Legacy Matters

Too Much Experience in Grieving

It's the elders among us who handle the details of death and show us how to grieve.  Like Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I didn’t want to become ‘old hand’ at these matters. But, I have. Even though the instructions on the box “How To Be An Elder,” are simple: ‘Be there for others as much as you can. Be there, and be there some more.’ It sounds so easy, but it takes cojones y ovarios. Big ones. Funny isn’t it, being an elder takes being more like the valiant creature: what did I say a brave ‘pet’ was made of? “Loyal in love, sheltering of the vulnerable, more far-seeing, more all-out brave, more decisive, bold, forgiving, more funny and heartful?” Yes, like that, in human proportion. No one is sprung full-born elder, like Aphrodite on the half-shell. I’m can see that I am working on it, finding the ways. Probably all the rest of my life long.

I Promise the Last Voice You Hear Will Be One of Such Love: Pet Loss

via Ambivablog who wrote

As she anticipates the loss of an aged, cancer-stricken Dalmatian ("Pepino is our relative.  That's all there is to it"), she knows it will reopen in the whole family the barely clotted, bottomless wound of the recent loss of a child.  The one thing you do not want to be at such a time is alone, and it is when family (blood family with all its capacious adoptions) rises up and shows its stuff.