A Blue Moon
On death and mourning
I. Mount Graham, Arizona
Beauty steps in when the heart can't hold any more.
I left Maxwell's body at the veterinary hospital with the vet tech who told me that his body was just a vessel and that if I chose to remember the love that he was, I would realize he is still here. But he isn’t.
It was after 5 pm and there was lightning in the distance. The mighty peak of Mt. Graham was just ahead of me, not 10 miles from where I left Maxwell. I pulled over to call my mother and sob at an intersection and then had to make a choice--drive four hours back home to Phoenix or drive the last 10 miles on our trip up to the mountain to camp.
Maxwell spent his last day in a car with me and his sister Daphne--panting and happy, excited to be going on another adventure. The choice of where I would sleep that night was already made.
We found a campsite at 8,000 feet where the sun filtered through the trees. A young deer stood by the fire pit when we pulled up. The campsite looked so much like Oregon where Maxwell and I had spent our best days. I parked the car and made camp.
In the gloaming the sky lit up with the most beautiful golden light. I couldn't help but feel that Maxwell had something to do with that.
I gathered some wood and built a fire as Daphne, the one I had anticipated would die first, settled into the tent--alone, distant, and noticeably older as night fell.
In my camping gear I had one small black candle which I lit and said a prayer to Saint Francis, patron saint of animals, asking him to walk with Maxwell as he found his way. The candle burned out, I finished my glass of wine, and put the fire out.
Sleep was not easy as both Daphne and I were restless for much of the night, but just before midnight a brilliant white light woke us both from sleep. It was so bright I thought that someone was at our campsite or that I had left the lantern on. I unzipped the tent and stumbled out to see the moon, brilliant and full in the east, cresting the distant mountains through the trees.
Maxwell passed on the night of a Blue Moon, the evening before my 44th birthday, an evening when the moon happened to be closer to the Earth then it will be again for another two years. This timing was just like Maxwell.
Maxwell was biacromial--one blue eye, one brown. If you saw him from the side with the brown eye he looked very much like a dog--his father's side, but if you happen to see him from the blue side he looked unmistakably like a wolf--his mother's side.
These two sides represented the way he lived, one eye here on the Earth full of joy for being alive and reveling in all the small wonders of being a dog. The other eye, the blue eye, always in some distant place guiding him on every night of a full moon as he sat outside, paws crossed in front of him, staring at the heavens.
Throughout his life Maxwell and I were together, then separated many times until we finally got to be together inseparably for the last five years of his life. The last time we were reunited, I drove to Medford, Oregon to rescue him from the pound after my X had surrendered him.
I was waiting by the reception desk when the door to the kennel opened and Maxwell came trotting out--content no matter where he was. I hadn't seen him in over a year and had no idea what he had gone through in that year apart or how he would respond to me. I squatted down and extended my arms to greet him just as he saw me.
The lady handling him didn't stand a chance--Maxwell was 120 pounds and half wolf after all. He bolted from her and knocked me to the ground licking my face, then burst into full blown husky run, ears back, smile all the way across his face as he lapped up and down the hallway and every human in the office burst into laughter.
I had just under five good years with him from that point forward. Together we would climb mountains, hike deserts, swim in the ocean at sunrise, take so many long walks and hikes and outings to the dog park, and we would eat a lot of good food together (though extraordinarily well behaved, he could not be trusted in a room where a pizza was cooling on the counter).
On nearly every walk I ever took with him, someone would stop to greet, pet, or compliment him. He loved children, old people, the homeless, other dogs, cats, jack rabbits, squirrels (oh, the squirrels!)--he just simply loved.
The night before he passed, we played in the yard and when he tired we went inside and spent some time on the floor together–me rubbing his belly, holding his paws, and with one finger lightly rubbing his nose.
In our fourth hour in the car, Maxwell let out a high-pitched yelp and slumped in the seat behind me. By the time I was able to stop the car and get around to him, he had slid off the seat and into the floorboard, his bladder and bowels emptied, the last flicker of life fading from his pale blue eye.
