by Susan Ahern of Midlothian, Virginia
I am not alone.
I’ve learned of so many of us, regardless of our political beliefs or affiliations, are reaching, yearning for a new year. To turn over a new leaf. Say good riddance to 2025, a year marked by grief.
I’ve heard it said that “grief is a foreign land.” I now understand what that means, as I spent the last hellish year hit with grief three times over, struggling to find a new normal. Unsure whether one even existed.
It began early in 2025, when I got a call from my dear friend, Lisa.
Lisa was part of a couple my husband and I met in college at the University of Delaware, and stayed in touch with over the decades. Driving north from Oak Island, North Carolina to visit their adult daughter and three grandsons in Maryland, Lisa and her husband, Rusty, would stop at our home in Virginia. Over dinner with wine and laughter flowing, we shared so much: a devotion to family, sharing our love of books and life-long learning, and a deep affection for the animal spirits –our beloved fur babies—who shared our lives with. Also, we bonded over our outrage with the current state of our county. Politically: simpatico.
But the second I heard Lisa’s wobbly voice on a phone call, I knew what had happened. Not how. She’d lost her beloved, handsome husband, Rusty, whose gentle nature played out in his career nurturing plants and trees. Restoring life.
Lisa’s voice sounded exactly the same when she’d called over 30 years ago to tell me her mother had been killed in a car accident. But wait…lightning can’t strike twice? Can it?
But it had.
Her husband had been killed walking along a road in Key West with Lisa and a crew of friends/cousins. The drunk driver veered up onto the sidewalk, sideswiping everyone but Lisa’s dear husband, Rusty, who went flying to his death.
How can so many cruel people live on and on, yet a devoted dad to four daughters and a much-loved grandfather, a steadying, kind spirit, be taken… with so much love left to give? Too much grief, so many unanswered questions. And my dear friend still lost, without her soul mate. Witnessing her grief was another kind of pain to bear.
Six or so weeks later, mid-May it was my turn to sit, cry, howl with acute grief. My beloved fur baby Bailey (Morkie) went outside with me to take out the trash, as I’d been busy peeling veggies all day for a savory soup, to accompany a program on “Savoring Time” with a women’s spiritual group I’ve been in for decades. My turn to host. I’d gotten clear scans after a second bout with cancer. Thankfully, on routine scans, I’d caught breast cancer, then four years later, appendix cancer, both early. But come on—cancer in any context is terrifying. Bottom line, I wanted to spend my remaining time relishing the present.
Instead, I was thrust into a walking nightmare in my own front yard. My neighbor’s dog, Delilah, a burly, big, powerful pit mix, which had been locked up for years (I rarely saw Delilah walked) nosed out the side door and attacked my small, sturdy Bailey Boy. I screamed HELP and my neighbor, Sarah, mom to two small girls, came running, risking her life. Despite being two strong, fit women, we could not get attack-dog Delilah to drop Bailey from her mouth, long enough to save my boy. As Sarah pounded the attacker with a plastic water jug (all we had nearby), I tried to desperately to hold back ferocious, frenzied Delilah, teeth the size of hammer nails. My neighbor Sarah and I, both terrified the pit-mix would turn on us, too.
For days after Bailey’s mauling and death, I seriously could not imagine remaining on this earth, living with those vivid memories: snarling echoes, gruesome flashbulb memories: the howls, screeches of my fur baby fighting for his life. I could not vanquish the mental reel of attack-dog Delilah waving my fur baby in her powerful jaws; my Bailey boy collapsing in her mouth– a bloodied, white surrender flag. God take me now, was all I could think, haunted by the images; though I had no actual plan to do myself in. I had no plan for living in this foreign land of grief, either.
Guilt got me., How could I be so utterly broken by my fur baby’s vicious death when my dear friend had lost her life-long love, her husband, to violent death, also.
Nobody could talk me out of it: I felt like I’d lost a child in Bailey. To me, a canine being, an animal spirit, has every bit the cosmic worth I have, though sadly the law saw my treasured Bailey as mere property that had been destroyed. The owner escaping any serious legal consequences, though his dog had already killed another small dog (unbeknownst to me) three years before.
Bailey was so much more than the law defined him; he’d been my constant companion, saw me through chemo, and was a service dog for over eight years, for anxiety left over from a fraught childhood. When Bailey looked at me—those shiny black eyes, two-way mirrors reflecting love, all my worries melted away.
My animal spirits had always saved me, including the first dog I got on my own, as I waitressed my way through college, racking up debt, worrying constantly how I would repay school loans. “Sem” (sounded like a mantra) was a beautiful sheltie mutt, who came to almost every college class with me for over three years (long before service dogs were a thing), soothing my angst, especially in those massive lecture halls where panic struck, so I could settle down and learn.
Thankfully, my daughter-in-law, who’d lost her dear mother to cancer four years ago, reassured me that my paralyzing grief was nothing to feel guilty about. “Grief is grief” she said: husband or beloved animal spirit.
My guilt also assuaged by a Kafka-eque quote: “There is no difference between the grief of a lost doll and a lost child,” noting that grief is subjective, all-encompassing to the one who endures it, no matter who the grief is for.
But honestly, without my Bailey, I could not imagine the new normal, my new therapist promised. But I realized soon enough grief is learning to march on with loss, even as it continues to hammer at the heart: And the mind: Somehow, some way I should have saved my Bailey boy!
I held on. Barely.
