stabLe_hips

 Dear Joey, I miss you, sweet girl.  It's day three for you in the kennel and I hope that you're playing with Julu and loving Kate and not missing me at all. I hope you're being good, but I also kind of hope you're misbehaving.  I keep wishing you could get this note and know that I didn't abandon you.  And that you're so loved and so missed that I can barely concentrate on anything else. I miss you and cannot wait until December.   Mama.

I had always understood that grief, the deep sorrow, only arrived after a death or loss.  I was thinking too grand, and imagining it different from what it is.  I had not yet heard of anticipatory grief, ambiguous grief, or stacked grief.  I didn't know you could grieve more than the person.  My grief arrived like autumn sometimes does.  My regular life enveloping me like sun-toasted September air, only to look more closely to see evidence of fall.  My grief arrived like a fallen, red leaf on a still warm sidewalk - curious, ominous, foreshadowing.  I knew, but I did not know, and I clung to my unknowing.  Bob wasn't dead yet, I reasoned.  The leaf fell too early.