I called ahead to the nearest vet which was 30 miles to the east. They told me to drive fast but be careful. All the way there, I kept calling to him and checking the rear-view mirror to see him moving, waiting for any kind of movement or sound, a whimper to let me know that he was alive. But he wasn't alive, I already knew that, I just didn't want the responsibility of knowing it yet.
At the campsite on the morning of Day 2, the moon sets over the mountains to the west just minutes before the bright orange sun crests the mountains to the East. I must remember, again, that he is gone. We've only been here a few hours and already we have seen hawks, crows, eagle, deer, and wild turkey. Maxwell would have loved it here.
The vet said it was most likely a blood clot that let go and traveled to his brain causing a stroke. There was nothing anyone could have done. I don't know whether this is true, or if these are the consoling words of a caring woman who knows that regardless of the truth, this is what I need to hear.
Daphne sleeps behind me, gnats buzz and land all over, a turkey gobbles somewhere in the woods, and Maxwell runs free--a bundle of pure light and joy--just as he was in his body.
II. Portal, AZ
It is day 35. The sun rises orange in the distance, as it does every morning here–the days that I notice and the days that I do not. But whether I notice it or not, the sun rises and each day creates enough beauty to break a heart.
It is Day 1, August 30, 2023, and my wolf-dog Maxwell has passed suddenly from a stroke. He has transcended his big, beautiful body. I am devastated.
It is Day 49. The ritual ends tonight and I have places to be, commitments I have made, a drive to make. I have made all the peace I can make with his passing for now.
Tibetan Buddhists believe that 49 days is the amount of time that a soul spends in the Bardo between lives. In that period, a soul’s karma is weighed, a life is reviewed, and choices are made which govern reincarnation. I’m not saying exactly that this belief is mine, yet on DMT in 2010 I am fairly certain I visited this realm. Many incredible things happened there that all these years later are still unfolding in this, my linear lived life, and I woke from that place with a profound sense of longing–like I had been home and pulled away again, back to this world.
For 49 nights I have lit a candle, stood in a sacred circle in the driveway, faced each of the four cardinal directions as well as the sky above and the Earth below and asked the gods, guardians, and protectors of each realm to open their gates. I’ve visualized Maxwell standing before them in spirit and I have asked them to let him pass freely and protected through their realms, to let him know that he is loved, and to help him find his way back to me should he ever choose to come visit.
Then, standing in this circle, I ask the forces of the four directions to let me speak to my wolf. I ask him how he’s doing, I tell him where I am today in my grief, I let him know how grateful I am to have been part of his life, I let him know that whatever he needs to do next he is free to do–that I will be okay–but that I do hope I get to be with him again. Then I do an invocation, I ask to remember his love and to be guided in bringing that love forth into this world. I ask that his love became a beacon for me of the love that I have left to give. Then I give thanks, always give thanks, say “Amen” and “So mote it be.” Then, I blow out the candle and close the circle. I do this every night for 49 nights.
Some nights I’ve felt Maxwell’s presence, like the night of the first full moon–the Harvest Moon– after he passed when it seemed as though he was there in the moonlight playing with Daphne and my newly adopted husky–Jones, and there have been other nights where I haven’t felt him at all. On those nights, the ceremony has just seemed like washing dishes or brushing my teeth, mundane but still important.
The point is not what happens on any particular night, rather a process charted on Day 1 that first night of camping without him as I sat dumb before a campfire with my grief.
After 49 days of prayer, 49 days of calling in all directions, 49 days of invoking gods and asking for peace and protection, 49 days of talking to my dead wolf and considering what it means to open myself up so completely for the love of an animal and to question whether or not I might actually be losing my mind–I am on the other side of a shore, waving softly, unable to see the land which I departed.
