Winterscapes

Mourning is hardest in winter. Especially winter in Ohio. While tomorrow marks a week since Rusty left us, not a day, not a moment, elapses that I don't miss that willful, ornery dog. I guess that is the truest of loves: when you can say, knowing how difficult the loved one was, that you'd happily do it all over again.

Like Poe's poet in "The Raven," I wish I could will Rusty back to life, healthier and younger than he was, to spare him all that pain he had in the end. But with all his faults and liabilities intact. He was his own dog, not what anyone else wanted him to be. And I always admired that, even when he drove me crazy.

However, in answer to my wish, my own internal raven whispers: "Nevermore."

I've always had a fascination with cemeteries, and there are a few in this blog that I've visited before, but this very old one on top of a hill beckoned us today, when my husband and I went out to run a few errands and to find winterscapes for this post.

In this very old cemetery, where the newly fallen snow was untrodden and pristinely white, we found very old graves, mostly of children and adolescents, but also of marriages: one stone marked, "Mother" and another, "Father."

This row of headstones seemed to lead to the road out of the cemetery, or perhaps the road that lead into the cemetery seemed to end at the row of headstones.

We visited a moment with "Elizibeth," who left her loving parents at age 6, in 1844, but whose headstone is still legible, and tells her story's end.

But along with the cemetery, we also saw a lot of the life that flourishes, and a lot of the living that's done in winter, including these beautiful white horses against the white snow, nibbling beneath the ice for the green remnants of grass.

My husband started planning the stone he'll make to lay on top of Rusty's grave in West Virginia, and sometime in the next few weeks we'll go down there to visit his parents, and I'll get to see the place where Rusty now sleeps the sleep of the blessed.

Winter is so hard for mourning. Especially a winter that has begun so early, like this one. But the best part of winter is that it must obligatorily move aside for spring, just like death must give way to life. On the day Rusty died, a friend adopted a rescued, abused dog, one that had been written off as unadoptable. One that would've been put down, if he hadn't taken her.

In my life's experience, whenever one door closes, another opens. That's why mourning, while necessary and unavoidable, is inevitably also tempered by joy.