I started listening to the Living/Dying Project's Saturday spiritual support meeting recordings, and this one is on the "Tantra of Grief".
I sobbed through most of it because it encapsulates so much of what I believe now and who I am and want to be in the world.
My grief nowadays is less about losing my one and only, and more about how our love clarifies for me the urgency and necessity of being present/loving/ever more expansive --- but my expressions of that seem too often met with disassociation, abandonment, callousness, entrenchment, projection, condescension. It teaches me over and over again that it's not about me. But it hurts anyway and I continue to process it.
***
It's through these recordings that I've learned about the concept of "the Mother", which is that everything can nurture/teach us if we let it.
And I think about my mothering orientation and how Sylvester brought it about, and how I miss him in part because I got to be my best self around him.
And sometimes I cry because that side gets evoked, which is that I feel how I felt around him, even though he's not technically "here".
Which is to say that side still exists, and maybe always existed, because there's so much in the world to tend to.
***
I realized there's an analogy to how I trained Sylvester, which is that I positively associated certain behaviors with treats, then treats and clicks, and eventually just clicks. The treat was "faded" away because the goal was for the behavior to be so engrained as to not need a reward.
It feels like Sylvester was my treat, to reinforce mothering behavior. And now he's faded away, but the behavior will forever be in me.