|
Alex
 Special,
magical, wonderful things often pop into our lives
unexpectedly. So does grief, pain and sadness.
It's one of the rules of living and there's no way around
it. Our friend Alex gave us both joy and sadness
in large measure.
We found
him at an animal shelter in North Salt Lake, UT. Walking
the rows of chainlink kennels and concrete floors we
saw many, many dogs. Some cowered in fear at the back
of their cell, some acted totally indifferent
to our presence, others wagged and whined, craving any
kind of
attention.
And then there was this one
little guy. . .
He
was five or six months old with a bottle brush nose,
hair sticking straight out in front of his eyes. Liver
and white, his fir was wiry yet soft. He sat at
the kennel door, ears cocked, looking right at us with
shiny bright eyes and a look that said he knew he was
going home with us so let's get moving.
Alex blossomed into a
family member immediately. He was a friend, a road trip companion, a nuzzler, a comic, a bagel
filch, a hiking buddy. He was family no less than a son or daughter.
He was included in all of our plans. He walked with us in the red sandstone
desert of southern Utah. He swam with us in mountain
lakes in Montana. He kept us company on road trips through
Wyoming and Nevada. He carried a backpack into the High
Uintas of Utah and strutted his stuff at Humane Society
fundraisers in our home town.
It
was such a complete weaving together of lives, like
a fabric. It warmed us and gave us a sense of substance
and purpose. Alex was joy itself. To him, all life was
a game and there was no end of ways to play it. We learned
so much from him about how to look at our lives and
how taking it too seriously is a waste of time. We could
be stressed and distracted at times but Alex always
brought us back to a balance just by tossing a ball
into the air or getting totally fixated on a squirrel
on a tree limb. It was all the simple things that made
his world right.
 Ten
years into the mesh of our lives, Alex left us suddenly.
Cancer the vet said. He was gone before we could prepare
ourselves and he left a deep, dark hole with his passing.
In the days and weeks that followed his death we learned
the language of grief. We struggled with the understanding
of something that cannot be understood, we struggle
with it still, many years after his passing.
Our
Pet Prayer Flags came out of this struggle to accept
and understand. We wanted something dynamic, not static like
a card of condolence or fleeting as a bouquet of
flowers. We wanted something that would continue to
connect us to him, speak to him, wherever he is. We
loved the simplicity and connection that Tibetans believed
their prayer flags offered and so we designed our Pet
Prayer Flags in the hope that our thoughts still reach
Alex and that perhaps others will benefit from that
same sense of infinite connection.
|
