A year after the death of our son, and after over a year of dog walks, the voices in my head, the self-doubt and questioning, began to recede. Perhaps it was fatigue, or the realization of the unproductive nature of this constant analysis. Or perhaps it was a gift of grace from the dog. I look back at her as my teacher, a stern guru who would insist often on an additional mile, or a long rest break to watch a hole in the ground, or some horses in a field. I now carry a pendant on my hikes with a small amount of her ashes. The rest of her ashes were scattered on a ridge in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She will always be a permanent part of my life.
Stern, aloof, but compassionate!
When I first set out on a dog walk, first and foremost it was a chance to put aside day to day problems and clear my mind. If there was a thought carried along with me it was usually of the form "What is it that I can learn from this walk?" I could suspend my thinking by just paying attention to the dog and the scenery. About once a week or so some nugget of insight would bubble to the surface from my subconscious- a small piece of the puzzle that was our walk.
Each of the daily walks would last from a half hour to forty-five minutes. There were four basic variants dependent upon Josie's choice of path. The two major walks, weather permitting, were a walk down into the hollow, and a walk to the cemetery on the hill behind the corner country church. I learned to expect the unexpected on these walks. There was always a surprise when paying attention, always something to learn. I sensed Josie was a sort of canine angel sent to teach me by way of a walking instruction.
Why did this dog walk seem to be the center of my life? Was it the only activity that kept me from losing it altogether? The only activity that let me know I was still alive? Sometimes I would achieve some insight into Josie's behavior, and then I would ask myself, if she were truly a teaching angel, why would she be showing me this? I can often be singularly obtuse, but usually the lesson was about the various kinds of attention.
Allow me now to take the next step in this impossible story. Impossible not because it's too painful to tell, but because it's too hard to put into words. Words are what I am left with, however, so I'm going to present you with a few more. Let's start with the phrase "my son was a heroin addict." Imagine a long pause here, where I ask you to imagine the various associations you may have had with these words. Before I went through this experience I could have come up with many of these myself. Loser. Weak. Low life. Scum. Heroin addicts have for the most part been portrayed in the media as the bottom dwellers of the criminal element. Depraved. Crazed.
If I were presenting this as a sermon in church, perhaps I would seek to undermine the congregation's complacency. After all, Christians are taught not to judge, but to forgive. But that's not what this is about either. This is about other things. In the long ago times- some eighteen years ago- there was a prophet (probation officer) named K_, who warned our son that on the path he was traveling, there were only two outcomes: imprisonment or death. Our son lived long enough to see six of his friends fulfill this prophecy before him. Two by suicide, two by overdose, and two sent to prison.
My son took these events as a warning, and he knew the danger he was in. He faithfully visited his two friends in jail, one of whom was incarcerated in Louisiana. The probation officer helped us keep our son out of the juvenile system by legal maneuvers involving an out of state half way house. He made it clear that we should keep him out of the system whatever the cost.
What kind of young people were these addicts? We had known all but one. They had been in our house. We had fed them, encouraged their efforts to get clean, hired them to do work for us. Some probably would, if asked, have called them crazy bastards, stupid, or worse. Yet without exception we knew each of them to possess a good heart. They were invariably polite, without displaying violence or anger. They were good young men and women who were prisoners of their addictions.
Our son was of the same cloth. He was kind and generous, besides being a fast-living risk taker, certainly no saint, but I did not know the extent of his generosity until the weeks after his death. In our grief we tried to recall all of the stories about our son that gave us a laugh or made us feel good about his short life. We encouraged visitors to tell what they knew.
One such visitor told us that our son and a former girl friend used to go around to restaurants after they closed and take leftover food to the homeless on the streets. This story was later confirmed by the ex-girlfriend, who visited us some six months later. There was the letter in his personal belongings, from a woman whose husband had worked for him. The husband had run off, abandoning his wife and new baby, and he had given her the money to pay her bills for several months. The letter expressed amazement that someone who didn't even know her would do such a thing. There were the space heaters, four of them, that mysteriously disappeared from our house. They went to a young handicapped man living in a trailer with no heat.
The stories went on, and my sense of shock was almost as great as it was the day of his death. He had fed the hungry, provided shelter for those in need, and visited those in prison. I put all of this together, one afternoon, standing in a field with this little brown dog, and it hit me with the force of a thunderclap.
On another walk, Josie stopped in the shade of the corner church facing one of the brick side walls, looking down at the ground. After some ten minutes of this I started to grow annoyed with her. Then I noticed what looked to be a finger sized hole, possibly for drainage, at the very base of the wall. Moments later a very small mouse stuck his head out of the hole, and then retreated back inside. Josie looked back up at me, her eyes once again stern. Pay more attention to what’s around you, not what’s inside you. Yes, roshi, I thought.
Next week Part 4: Dispatches From The Front
Part 1: Genesis
Part 2: The Weight of Reason
Update: A portion of this installment appeared in slightly different form in the wonderful book by Carolyn Scott Kortge entitled Healing Walks For Hard Times; when she interviewed me about Josie and our walks, I wanted someone else to tell my story, and did not feel confident about my own abilities as a writer. She used her own words, and here I use mine. Nothing was copied in either direction.