In just a few short hours, my dog Jack will have been dead for a week. I was in Florida when my parents went to take him outside first thing Sunday morning and found him dead in his cage. There’s no official word yet, but the general consensus is that he died from a blood clot—a complication from the immune mediated hemolytic anemia he’d been suffering from the past two to three weeks. I cried on and off for two days, and even now, a week later, certain things still push me toward depression. We’ve lost animals before (I’ve never had someone close to me die), but none of those deaths ever struck me with quite so much force.
And yet, even while dealing with this (and a few other family medical issues that will not be discussed online), things keep happening to me that are, well, good.
My second book review for The Collagist was accepted, and this time it seems that I wrote a stronger first draft, which means I’m demonstrating what I’m learning. The revisions for a short story I’ve been working on are going well. I had a lovely time in Florida. And, finally, just tonight I found out that PANK has accepted a guest post I wrote for their blog.
The trouble, though, is that if I let myself dwell on either the good or the bad, I end up feeling crappy. Life goes on, yes, but I can’t help feeling that our dog, Jack, who was so full of love, deserves more of a reaction. Maybe if he were a person I could apply the logic that he’d want me to carry on, to let go, but I’m finding that I just can’t in this situation. And yet the world, minus the weather, seems to be throwing things at me for which I should be happy and grateful. Balance, we call it. Or, perhaps we should call it: Life.