I write this on the two week anniversary of little Shadow’s death, on June 4, 2024. See previous posts, June 4, 5, 6, 7 and yesterday!
About three days after he died, I was listening to a podcast from a person who does animal communication. She says that, unlike us, our animals do not grieve when they die. (I had never even asked that question! Either I’m totally self-absorbed, or, a part of me knows). She went on to say that what grieves is the body. That made total sense to me. Little Shadow had threaded his embodied life into my own, on a daily, intimate, minute by minute basis. He always sensed my moods; and moved to comfort me if needed.
This woman also said that our deceased animals may communicate with us after death, just like our human partners and other dear ones do. And I’ve certainly had that experience! See This Vast Being: A Voyage through Grief and Exaltation. (I have copies here, if you’re interested.)
The next morning, as I awakened, I distinctly heard the door being scratched down low, just the way he would do it. I knew he wouldn’t be there if I opened the door; I also knew that he had sent me that message.
Here are two twitter offerings that speak to this subject of grieving.
And here’s an excerpt from a very early post on exopermaculture.com . . .
On Shadows, both real and even more real.
I wanted to give you an update for today, a day when puppy Shadow and I headed into the woods of InDiana, above nearby Griffy Lake. Shadow’s name of course, is very meaningful; he dogs me like my own shadow does, to the point where I sometimes trip over him; his hairy muscled body and faintly bad breath gunk me up sometimes, just like my own shadow does, gunking up both the bathroom and my own body.
Here he is, barely visible, like shadows normally are. Check for the bit of blue, center left, that’s his leash. Follow it to the left end of the log, where Shadow is in shadow.
See him? I admit, I can barely see him, I just know he’s there. Kind of like my own shadow. Most people don’t see it, unless I show them, but for me, it looms large.
For you, here’s Shadow, alert and illuminated, a bit further along the trail.
How’s this, for truth? C.G. Jung:
“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.”
I’ve been talking about the shadow as projected into the body, or the environment; Jung puts his finger on the spiritual/mental/emotional shadows that accompany them, and are perhaps their source. As the Buddha says, what we hate and what we love (read: “are attached to), both aversion and desire, are the sources of suffering.
