Last Updated on January 17, 2023 by James Dziezynski
For the past six months, I’ve put the majority of my personal writing aside to spend time with our 17-year old dog, Mystic. He passed away peacefully in mid-September on a perfect, cool autumn afternoon, surrounded by the people and the dog who loved him beyond measure. True to his mountain-king spirit, his last views were of peaks near and far he had summited in his life. A mountain breeze blew cool and clean under an electric blue sky as we laid him gently on his favorite bed. With his last quiet breaths, he serenely passed out of our lives.
I shall not expound on the nearly unbearable grief of losing a beloved dog. A mountain dog. A dog deeply bonded to those who loved him. If you’ve loved a dog, you know the numbing absence and emptiness. You know the strangeness of routines and rituals no longer needed. You know the cold comfort of a wonderful, long, life concluded with compassion, but nonetheless concluded with tears.
It’s been a few weeks now. Mystic and our two cats are now gone and our little family, once six, is now three. There is no doubt our dog Fremont is experiencing his own heartache.
That’s all I can really say about it. Or all I want to say about it.
The intimacy and uniqueness of losing Mystic for our family is a sadness that will stay with us forever. Should I live to be 100, I will always miss having him by my side on the mountain, asleep in the back of my truck on the moonlit open road, or simply here in our house, making it a home.
These past two years have been marked by enervating extremes. We built a house in the mountains but had to go all-in and then some to make it happen. Jobs were lost, and better jobs were found. Books were written. Family members passed away. We’ve witnessed the ravages of old age in our pets, friends, and family. And this is before adding in the sheer lunacy of Covid, from the exceptional triumphs of science to the utter failures of the human intellect.
I haven’t written because writing in a blur is very unsatisfying.
I haven’t written because I overloaded my work schedule to fund the ridiculous process of building this house. Nearly all of my eponymous “free time” has been invested in freelance gigs, along with my full-time job, and updating my books. I harvested every last reserve of creative energy.
Writing for pleasure can be expected to go dormant in such circumstances. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t miss it.
There is a fine line between relatable sorrow and cathartically bumming out the people who are nice enough to read what I write. So I’ll put a hard stop to it here: it’s been a very sad, challenging time, and yet life indeed goes on. Sorrow must be archived. Life must resume.
The good stuff has been relegated to background noise in the past few months, yet it has been there.
I have taken comfort in the near completion of my trail-building project, a 5-year effort that manifests the trails that I write about for a living into my literal backyard. I’ve reconnected with recording and playing music again, finding it pleasantly easy to resume. There has been a renaissance in video games, the virtual counterpart to my real-world adventures that are every bit as rewarding. And there’s also been that indescribable mix of gratitude and gravity that comes naturally in middle age, the staggering marvel of being alive and the baffling futility of watching that which we love fade into nothingness.
So that’s about all I can muster for an update. There will be more adventures soon—and more stories.
Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break. – William Shakespeare
