“Jazzmin is a cloud”

Original papercutting, 12×15

My dog Jazzmin died in my arms when she was 15. It was July. She didn’t want to traipse through another Tucson summer. A short time before the vet arrived to put her down, I lay down with her and told her it was okay to go. I put my arms around her. I kept telling her I loved her and it was okay to go. As with most Australian shepherds, she was very bonded to me, her person. I held her for some time and then she went. I sensed something leave her body at that moment. It rose upwards. I was later reading a book by Thich Nhat Hanh, in which he writes about changing forms–how, if we look deeply, we can still see the cloud in the rain. The cloud is not gone, it has just become rain. There was a monsoon storm the next day. I thought of Jazzy, how she’d gone up, and maybe become a cloud, and then became rain, and then helped things to grow.