When You Look Out the Window

You will see the lives that pass us by everyday.

He tells me he never gets used to this, that this is the fourth dog he's buried since his days growing up on the farm in Morrison County, and no death has taught him how to better handle the next one.

Then he says, and this will stick in my head for a while, "There's no wisdom I've come across, or read about, that helps me see the nobility in loss. Loss is just pain, and you tire of it."

He had lost four dogs, but what was in that mournful questioning was also the death of his wife two years earlier.

Perhaps he thought the years would make the questions go away, or make them less vexing. He wanted the beginnings of a serenity that he assumed old age would bring, and he was frustrated, because what came was little more than compounded loss and its accompanying fatigue.