. She ran off into the property and Mom couldn’t find her. For a few hours, we all believed that she had gone off to die somewhere, but eventually she turned up, limping on a badly broken leg and bleeding from a couple of gashes, but otherwise unharmed.

On Sunday, she chased after my horse Junebug, a mare that does not suffer fools of the canine variety. No one saw what happened, but she came back limping and it seems likely that she was kicked or trampled. Her kidneys were damaged, and today it became clear that she wasn’t going to recover this time. This dog survived a kick to the head many years ago with just a concussion, survived being run over and then leaped four-foot fences with a heavily-splinted leg and elizabethan collar. There’s a part of me that keeps expecting to find out that it was all a mistake, and she’s going to be fine. It’s happened so many times before. But not this time.

So here I am a thousand miles away and sad. She was my mom’s dog, but the truth is that we all belonged to her. Everyone who spent much time at my parents house were grafted into Sugar’s pack of humans, and she loved all of us. It didn’t take much more than a kind voice and a pat on the head to win her over, and once given, her affections were permanent. She was never particularly smart, but she loved her people well and gave us all a share of her simple, boundless joy. She was a good, good dog.

It seems like such a small thing in this big, sorrowful world, to be sad about a dog. But I have learned these past many years that grief is a house with many rooms. One of those rooms is a gallery of wet noses and wagging tails, soft, contented purrs, welcoming nickers. It houses the heartaches for the animals that have made the world feel a little softer around the edges and helped me to be a kinder,  gentler, better human. My life is richer for having had Sugar, and emptier without her. There is space for this grief too.

give me the courage to not look away

I’m reeling, still, from the attack in Orlando this past weekend. I’m watching my friends try to process and somehow respond what happened on my Facebook feed, freshly heart-broken at so many posts. It has been especially hard to see the responses from my LGBTQ friends, for whom this attack is so deeply personal. I mourn with them from the outside, and I wish I could do something to make it better, something to help. I wish that I could write something powerful enough to shift the tide of discourse here and around the world so that we–as a global, inter-religious community–no longer say the words that breed the hate and violence. But all I can do is grieve and cast out my small voice and hope that it means something to someone, somewhere.

This is how I always feel in these moments when the ongoing crises of our time reach a fever pitch and burst out in violence. I struggle to process. I don’t know what to do. Everything seems so hopeless, and no one has any answers–no answers for why, no answers for what to change to make things better. I don’t have any answers. These days, it seems like massive outbreaks of violence happen so frequently that we have become inured to it. We shake our heads, we whisper a prayer, and then we turn away. It is at once too horrible to watch and too common to keep our attention.

In these moments, I have found myself uttering a simple prayer: Lord, make me brave enough not to look away. I whisper it to myself when my newsfeed fills up with images of violence, devastation, and death, when the pain of others threatens to upend my own comfort. I don’t want to read the stories of Syrian refugees around the world. I don’t want to see the faces of victims of police brutality. I don’t want to see the weeping families and friends of the Pulse victims. I want to turn it off, to look away because it is uncomfortable and disquieting.

But I have come to believe that we need to be uncomfortable in these moments. There is, I think, something both deeply human and intensely sacred about allowing someone else’s suffering to enter in. To carry another person’s (or people’s) pain in your heart, to grasp onto whatever small corner of that burden you can hold and share in carrying it, to allow yourself to be changed by it, to remember–I’m not sure that there is anything we do that is more holy than this.

In a country that is obsessed with individualism and in a political atmosphere in which we eagerly lob the rhetoric of “us versus them” like hand grenades at an enemy camp, this is what radical love looks like. This is what peacemaking looks like. We bear witness to one another’s pain. We listen. We share in the burden of suffering. We don’t look away.

Because when we turn away from others’ suffering, we delegitimize it. We say that their pain doesn’t matter because it’s not my pain. We stay comfortable, and that’s a problem because comfort doesn’t prompt us to action. Comfort makes it easy for us to stay out of the fray and let others worry about questions of justice and what should be done to change things.

As I’ve been writing this, I’ve been thinking about the so-called “great commandment,” in which Jesus says to love God and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22: 36-40). I think we sometimes interpret that second part along the lines of the “golden rule”: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Think about what you want, in other words, and do that for others. That’s a fine rule, but I think when Jesus says to love our neighbors as ourselves, it’s deeper than that. I think it means, at least in part, for us to make space within ourselves to allow the other person in. I think it means to allow another’s pain and suffering to enter in. It means knowing that I am not exempted from shouldering my share of the burden of life and humanity and sorrow and horror, even when it’s not mine. It means not looking away.

Lord, make me brave enough not to look away. Lord make me bold enough to act justly and act for justice in a broken world.