Suddenly, with no warning, one minute here, the next minute gone already. If Maxwell was able to hear me for these past 49 days and nights, I am certain that he knows he was loved. I have said all there is to say for now.
It does not escape me that to some this grief might feel indulgent. Even for a special wolf dog like Maxwell, at the end of the day he was still a dog. How does one weigh grief for an animal against a world with so much human loss and suffering? Surely there must be some perspective brought to bear.
There are many variations of dogs in this world–some dogs are distant, some are dumb, some never emotionally bond with humans. Then there are dogs, such as my Daphne, who are perfect in all ways to their owners simply because they are just dogs driven by all the love, anxiety, and pettiness of their kind. Then there are dogs like Maxwell who possess something else entirely–a kindness, an intelligence, that passes straight through to archetype–the type of dogs Jack London wrote about.
Dogs have the potential to become so much more than savage beasts over the course of a lifetime, if our steady hand leads their development. I know people who have adopted dogs, never trained them, rarely exercised them, been inconsistent with their affection and their scorn, then wondered why their puppies misbehave and “act out.” Too many of these dogs are abandoned to shelters and spend the remainder of their days sad and waiting for anyone to love them and hundreds of thousands of them are killed each year because no one ever does.
Is it silly to believe that animals have souls? That they descend and rise again from this form into another–on and on through all of time just as we might? And if it happens for dogs, what of the chickens, the cows, the pigs we consume? Do they too have souls? If one starts to crack open this line of thinking Pandora’s box opens wide, so perhaps this is a child’s belief best left not written down so there can be no record of our magical thinking.
Maxwell was drawn to the full moon and spent those nights outside, lying in the grass with his paws crossed, staring up at the sky.
It was the conjunction of the blue moon, super moon, and my birthday that led me to plan a camping trip that weekend, and a planned "portal ritual" to shake off some middle-aged stagnation I was feeling. Rituals have costs and should not be entered into without considering the unintended consequences. As Maxwell's life ebbed away in the backseat, I couldn’t help but feel that his light might have been the cost I would have to pay for such a shift to happen.
The evening before our departure, I skipped a birthday party to finish errands and pack for my trip. I ended up playing with Maxwell in the backyard until he got tired, then we went inside, and Maxwell fell asleep by my feet as I lounged on the couch. I laid down on the floor beside him, held his paw, petted him. He softly licked my face.
That night, I woke in the middle of the night and Maxwell was right beside me instead of his usual spot by the door. He was awake, panting, and his body seemed to glow. I drifted back to sleep and would have forgotten about that image had he not passed the next day.
Morning came, and Maxwell licked me awake. I loaded the car and we left for our camping trip, Maxwell taking up the whole of my rear-view mirror with his mass as we drove out of town. He left me under the full moon, and his ashes returned to me on the day of a new moon. Another stroke of synchronicity.
Two days after he died, I was restless and heartbroken. Being new to Arizona, I consulted an atlas to see where I might go next. With rain threatening, I traced a path east to escape the weather, my finger stopping at an outpost named Paradise, and just ten miles further, an unincorporated community named–Portal.
In the weeks following Maxwell’s passing my heart cracked open. I know of no other way to express what I felt in the aftermath except to use that phrase and by it I mean something like: the world became more beautiful and fleeting. I saw my older dog, Daphne, in all of her frailty and wanted nothing more than to ease the slowness of her final years and make them beautiful. We were out of bed before sunrise every morning for a walk around the neighborhood. The immense loneliness of my life, of not having more close friends, of being in a new city in my 40s with no roots, no people to connect with weighed on me. All the choices I’ve made, all the casual hookups that went nowhere, all the investments of energy into people who never call and the neglect of those who do, all of it felt so heavy. I felt so vulnerable and so fleeting.
For 49 days my grief had a structure, and by committing to the ritual my pain transmuted. Reflecting on Maxwell’s life for so many nights in a row, I couldn’t turn away from his death. The ritual forced me to stand with it, to embody it, to be fully in its presence for the whole of 49 days.
