Shadow

Shadow was my father-in-law's constant companion for 12 years. This is an excerpt from a tribute his son (and my husband) wrote the night we received the news.

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Shadow always loved the Lake and would often wade in it, fishing for minnows, but she had long ago stopped trying to swim, because she couldn’t seem to remember to keep her mouth closed and thus had the quickly discouraging experience of nearly drowning. So mostly when you went down to swim, she would run along the shore, watching you. But that day this week with Dad, they were on the dock and before Dad knew it, she had dived off the end of it. He watched her a while, astounded, as she swam out to the left, toward the Lake’s main channel and greatest depths. Worried that her strength would fail her, he finally went in after her, but he soon realized that she was swimming at least as fast as he could. She had suddenly realized that she was quite good at this and had no intention of turning back immediately. The two of them ended up swimming together in the Lake for about 45 minutes before Dad was able to steer her back to shore.

This was the moment of Shadow’s life that Dad was trying to retain and wanted me to retain: two days before her death, Shadow had surpassed herself and overcome her old boundaries. Her felt like her last great gift to him was to show him that this is possible, in whatever limited time we have left. Amid his grief, he was looking to this point of light, which in this case was a small black creature swimming into the distance, paddling and breathing as naturally as if she had been doing this all her life.

For my part, I thought that this is of course what Dad does. His life’s work has been telling stories in praise of others, largely by letting them tell their own stories—the mountain people, his father, and others (Samson, Hannah Arendt)—in his poetry and visual art, his mother in the collection of her letters to Papa that Dad found in her attic and collected and had printed for the rest of us so we could recall her strength. I thought what an extraordinary, and extraordinarily generous, gift this is. In my life I have too often recalled those no longer with me with bitterness, the pain of being abandoned. Dad instead looks for the light they have left behind, so that we may continue and in turn also leave behind a light to guide those who will follow us. This is the radically sustaining power of gratitude.

How blessed we are.