Unbelievably, grief was not done with me. My best friend, Paula, from first grade at Christ our King Elementary, left this Earth and was buried two days before Thanksgiving. I got the call the week before that, though we all (her family and I) thought Paula was turning the corner after surgery, she instead sidled up to death’s door. I needed to drive ASAP four hours (near my childhood home) if I wanted to see my best friend from 6-years-old alive. I arrived in time, thank you, God. I absolutely did not want to help my oldest and dearest friend stare down death. But I could not abandon her, either.
We had wildly different political views, but that had never mattered. When it comes to life or death of your people, politics is irrelevant.
For years, Paula had a fleet of prayer warriors praying for me each time cancer struck, and I lit candles for her every time her heart (inherited cardiac myopathy) acted up. You could not take the Catholic girls outta us.
When Bailey was alive, I called Paula often, while walking him– 40-minute phone calls where we talked, not about the past or politics, but about the shite life throws at you; we celebrated our kids’ accomplishments, and commiserated when they drove us crazy. Our favorite line—an old Chinese proverb: little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems.
Later, the night Bailey was mauled to death, I went to the ER for wound care and a rabies shot. (Yes, both my brave neighbor Sarah and I gotten bit, but managed to get away as Deliah finished off my Bailey). Back at home, after my husband, also shaken, had finally lumbered into sleep next to me, I called Paula at midnight; we talked for hours, her reassuring me I’d somehow be OK, as she had often done while we were growing up.
As a kid, Paula’s modest brick house had been a safe haven for me, a respite from a home beset with more troubles than any child should endure. Paula’s s blue-eyed, ruby-cheeked Irish dad, Bill, treated me like a fifth daughter. He often reminded me to open the fridge, like I was home, and eat what I wanted. As a fireman, he cooked food at the fire station and when he was off duty worked at the A&P; he also shopped and cooked all the food for his family. I remember Paula’s dad hauling in groceries, quietly stowing away Kotex pads in the upstairs linen closet for his many teen daughters. He was that kinda dad—devoted, steady, providing. He laughed a lot, though I don’t’ remember him talking much. He and the Black 4th-grade teacher next door to my own home, role modeled to me what dads are supposed to be like. I always marveled to Paula how we both married well. Not that our husbands were well off. But they were pillars of strength, loyalty, kindness. Devoted. The best kind of husbands to have, modeled after the best men I knew.
My own father was 64 years old when I was ten, paralyzed with grief that he’d left Ireland at age fifteen, to join the Merchant Marines and send money back home to his impoverished family. He never got over it—that he didn’t make it back to his beloved Emerald Isle to see his parents, dead or alive. Money was tight in those days.
While my husband, Steve, worked remotely in the main entrance at the Delaware hospital where Paula spent her remaining days, I sat with Paula over three days, holding her hands, laughing about the stupid stuff we did as teens. Sneaking outta our Catholic high-school dances to drink Boones Farm in the nearby cemetery, where ironically Paula would be laid to rest. Paula’s kids loved me telling tales on their mom and were especially grateful for stories about their grandparents, who I’d known well. As Paula’s own children got a break to shower and check in on their own kids, I kissed Paula’s cheeks a thousand times, reassured her as she’d so often done for me.
I did not want to let go of my touchstone. In first grade, Paula and I in our tiny Catholic-school library, we were only allowed to take out two books each week. Paula loved to watch basketball on TV; I lived to travel around the world through books, escaping my volatile childhood. So, Paula always took out two books I picked each week. Extra books for me. You can never let go of a friend who extends that kind of lifeline.
Puala’s church service held so much history, memory for me: Held at the grand cathedral in Delaware, St Anthony’s, where Beau Biden’s funeral mass was held. I was also married there, as well as my husband’s parents 30 years before. Paula was married there, also, three months after me. Of course I was there. And I stood holding Paula’s third daughter in that same church, as she was baptized, my goddaughter. I stay in touch with and love spoiling her till this day. Paula’s dear husband’s service was also in this same church. Bagpipes announced Paula’s arrival from the viewing, and I steadied myself in the jeweled church light, filtered through stained-glass windows (a familiar comfort from childhood) and felt moved as the priest rung bells and shook smoke from a gold ball: incense, an earthy aroma, floated its way to heaven– the only place Paula belonged.
Alas, this year of grief has undone me in ways I did not know I could be undone. I’ve been lucky to have so many friends lift me up; I wrote a non-fiction book once about how important it is to create kinship in a world of strangers, which friends often are these days. This year confirmed for me that friends are increasingly our lifeblood, though we may share no blood.
After all my grief- therapy and my trauma- therapy (awesome young 40-something female therapists who’ve restored my hope in the next generation), and my Women’s Circle of spiritual kin, and other dear friends who sat with me, literally came to my home and sat with me, in my dark grief—
I’m ready to embark on another adventure.
On New Year’s Day, my dear husband and I are going to pick up our new fur baby. It won’t be Bailey, though I won’t ever let him stray far from my heart. Whether or not I’m lucky enough to avoid the sword of Damocles that hangs over my life– cancer— I want a fur baby by my side. An animal spirit that loves unconditionally; those of us who love animals as much as our people totally get this.
Our new tiny fur baby’s dark mask and reminds my husband and me of the superhero Zorro; so, our pup will be that superhero’s namesake. Zorro and I will be superheroes to one another, like Bailey and I were. Taking care of each other in equal measure.
After this God-forsaken year, I’m reminded of the moving and famous dialogue line cool and all-knowing Morgan Freeman (portraying the character, RED) speaks in the movie The Shawshank Redemption:
“Get busy living, or get busy dying.”
You’ll catch me in the New Year trying to live that sage advice.
And all of you carrying grief into the New Year, whatever your politics, I wish the same for you— Get busy living. We’re all on borrowed time.