On the Harvest Moon, one lunar month from when Maxwell passed over, I stared at the moon, a protective circle drawn around me, Daphne at my feet, and repeated “I love you. I love you. I love you” over and over and over. I said it to my dead dog, I said it to my living dog, I said it to my grandparents, I said it to my mother, I said it to my neighbors, to the birds, and to the world. The phrase became a mantra: I cried, then I wept, then I smiled, then I laughed, then I jumped for joy all while repeating “I love you” in the light of the moon. Anyone watching would have observed that I had truly become a “luna-tic.” But love is what I am left with here at the end, love and gratitude. If this ritual has given me anything, it has given me that–more love, and that, in the end, is enough.
III. West Liberty, KY and Beyond
The spring before Maxwell passed, my mother came to visit me for the first time in the west where I had lived for 15 years. I got married in 2014, and my family chose not to come because they couldn’t support a gay marriage. We didn’t speak for a couple of years after that, and I resolved when we did begin to speak again that I would not go to Kentucky to visit until they made a first move to show me that they were willing to find some middle ground. I felt at the time that I had spent a lifetime trying to accommodate them, but they hadn’t reciprocated. Twelve years passed, my nephew grew up, my niece had a kid of her own, all of that time passed, and I was locked out of my family’s life by principle, stubbornness, and resolve. But in the Spring of 2023 after only a few months in Arizona, my mother and nephew got on a plane and came to visit. It was my mother’s first plane ride and her first time west of the Mississippi. She had always been afraid of flying and used that as an excuse to not come visit. When I asked her how flying was “Awe-some!”.
When we got home from the airport, I opened the door and Maxwell and Daphne came trotting out to greet us.. Mom gasped and pulled back as Maxwell nosed her and gave her an enthusiastic hello. She had seen his photographs for years, but when you tell people that you live with a wolf and show them a picture, they really don’t get it until they are in his presence. A wolf is a remarkable animal, villain of our childhood stories, creature of myth and legends, and when you are in the presence of one it’s not the same as being in the presence of a dog. An intuition deep and ancient tingles with recognition, but any sense of fear dissipated as soon as Maxwell leaned his bulking body into you to signal that he trusted you and you could trust him. He was truly a gentle giant.
Early one morning mom woke me up very early. I moaned and turned to the window, knowing that we were at least a good half hour before sunrise, an ungodly hour to be awake. My mother has always had a habit of being overly cheerful in the morning, singing songs, playfully pinching us, “rise and shine–you may not shine but you’ve got to rise!” at 5:30 a.m. in middle school. I grunt and ask mom what she’s doing up and she chimes that Maxwell wanted her to get up. “What do you mean?” “I was laying there asleep, and I heard him come into the room. He walked over to my side of the bed and nuzzled me until I turned over and got up.”
When he died, I had expected my mother who has lived on a farm her whole life and has a very utilitarian view of animals, even dogs, to be dismissive of my grief. Instead, she understood. She shared that she had felt like he was a “spiritual being” when she visited, and over the next few months her calls became a check-in with my grief. After a decade-long rift, I got to be a son again, crying to his mother and not feeling dumb for the things I felt.
That Christmas I decided that I would drive to Kentucky for the holidays. It had been 12 years since I’d been home, and after the fall I’d had I felt the call to come home. On the Winter Solstice, I loaded the car, made a bed with Daphne and Jones, downloaded a 500 song playlist, marked my goals for days one, two, and three of the drive, and I set out to see the country and go home. I had driven so many roads since leaving Kentucky in the 90s, but only once had I driven cross-country and that was from Chicago to Portland. I arrived on Christmas Eve for my first holiday in the bluegrass in almost 20 years.
It didn’t seem like that amount of time had passed, but it had. My parents were visibly older, everyone I knew from high school was plump and middle aged, the kids had kids. There was no denying that time had passed, yet there was also the agelessness of Appalachia.
