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Don’t Forget About The Tacos
Grief can churn our insides. Losing our beloved pets, our favorite humans, or our long-chased dreams, anticipated or sudden. Yet, we’re often encouraged to focus on the positive, to express gratitude for what we had while it was in our embrace. To lean into all the good feels the experience gifted us.
Don’t worry, this isn’t a sad post. In fact, it ends with delicious tacos.
This week marks 7 years since my stepdad passed. Ted died on tax day, but his life was celebrated May 5th, Cinco de Mayo — fitting for a man who was half Mexican, half Basque, and always ready for a party.
We buried him in a brand new Hawaiian shirt, his typical “classy but fun” style. My mother had bought it on a whim for him just a few unsuspecting weeks before he died, planning that he’d wear it on one of their Saturday nights out.
That holiday weekend, we mourned his death and celebrated his life, and I found it hard to balance the two, death and life, grief and joy.
My three-legged dog, however, demonstrates this balance perfectly, celebrating unleashed joy in the presence of cold, stiff death, but in her own grisly way.
You see, Roo has a habit of discovering carcasses. Last summer, on a nighttime off-leash run, she returned to my whistle jingle-jangling the bones of a possum from her teeth…