It's a Mystery: "There Are Sorrows Much Keener than These"

The Blue Bowl

BY JANE KENYON

Like primitives we buried the cat

with his bowl. Bare-handed

we scraped sand and gravel

back into the hole. It fell with a hiss

and thud on his side,

on his long red fur, the white feathers

that grew between his toes, and his

long, not to say aquiline, nose.

We stood and brushed each other off.

There are sorrows much keener than these.

Silent the rest of the day, we worked,

ate, stared, and slept. It stormed

all night; now it clears, and a robin

burbles from a dripping bush

like the neighbor who means well

but always says the wrong thing.

(With thanks to my long-ago UI poetry professor, Michael Van Walleghen, who introduced me to the work of Jane Kenyon. I will be eternally grateful.)

We buried the guinea pig today, not with her bowl but with a carrot and a black-eyed Susan, for no one should travel to the afterlife without food and something beautiful. She was an elderly and ailing piggy and we chose her death for her, which, even when right, is never an easy thing to do. It never should be an easy thing to do, and it’s not a responsibility I take lightly. But given her age (great, for a guinea pig) and her condition (poor), I thought I would have more peace than I had in making this choice. I am an emotional person at the best of times but my response to this sad event has seemed out of proportion, even for me. Don’t get me wrong, I mourn all of our beloved pets when they leave, but this feels--different. Sometimes letting go of a guinea pig is more than just letting go of a guinea pig.

For the last eight years, I have been mentally writing an ongoing eulogy, steeling myself step by step to say goodbye to someone who is my heart. It does something to you, something that feels irreparable, living with incomplete mourning day in and day out for eight years. In recent times, I’ve almost forgotten what it was like before that diagnosis that sent our world crumbling down. I wish I had appreciated it more when it was good. I spent a lot of time in denial and even more in a state of paralysis.

I closed all the windows. I battened down the hatches. I knew a storm was coming and I shut down as an act of self-protection. But the storm seeped through my pores and went underground. There’s a river of pain flowing under my surface. It is deep and it is wide. Smaller losses, like a guinea pig death, crack open the ground above and send fissures running down to that river. The river rushes up and out and floods, and then it recedes. But it’s always right there, just below the veneer of okay-ness that I have constructed on top of it.

A lot of people have this river inside them. I don’t know if this river will ever dry up and go away. I don’t even know if that’s what I want it to do.

I wrote a really depressing poem about all of this today that I want to share with all of you, because I’m generous that way. Today I don’t want to hear that it will all be OK or that God has a plan or that my endurance of my pain somehow makes me a saint. Today I just need to feel it, to let the current carry me. Tomorrow, maybe, the floods will subside.

Everything we ever love, we lose.

Ponyboy and Robert Frost were right,

Gold can’t stay, it all dissolves to rust.