Grief is a many-splendoured thing.
The irony of that statement aside, associating something so painful with splendour, grief is a rich tapestry of emotion, learning and growth.
As I write this, it has been just three weeks since Lady MacBeth (a.k.a. The Bug) died (I hate the euphemistic way people talk about death, such as "passing on," or, for pets, "crossing the rainbow bridge"). Nevertheless, I could already feel my life growing around the grief.
If you're unfamiliar with "growing around grief," it's a psycho-emotional model posited by grief counsellor Lois Tonkin in 1996.
In our immediate moment of loss, grief is all-consuming. It is our entire life. As time goes on, our grief does not get smaller, our life just gets bigger around it.
We gain perspective, but it doesn't go away. It's still there, as intense as it was in the beginning, but we can once again experience the joy, love and positive emotions associated with our lost loved one.
I was just starting to get there when the veterinary hospital called last week to let me know The Bug's ashes had arrived.
Suddenly, the grief came flooding back, a tsunami of all-consuming emotion just as intense as it was at the beginning.
I once tried to develop this theory that there is only one primary human emotion.
Psychologists tend to agree there are primary and secondary emotions. Primary emotions are basic and universal across cultures.
In 1890, William James, an American philosopher and psychologist proposed four: fear, grief, love and rage.
Others have expanded on that with Paul Ekman's six primary emotions perhaps being the most widely accepted: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust.
Secondary emotions derive from these primary ones. Where a primary emotion is an unconscious reaction to an external stimulus, a secondary emotion is an internal reaction to a primary emotion, such as feeling guilty for getting angry.
My idea was that the only primary emotion is fear. It occurred to me that all the other emotions we experience are a reaction to fear. For example, grief (in James's model) or sadness (in Ekman's) derive from fear of loss.
I never really developed it, but I think it would make an excellent Ph.D. project.
Getting back to grief, it is not really an emotion at all. It is a process that runs the gamut of emotions. It is love, anger, sadness, guilt, fear, frustration, anxiety, depression, gratitude, embarrassment, pride, admiration, vulnerability and probably a few others I can't think of.
It is a process of reflection, of getting in touch with our feelings, of gaining a deeper understanding of life.
But the bottom line is, I miss my dog.
