On loving what you love & week 50 of 52

every blade of grass holds a story

Apr 23, 2025

I’m not convinced that humans are the only species that thinks about death.

We’re probably the only species that thinks we can change it, or that ruminates over it. Anthropologist Ernest Becker disagreed. He wrote in Denial of Death that “the knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it.”

While I agree with him that no other animals embark on an experiment to reflect weekly on death merely to see if it will help them to better live, I can’t help but think animals do have some inherent knowledge and awareness around the time they have.

When an animal is dying, in my experience, there is a shift. Maybe it’s not contemplation, curiosity or rumination, but it is awareness.

My dog, Ahti, is not doing well.

She wheezes and pants after the shortest of walks. While we are managing her pain, and she does have many beautiful moments, there is water collecting around her lungs, and her joints are swollen. Her arthritis requires monthly shots, and if she gets too excited and tries to chase a kitty, she limps for three days after.

I wonder about her quality of life at some points, but she still lifts her chin against the spring breeze and barks heartily at squirrels and small children who dare to bike near our home. She adores our painfully slow walks to the park, which are rekindling my relationship with patience, and she smells every blade of grass with thorough attention.

At times, she stops, stares up at me, then side-dives into the lushest grass in our neighborhood and rolls around. While she’s moving slower and has moments of discomfort, she seems to fully love life.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

—Mary Oliver, from “Wild Geese”

Ahti has become my shadow, nestling up against me every time I lay out my yoga mat and scratching insistently on the door if Chris won’t let her into the garage to watch the neighborhood when he’s out there painting.

Her insistence is magnified, almost as though she is trying to inject each moment with more of what she loves.

If you know me and my dogs, you know that she’s getting what she wants.

Sometimes, we’ll take her off the leash and let her roam around the trees because we know she can no longer run and is easy to catch. She still tries to defy us, limp-running off and looking back playfully, only to stop and position one of her nostrils directly above a tiny stick, intaking its history with scientific rigor.

Ahti may or may not think about the fact that her life/time is almost up, but she does know that her space and time is precious, increasingly so.

It’s week 50 and my invitation to you is just that … Love what you love.

It’s your nature to live and love fully. To run rebelliously even if you know you’ll be caught, to drift toward what sustains you, ever more toward those things and people and places.

Let all the fear of death go, just for today, and be totally in your body. Write without apology or politeness. If you are afraid, talk to your fear. Tell it that everything might not be okay, that’s true, but you’re going to soar anyway.

On loving what you love & week 50 of 52

every blade of grass holds a story

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