If Love is Not a Victory March

Dear Alex,

Two evenings before the last day of the Old Year a week past, my daughter FaceTimed me to report what I could not hear: my best friend of four pounds for these 13 years, our Maltese loved more than time would allow, could not walk.

Into the New Year I stay deaf to the words, attuned to yes - go, strike an opportunity - for most of my life.  Her journey foretells mine.

And now I have no place to receive the looming truth of my beloved whose hind legs, the vet tells me, are   paralyzed from a presumed spinal cause.  He flips her to see the absence of a normal reflex, confirming a reality I could not envision.

No, not.  He refrains from drawing out those names.  A gift, he calls her, of love. 

A love song you sang on Christmas Sunday, straining in the twang of pitch and guitar.  If love is not a victory march, rendering no relief to the bearer of questions, then why bother cry your bones dry to expose our hollowness?

I retreat to the first lines by Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest and writer, in her recent reflections now on my bookshelf:

In the middle of the night, covered in blood in an emergency room, I was praying. 

We had lived in Pittsburg for less than a month.  Amid frigid nights and snow that had turned to gray slush, I was miscarrying.

When there is no place to grieve, I pause to pray and plead. 

Yours, Kate