Heart Wounds
A note on loss and transformation
Neighbors, Monday was a hard day in our home. It was the one-month anniversary of losing our sweet dog, Izzy. Last Saturday night, I dreamt of her for the first time since she died. In the dream, I was hugging her and calling out to my husband, “Honey! She’s here! You can hug her!” It felt so real.
Honestly, I’ve been emotionally “limping” this past month. In my mind’s eye, my heart is like a wounded appendage, and I’m gingerly cradling it, trying to keep up with the day-to-day while using a lot of physical and mental energy to protect it as it transforms. When my wounded heart needs it, I’ve been trying to honor short periods of quiet and listening, even though the larger situation demands speaking out and action.
I’m trying to honor that need because I know that sometimes God (or whatever you call it) sends us events that require us to be quiet inside ourselves and listen to what wants to be heard. Like during the pandemic, when we needed to cover our mouths but not our ears. Many of us, including me at times, had trouble picking up on that fairly obvious prompt to be quiet and listen.
The stillness has given me time to reflect, to “hear” some things I want to share now. Things I hope will be useful to all of you, as well.
Lessons From My Dog
Reflect before you are obedient. Izzy was a very intelligent animal. I know everyone says this of their pets, but folks who knew her will vouch for me. She had a big personality and many human qualities. She understood lots of language, spoken words, yes, but also simple sounds, body language, and energy shifts. She could also communicate back to us very clearly. Such strong communication meant Izzy was a very good girl who followed most commands easily.
However, she almost never obeyed “come,” at least not unless there was a high-value treat involved or she’d taken the time to decide on her own to come to you. If you think about it, “come” is a command that requires ultimate submission to authority (Like ICE breaking down doors and yelling in people’s faces). Izzy taught me to notice areas where we are trained to obey and to carefully consider whether obedience is always warranted.
Welcome others with excitement and interest. When you walked in the door, Izzy would come running to you, eager to see you, sniff you, lean against your legs in a doggy hug, and curiously investigate what you were carrying. If she hadn’t seen you in a while, she might bark and do some zoomies, racing to other rooms of the house to let whoever was home know there was a loved one in the house.
It could be a bit overwhelming, and I know some dog owners would call some of her welcome routine “bad dog manners,” but it’s also kind of nice to have your presence so celebrated. Izzy taught me that every moment of reconnection with loved ones is a gift to be acknowledged, because it is not guaranteed. (Like ICE snatching people, leaving their families with no idea where they have gone.)
Friendly does not mean there is no threat. Izzy was not fooled by every friendly face. She did not take kindly to random folks coming to our door or approaching us on walks, no matter how soothing their tone or how respectful their head pats. Even if we gave them treats to give to her, she was not automatically disarmed. She would not attack, but she would not let her guard down until it was clear to her that this person was safe and that their intentions toward our home or our person posed no threat.
Izzy’s behavior highlighted something that I think we struggle with in white culture, especially with other white people ... equating friendly with trustworthy too quickly and believing we must immediately return that energy. Izzy taught me we need to be more discerning. (Like your co-worker who disarms everyone with the brownies she brings to work on Fridays, but also thinks that if we just “reform ICE,” it will be fine. My friend, Lauren Grubaugh Thomas, did a great job speaking to this in much more detail recently. I highly recommend checking out her note.)
“Live, laugh, love” values won’t cut it. Mercy, for example, has become an increasingly central value for me. Specifically, watching the genocide in Gaza unfold has made it clearer to me how much mercy matters. The more I was exposed to the utter brutality humans can unleash when they remove even the most basic mercies, the more aware I became of how much our entire world, the planet itself, needs mercy.
Then my sweet Izzy needed mercy. I realized that if mercy was important to me, really living it might be painful. On her final day, I could see how much distress my girl was in. My husband and I discussed it, and then I initiated a tearful but necessary conversation with our vet team, asking them to be blunt with us. In this case, really living out mercy meant facing the grief of losing a family member.
In others, maybe mercy means admitting I was wrong or caused harm. If I were to extend mercy to the planet, I might have to live “less comfortably” by “first world” standards. Izzy taught me that the nouns we profess as deeply held values (mercy, love, justice, courage, etc.) require a verb approach, an action. One that often comes with a cost. (Like, needing to break unjust laws to obey higher moral laws in resistance to ICE.)
Connecting The Personal To The Communal
Throughout this note, I’ve been committing a cardinal sin by Western psychology standards. I’ve been connecting personal loss to national and global loss. This isn’t new to me. All my life, I’ve felt that things were connected that I was told not to connect. Therapists would tell me not to “pile on” or “spiral.” But other frameworks, like Indigenous ones, emphasize the interconnection between personal and collective events.
In health coaching within the autoimmune community, I observed that conventional healthcare often treats diseases as confined to a single organ, such as the liver or the skin. This approach neglects the person’s entire life and societal context. Just as we are more than one body part, we are also not separate from the events of our societies. (This is what “holistic” means, btw. Lots of wellness influencers throw that term around without any intention whatsoever to practice it.)
I think what I learned coaching and what I’ve experienced as the limits of Western psychology’s focus on individualism, especially in our current reality, has left me feeling tapped out on its usefulness. It makes heavy emotions, like grief, so isolating. It leads to either flattening our own emotions in the face of larger events or to enlarging them until there is no room for what is being experienced beyond ourselves.
Instead, I want to embrace what Indigenous ecologist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “two-eyed seeing.” This framework shifts our psychology toward greater relational and spiritual understanding, greater humility, and the integration of personal and communal events. I don’t think that’s “piling on.” I think that is accepting our interconnected reality and finding resilience there.
Transformation
At the beginning of this note, I bolded the word “transform,” referencing my wounded heart after losing Izzy. I don’t think the wound is just going to resolve. I think it’s going to force me to change, to transform in some ways, so that I can carry the loss less gingerly and move through the world again with more insight and with less of a “limp” than I have right now.
You know, like the heart wounds we are all experiencing after watching Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Keith Porter, and others be executed in the street for resisting industrial-scale dehumanization. That pain isn’t going to go away; it’s going to force us to change. Hopefully, it’s transforming our fearful isolation and helping us move more confidently toward a united, unbreakable front. A place where our interconnection divides burdens and multiplies joys.
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So sorry for your loss Angie. Thank you for these heartfelt and powerful reflections too.
Always such moving words, Angie. 💛🤝