What is Life, really? Is it the endless search for financial gain? Scrounging and scrambling around blindly in the dark corridors of despair when the people you thought were the closest destroy the very fabric of your deepest core beliefs? Or is really living each moment, because we truly never know when it might be our last?
The day I met Mark it was because he was bringing his German Shepherd in for a behavioral lesson where I worked and I was to help teach some aggression modification techniques and he was also joining in on the training aspects of Schutzhund. Adia was not very social with strangers and he wanted to try and help her learn how to be more relaxed and inhibit her reactions to bite first and ask questions later. After she tried to bite me in the face for reaching for a tennis ball that had rolled far away from her, we actually became fast friends and over the 12+ years since then he was always someone I could be my true self with. Mark saw through the veils that people put up…but he had a way of helping people learn how to allow themselves to shine. He had an indomitable enthusiasm for life, and an insatiable yearning for knowledge. I actually think anyone who met him fell in love with him. Not the romantic kind of love, necessarily, but the connection that draws you in and really makes you feel like you are not alone. He never stopped encouraging you to be more, to do the things you were scared to do…or thought you didn’t have the time for. To be silly and laugh, always more than you cried. For me, and in the beginning, this meant he was there for me, on the field as I shook the judge’s hand, as I titled my first dog because my anxiety attacks were so crippling at that time in life, I never thought I could do it…and I learned I could manage them. Another time it meant literally saving my life when I thought I had nothing left to live for. He was my non-blood big brother; my sarcastic cohort; my friend. We spent our time at movies, discussing themes and plots and scripts. We spent more time cooking, grilling, and eating scrumptious food or simply discussing behavior, engineering, MMA/fighting, space, theory, medicine, and religion. We went to the Range and out for ice cream more times than I can keep track of. When he lost Adia, something in him changed…and when I lost my Guinness in August of this year, I realize exactly what. Considering Adia stayed at my house for a week once and she played with Guinness very well, I now imagine all three of them in the Heavens causing a ruckus…much like they did for Guinness’s birthday party back in 2007. Eventually I will join them…and all the others I have lost along the way. But not yet. Mark…we will always love you. We miss you greatly. Maybe from time to time you can sneak in on our dreams and help suture closer the holes your departure from this realm has caused by reminding us of the amazing times we’ve had and that you’re now free from pain. Because the greatest lesson I learned from Mark was this: Pain is inevitable. Suffering, though? That is optional. As time went on and the cancer took a greater hold on his body, through all of the pain, Mark still chose not to suffer. He would belt out with “Cancer may have already killed me, but I’m not going down without every cell fighting and I’m taking this bastard with me!” I think everyone around him can attest to this in the way he responded with wit, sarcasm, bubble baths… and sparkling painted toenails. The best way we can honor him and celebrate his journey on Earth with us is to live…and eat the damn ice cream.
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Julie WestphalAuthor, Poet, Dreamer Archives
February 2024
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