Just Another Question

I am standing on the front lawn across the walkway from the palm tree, holding my dog, Sweetiepie. I love her, and she knows it. She is gone now, long dead. It happened on a regular California beautiful day. We were playing with our dog in the backyard, my brother Sterling and I. One of us threw the ball across the street to the vacant lot so Sweetiepie would run and get it. No one had to tell her. She knew what to do. 

On her way back across the street, running to us with the ball in her mouth, she was hit by a car, and the man who drove it did not stop. He killed our dog, and didn't stop. I hated him as much as I loved her. We gathered her up watched her die in the backyard while we wept in sorrow and disbelief. And I am crying now as I read what I have written here.

This is not what I was going to write about but I couldn't help myself. I had to tell this part, maybe to show how much we loved her, how much I loved her. After 60 years I think of her and wonder what happened to that love. There was so much of it, and I still feel it. But Sweetiepie cannot feel it now. Can she? So what happens to it? Does it float in the air, waiting to be put onto or into something or someone else?

I am thinking not only about my dog, of course. She came to mind because Sterling told me again that he has that photograph of me holding her, and so I thought about all the love I have felt for those who are no longer here on earth. My mother, small bundle of energy and large intelligence, and about how much I loved her.  And my father, whom I loved more after he died than before, or I should say I recognized  the love I felt then, after he died.

And my husband, Wayne, who died much too soon. He was 63 and we were finally learning how to be married, because for us, we had to start getting old before we knew much. I'll speak for myself. I thought I knew a lot, but now I see more clearly--I didn't know much, not much at all. That is not what this is about either. It is about all that love, and I wonder where that love is now, my love for him. And what about his love for me?

And my friend Joyce. I loved her. Still do, I suppose, but she died and so I put the word in the past tense, loved. That's because I can't go visit her, which would show her that I love her.

I want to ask the same question. What has become of the all the love I felt and gave to them when they lived? Where is it now? Stuck inside me?

Does anyone know? Really know?