Never Ending Love
Summer – Week 33 – When August Holds Its Breath
In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures – and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.
That particular week in August, memory knows it as the time when summer held its breath. When the summer sun hung at its apex, relentless and golden, and everything living seemed to pulse at its maximum. Grasshoppers humming their electric hymn, tomatoes splitting their skins with ripeness, the air itself thick enough to swim through. It was in this crucible of heat and fullness that absence carved its shape into my life, not once but in a trinity of losses that still echo in the chambers of late summer.
Two years have passed since my beloved whippet, Huckleberry died. Almost fifteen years of devotion finally yielding to the greater motion of time. That same day, the horse who had carried me through both flight and fall was loaded onto a trailer, sold to steadier hands than mine had proven to be. And beneath these fresh griefs lay an older sorrow. It was the anniversary of my grandfather’s death. A man who had departed the world the year before I entered it, his absence shaping my entire existence.
How strange that grief should cluster like this, as if loss attracts loss, as if certain days and weeks become charged with departure. Or perhaps it’s simply that in the furnace of late summer, when life burns at its brightest, we see most clearly the shadows it casts.
Hucky knew something that morning. Dogs always do. He had risen slowly, his grey muzzle lifting toward the window where morning light pooled on the floor. A lifetime of mornings, and this one arrived different, softer, as if the universe had gentled its touch for his passage. His ribs, those delicate arches, rose and fell with careful breath. In the end, he simply stopped trying to hold himself here, releasing his grip on this world as naturally as a leaf releases from its branch.
The vet said his heart was giving out. His registered name was Never Ending Love. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say his heart gave everything. Unreserved love poured out until the vessel could hold no more.
That same afternoon, while Hucky’s collar still held the warmth of his neck, I knew the horse trailer was coming. This leaving was different. This one I chose. This one I orchestrated with my own hands. Signing papers with fingers that trembled not from grief alone but from shame. From the knowledge that I was breaking a covenant I had made when I brought him home - that I would care for him, always.
He was a good horse. That’s what makes it inconsolable. Deus wasn’t dangerous or mean or unmanageable. He was simply more horse than I had courage for after the accident rewrote my body’s memory. The fall was my last ride. I never got back on.
I kept him for months after, telling myself I was working up to it, that I just needed time. But I knew, somewhere deeper than thought, that I would never ride him again. It took a long time to finally say out loud what had been true from the moment I hit the ground: I had lost something I couldn’t get back. Not with horses maybe, but with Deus, this beautiful creature who asked for a rider I could no longer be.
The story I told myself was that I was doing what was best for him, that he deserved someone who could actually support him, who could meet him with confidence rather than fear. And that was true. But it was also true that I chose my own safety over my promise to him. That I chose not to fight through the terror that had taken up residence in my bones. That sometimes love means letting go, and sometimes it just means we weren’t brave enough to hold on.
This grief is different from losing Hucky. He died in my arms after fifteen years of unconditional love freely given and received. That grief is clean, even in its depth. But this, this is the grief of betrayal, of broken promises, of love that wasn’t enough. I still mourn not just his absence but my own failure, the woman I couldn’t become, the courage I couldn’t summon when he needed me to.
I think of him often, and pray that the young girl who took him was brave enough for both of them. That they found their dance together, the partnership he deserved. That he’s loved and ridden with joy. I adored him. And I let him go hoping he would find what we couldn’t be together.
And beneath these fresh griefs lay an older sorrow, the fiftieth anniversary of my grandfather’s death, falling on this same impossible day. A man I knew only through the space of his absence. He died the year before my birth, taking with him stories I would never hear firsthand, a voice I would never recognize, hands that would never teach me any of the hundred small wisdoms grandfathers pass down.
My mother would grow quiet every year as this week approached. Even from far away, I could sense it - the shift in her voice on the phone, the way certain silences held more weight than words. The pull of remembrance. He was a gardener who loved the natural world, growing the most beautiful roses, winning prizes for his chrysanthemums. She tells me he would have been proud to see how his love of growing things lives on in me - the bees I keep, the land I tend, the way I notice every shift in the season. How strange to carry the genetics of someone you’ve never met, to be living proof of a life that ended before yours began.
The summer heat that week was unrelenting. It pressed against windows, rose in waves from the earth, turned the simple act of breathing into conscious effort. The world felt oversaturated, as if someone had turned up the intensity dial past comfort, past endurance, to some place where life and death blurred at their edges.
Memory is a strange curator. It preserves some moments in amber while letting others dissolve. From that week, I remember the particular quality of light, heavy and golden, like honey poured through air. I remember the vet’s kind hands on Hucky’s still form. I remember the silence of the barn after Deus was gone. I remember my Mum, heavy with her own grief for a man whose death we were marking again. What memory holds is not just loss, but love’s refusal to end, how it continues beyond presence, how we carry those we’ve loved not as weight but as wings
This time returns again each year with its freight of summer heat and remembrance, and each year I understand a little more. That we are all moving through time at the pace of our heartbeats, accumulating loves and losses, learning to hold both in the same breath. That love persists, and that absence can be another form of connection. Perhaps the highest honor we can offer what we’ve lost is to carry it forward transformed, not as wounds but as the shape of what continues.
—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.
As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.
Love,
Jane