Following Burnsie’s drowning and resurrection at Las Golondrinas on July 6th, this week has brimmed with apprehension, delayed grieving, and also a large measure of thanksgiving.

Death has been on my mind. Couldn’t shake it. Since losing Charlotte to cancer in January awareness of the fragility of goodness has stalked me in everything I do. But standing armpit deep in the muddy Rio Grande irrigation ditch, crying my eyes out, holding aloft over my head the dripping, lifeless body of Burnsie, as I did that unforgettable afternoon, burned death into my soul too vividly to forget.

That horror burned other things into my mind, too– like affirmation of life! Tossing Burnsie’s limp, unconscious body like an overhead basketball shot high over the water in an arc to the distant bank and watching him bounce like a ball when he hit the far sandy ditch bank; then watching in disbelief as he bounced up, sputtered slightly, and shook himself a mighty shake before rolling over and over and over in the sand is a memory even stronger than that of his lifeless body. I stood dumbfounded watching him jump up to look back at me with piercing eyes as if to say, “Hey, Dad. What are YOU doing in the ditch? It’s really FUN, isn’t it?!”

Unlike his Dad, Burnsie doesn’t look at death or life through layers of philosophy, theology, shoulds, and what-ifs. To Burnsie, if you’re alive, then it’s time to celebrate. Period.

I sat by his side and couldn’t stop crying; most of the day I couldn’t stop crying.

Looking back on it, I know why. The reason I cried my eyes out on that ditch bank after Burnsie revived and the reason I couldn’t stop was not because Burnsie was alive from the dead; it was because at visceral levels I was helplessly angry at myself and at life that somehow, some way, I was not able to toss Charlotte, not able to throw her to her own safe bank where she, too, could have bounced back whole again. I saved Burnsie but I lost my Charlotte.

Those hot tears that day and the days following, hot with anger and helplessness and pain, came unbidden to remind me grief-work does not move in straight lines nor can it be pigeon-holed as yesterday’s work. It’s as much a part of me as my breathing. It is the life that has been given to me.

But so is a growing joy. Seeing Burnsie, back from the dead, full of life and Diehard attitude, is an object-lesson in a Scottie-fur coat about how I must seize life as celebration, NOT waste it in fear or worry.

A line from one of Wendell Berry’s poems has lingered in my soul this week:

“We live the given life, and not the planned.”
(Sabbath Poems, 1997)

As I’ve ruminated over Berry’s thought and the deep truth that for all our self-congratulation over planning and security our lives are shaped by forces of genetics, history, culture, ideology, economics, and luck–outside our control. As Paul Harvey used to say, “The rest of the story …” is what we DO with the life given to us.

That’s where the human spirit comes in, refusing to capitulate even in utter helplessness. I want to believe my personal soul-making consists in choosing to live artfully the life that comes unbidden. Most days I feel my bungling is anything but ‘artful.’ What keeps me going is belief that, in terms of the life well-lived, it is the reach that counts, not the grasp.

Joseph Harvill, publisher Great Scots Magazine