A long time ago — maybe 1978 or so — my Brittany Spaniel puppy, Dandy, was obsessed with a robin’s nest.
The nest was tucked six or seven feet up into the crook of a maple tree, and Dandy, filled with puppy curiosity, enthusiasm, and energy, would leap into the air to go nose-to-nest. Then she would sprint around the yard and do it again.
The nest was just inches higher than she could leap, so I didn’t worry that she would turn the yard into some grisly horror show of flesh and feathers. Instead, we just laughed at how long she sprinted circles around the yard and leaped after the nest just out of reach.
Goofy dog.
At the top of her leap, just before gravity won the game and tugged her back down, she could peer across the lip of the nest. As the chicks grew bigger, she could actually make eye contact with them. None of them panicked and leaped in an ill-advised escape plan, and although mama robin was considerably miffed about all the attention her babies were getting from a leaping lummox of a pup, in time the babies grew up, feathered out, and left the nest safely.
But that wasn’t the end of the story, because every spring and summer after that, Dandy dashed around the yard, leaping to check the crook of that maple tree, though the nest was long gone and robins never nested there again.
As she grew older her leaps grew shorter, and by the time she was ten or twelve years old, all she could manage was a lift onto her hind legs to peer up at the vacant tree-crook before pacing around the yard to do it again.
Every year until the end of her life, she never forgot that there was once a nest full of chicks just out of reach there when she was very young, and she never abandoned her search to find it again.
I thought of Dandy today when — of all things — I was reading a book called Lost and Found by Pulitzer Prize winning author Kathryn Schulz.
I was given the book by a group of guys I have known most of my life. It was — ostensibly — a prize for winning a silly limerick contest we had challenged each other to write. But I found it curious that the grand prize just happened to be a book about the grief of losing a loved one.
I am no stranger to grief. Just two months earlier I had lost Carol, my partner of almost four years, to stroke. Almost five years ago I lost Gail, my wife of 48 years, also to stroke.
And now — go figure — I win a prize that happens to be a book about grief? What are the odds? But hey, we’re guys, and guys don’t talk about coincidences like that.
And as I read Schulz’ insightful words about grief — both new grief and old, how grief changes (and doesn’t change) over time, how it sneaks up on you in unexpected ways — I thought of Dandy.
Still, the book has nothing to do with dogs or birds, so why would I stop reading, close the book, shut my eyes, and remember a goofy dog who wouldn’t stop joyfully leaping for a nest that was no longer there? For the first time in decades, I think I finally had an answer.
I had just read a passage in the book where Schulz says: “I still notice, almost daily, all the places where my father is missing,” like her father’s chair, now empty.
But rather than bringing unrelenting pain, she says: “Some of these absences make me grateful, for who my father was and for the excuse to pause and spend a moment thinking of him…. They are still here, unlike him, and I assume they always will be, as enduring as the love that made them. This is the fundamental paradox of loss: it never disappears.”
Just like that goofy pup, joyfully leaping with puppy-strong legs at a nest full of chicks — and doing so for the rest of her life, long after the nest was absent from that tree crook.
I put down the book and walk to the kitchen, where there is a picture of Gail in Florida waving at me from her wheelchair with a broad smile on her face, a strawberry margarita sitting half-empty (or half full) on the table before her. It was the day she got that great haircut, and we went to the Island Gypsy Café to celebrate one more good day together.
At the other side of the house, I gaze at the picture of Carol standing ankle-deep in the gin-clear Apple River in western Illinois, wearing a white hat and kicking up a spray of water in her gym shoes. It was the day we drove home from Galena and, after visiting a huge antique mall, stopped at Apple River Canyon where as a kid I used to camp with my parents — both now long gone.
Between the picture of Gail and the picture of Carol, I pass dozens of objects connected to both of them.
Both Gail and Carol are absent, as are my parents, but their pictures and other objects around the house make me grateful, for who they were and for the excuse to pause and spend a moment thinking of them.
And when I do, I feel my heart both sink and soar, like the striving heart of a goofy dog leaping all through the remainder of her life to regain a long-vanished nest just out of reach.
That’s grief, I guess. And also joy. Two sides of the coin we pay for love.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
