Don’t Miss Your Moment

My son is finishing college, and the empty nest seems cold and quiet. My husband is about two years into a diagnosis of Myasthenia Gravis, which, for some reason, feels very much the same. I lost my mother last December. She was 96 but had been determined to stay at least ten more years. Then, in May, I lost my dog, Atticus.

I have heard people talk about a “soul dog,” and I never really understood what they meant until I lost him. Atticus was fine one Saturday. Then he was diagnosed with two autoimmune diseases, and the next Saturday he died. He was the dog who gave me full-body hugs and told me he loved me whenever I needed to hear it.

His eyes were fluent in love.

I worked through all of the loss the way teachers do. Teachers don’t take days off because days off mean more work and falling furthAtticuser and further behind. So I wiped my tears and got up after sleepless nights with my body aching and my mind numb, and I went to work. Teaching is all-consuming, which can be a blessing when you are trying to keep pain at bay. There is always another class coming through the door, another lesson to teach, another stack of papers to grade, and another student who needs something from you. There isn’t much time left over to fall apart.

At the end of May, I retired from an eclectic 38-year career in education. It is now almost September, and my body and mind have begun the process of decompressing. I can feel them settling. The changes are small, but I know things are slowing because the unrelenting piles of papers to grade and lessons to plan have vanished, and the endless noise of teaching is slowly being replaced by something I wasn’t quite prepared for: the silence of grief.

I am sometimes startled by unexpected moments of great loss. At times, I feel as though I am disappearing. Not just me, but my life. There is no longer a busy schedule demanding my attention. There is no longer a son who needs my help in the way he once did. I will never get the chance to spend time with my mother without the weight of work whispering in the back of my mind about everything I still need to complete. Plans of finally having time to spend with family and friends have somehow become days in a still, quiet house with a long list of projects put off much too long.

This week, I had the television on for background noise. As I walked through the room, I heard someone say, “This is her moment, and she is going to miss it.” I stopped, turned around, and looked at the television. And I realized I was the “she.”

This is my moment.

It may not be what I expected. It may not be what I wanted or what I hoped this season of my life would look like, but that doesn’t matter. This is my moment, and I will not lose it.

I am going to give myself time to decompress. I need to learn to breathe deeply and slow down. I need to give myself time to grieve and to discover what life looks like in this moment rather than constantly comparing it to the life I thought I would have. But I refuse to miss whatever this moment holds for me.

When I lost Atticus, I decided I would not get another dog. I knew he could never be replaced, but our other dog, Poppy, had never known our family without him, and she was grieving herself to death. She was pitiful, and the humans weren’t doing much better. Then one night, I saw a five-month-old puppy on a rescue page I followed. He was malnourished and pitiful, but he was also the kind of puppy who wasn’t going to have to wait very long for someone to fall in love with him. I decided I would fill out an application and just see what happened. The next day, we brought Huey home.

He is now almost seven months old and absolutely adorable. Poppy and I are both exhausted. Poppy is exhausted from playing, and I am exhausted from trying to housebreak a puppy. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in almost three months, but Poppy is eating again. She is playing again.

This morning, when Huey needed to go outside yet again, I opened the door and found a beautiful sunrise waiting for me. It hadn’t been there twenty minutes earlier. I stood there looking at it, and I smiled. Then I looked at Poppy and Huey and said, “Thank you for making sure I didn’t miss my moment.”

Maybe that is what I am learning about this season. Our moments don’t always arrive looking the way we imagined they would. Sometimes they arrive in an empty nest or in the silence after a life that has been much too loud. Sometimes they come through grief. And sometimes they arrive at the end of a leash at exactly the right time to get you out the door for the sunrise.

If you find yourself in a similar place, give yourself time. Grieve what you have lost. Rest when you need to rest. Learn to breathe deeply again, but keep looking.

This is your moment, too, and you don’t want to miss it.