posted 2007/06/18 at 15:28
Today marks a year since Rowan passed away. Needless to say, this has me in a very somber and very reflective mood today.
I was very lucky to get through my childhood and early adult years without having that much experience with death. The only family member I can remember dying in all that time, or at least the only I can remember who I ever had contact with, was a great-grandmother who I never remember really talking to. I remember playing euchre with her and other members of Mom's side of the family, but then again everyone on Mom's side of the family plays euchre and I was far too young then to really join in on their conversations. Over the past decade, though, I've had to deal with the deaths of two cats and three grandparents, and perhaps it wasn't so lucky for me to get through childhood without that much experience with death because I never really developed coping skills for dealing with loss until I was an adult.
Rowan's death also marked the first time that I ever personally witnessed death. When Alexander died nearly a decade earlier, he was put to sleep at an animal hospital and I wasn't there. I can still remember the plaintive cries Rowan made all through the day, wandering from room to room (she had lost her sight about two or three years prior to this), throwing up clear liquid. She protected us for over twenty years -- I still believe that if it weren't for us finding her with her hacked-up tail, we wouldn't have realized that my sister's psycho ex-husband was stalking around on our property -- and even though she had basically brought us Skooter over a year earlier as her "replacement," she didn't want to leave us, and as much as we wanted her pain to end, we didn't want her to go either. Even hours after her death, we couldn't get her eyes to close. It was as if she wanted to keep watch over us even in death.
In the year that has passed, of course we have all resumed our normal activities, and we have laughed and we have loved, and we all still miss Rowan dearly and hope that she and Alexander will be there to greet us when we pass on. On a day like today, though, it's hard not to wonder just when it became okay to move on from that grief. Even though in my mind I know that we had to move on, even though in my heart I know that Rowan would have wanted us to move on, when the anniversary comes around like this, it's almost as if the grief never lifted from the air, because it is certainly heavy in the air right now. I know that there are no hard and fast rules for when and how to grieve, but looking back now that a year has passed, there's a part of me that can't help but second-guess my own actions and wonder if I really grieved for Rowan as much as I should have. Today, certainly, I feel like I haven't grieved enough over this past year.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon