Late last week, I signed up for something I haven’t done in almost a decade. I wondered for a while afterward why I felt down about it. Although the experience was stressful, anxiety makes me feel more energized, not less. Soon after, I realized it: this will be my first time going on this particular journey without my dog Sawyer.
At the start of this year, things were largely the way they were almost a decade ago. They continued at that rate for months until Sawyer’s death. I’ve been in limbo ever since. I’ve spent a lot of time lately reminiscing over how Sawyer would tell me goodbye before I left the house and hello after I returned, or ride with somebody to drop me off and pick me up before I started driving myself. None of that will happen this go round. There’s a great deal of sadness in that.
This is yet another painful change from my life with Sawyer as well as the time since his death. I keep getting dragged forward in time even when I’d rather stay put. That started early on as most of his stuff was packed up and put away the day he died. I would have preferred everything stay out for much longer and gradually be put away over several months. I’m almost never good at handling overnight changes and Sawyer’s death was such major, painful change that happened so fast. More time to get used to it as well as the many changes that followed would have been nice.
All the changes over the past four months make it seem like Sawyer was never here in the first place. This is where the urge to keep things as they were during his life originates: the underlying hope is that it won’t feel like he’s really gone or that so much time has passed since his final days if not much changes. Yet time keeps passing and things keep changing, whether or not I want them to.
I don’t have a profound lesson with which to end this post. This was simply a way to share a recent realization I had and why it was a painful one. I’ll do my best to sit with all the emotions around this and work steadily at everything I’ve got going on in my life right now. I hope that’ll do the trick.