Once I was on the farm, I borrowed my father’s coat and wore hiking boots and jeans. Within a couple of days, I slipped into a way of being that was natural, easy. I can’t say that I am Appalachian anymore now that I’ve spent more of my life away, but there will always be a fundamental part of me that is Appalachian.
In January, after the excitement of the holidays passed, I went to visit the family grave where my dad had grown up on the other side of the county. I hadn’t been in the area in a decade. My father had grown up in a holler–a deep one, one where the passing of time and culture from the outside world moves even more slowly even in this age of acceleration. I had come to pay homage to the dead after several dreams involving my great-grandfather who passed when I was four had come to me in dreams the weeks before I decided to make the trip. I didn’t know why I was there, but I felt called.
I stood on a hilltop that day and faced the graves of my aunts, uncles, grandparents, great-grandparent, long lost aunts and uncles, in a small cemetery that had housed my family’s bodies for over a hundred years.
Standing on the hill that day I felt the immediate presence of the past. I imagined my grandfather as a boy hunting in these hills, sensed my father and his siblings as they played in rivers poor but cared for. In my childhood, I had known a world whose last lights were already fading by the time I came around, ways of life that are lost to time.
At the end of my trip home, I went to my father’s hunting cabin that he built by hand over the course of many years. I lit a fire, did a ritual, had a shot of whiskey, and spread a handful of Maxwell’s ashes over the frozen pond while reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Maxwell had never been to my parent’s farm, but his spirit remains close to mine and my spirit remains close to the land where I grew up. It felt right that part of him should rest there.
The mornings after Maxwell passed I felt cut off in time, abandoned to care for what remains. It is a part of grief. But in the emptiness I also felt a longing, deep and eternal to not feel alone in the universe. I read the book of Genesis, then the book of Mark.
On my second night of driving back home, I approached The Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a 190 foot tall free standing cross off the highway 40 miles east of Amarillo, Texas. On my way to Kentucky, I had seen the cross on the morning of my second day of driving aand found it to be obscene and garish, but on the way back–at sunset, after feeling all the things I had felt on the trip home, the cross had a weight that made me turn off the music and breathe heavily. I pulled off the interstate not far from the cross and took photos of the cross against the horizon with the sun setting over a cold Texas emptiness. The cross had transformed from a garish and grotesque symbol into one of hope and persistence.
When I got back to Arizona, I started to pray at night, then in the morning, then it became a habit I practiced twice each day. I started to read Stoic philosophy and listen to thinkers that just a year ago I would never have considered listening to. Every day I prayed. Sometimes, as in the ritual to Maxwell, it felt like going through the motions. On those days, I would say the Lord’s Prayer, ask for peace and protection, and call it a night. Other nights the prayers became long and rambling.
In the time that has passed since Maxwell’s death, I have come to terms with just how quickly a life can pass. My own, if I am lucky, is at least half over now. There is so much I still want to do, so much I want to write, so much I want to see, so many conversations I still want to have, and I have spent too much time lost, confused, holding to my guns and missing out on my roots and my family when they are always the source that gives me hope and direction.
On nights of the full moon, I still take the urn with Maxwell’s ashes outside and sit them in front of the statue of St. Francis in my garden. I sit for a few moments and think of him, reach out to Jones and Daphne and pet them, remind them that I love them as I do every day that they live.
I don’t know what it says of me that at this stage in my life dogs are my closest companions–but they are there for every adventure, every walk, every morning no matter what it is I need to do. Dogs have never divorced me, never unfriended me for political opinions, never frowned when I open a second bottle of wine. They are just here to love me and accept me as I am.
The sun rises orange in the distance, as it does every morning here–the days that I notice and the days that I do not. I am grateful for this awareness of time passing, for the beauty that comes from knowing that love will wreck you in the end. This morning, I noticed the sunrise, looked to the dogs and said, “Do you want to go for a walk?” They respond with unbridled enthusiasm and joy; I am the luckiest man alive.