Page 203 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

was too much for him to manage on his own. When I was done, I dried him with a towel.

Without his breath rising to meet my hands upon him, without the whimpers and groans

and occasional growl to let me know I was entering sensitive territory and should tread

cautiously, without his purr to keep both of us calm, I almost felt as though I didn’t know

this version of Duncan. And yet, I had cared for this body since it was twelve weeks old,

nurtured it and watched it grow, along with the intelligence and spirit that had inhabited

it.

It has been five years since I dreamed of

embracing Duncan, and five months since he

died. I went back to the dream in hopes that it

would open my heart to grieving him more fully,

and it did. Yet I could not revisit it without also

revisiting the sense of shame I felt upon waking

from it. What was that about? I’ve been wrestling

this, dancing around it, distracting myself from it,

sanitizing it, knowing that going there means

diving deep into a sea of divisions that exist within

me: between my mind and my body, between my

body and nature, between humans and animals, domestication and wildness, control

and impulse--the list is long and daunting, and knotted up with shame.

I consider my statement that the dream embrace was “like a meeting of equals” and

wonder what needs to change in order to say, “it was a meeting of equals”? I believe it

would require me to acknowledge and own my animal nature – not theoretically, but in

my body.

And so, is the dream (also) an invitation to remember and reclaim my animal body? The

body that navigates the world and each moment by instinct and urge, sense and

sensation, where the thinking mind and all its notions of and taboos about “the other”