Our House Has Been Lifted Away From Its Foundation

In Memorial, Harper Nelle, March 30, 2016-June 15, 2026

We brought her home on Memorial Day, which should have warned us from the beginning: even the best among us don’t last forever.

I was shell-shocked, scarred from witnessing a shooting, walking through the erosion of church, in the aftermath of two cross-country moves in nine months, three miscarriages, and Nate would leave on the train at 6am and I would not see him for 13 hours every day. I was hobbled and hung with a kind of sad I’d never felt before or since, until maybe today, but maybe not. I don’t know. This is worse.

If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have made it through 2016. Maybe I’ve never said that aloud quite like that but it’s the truth.

She made me get out of bed and go on walks and sniff the air and smell the trees. She made me chase her through the neighborhood on more than five occasions and she peed every single time someone came through the front door or the back door or any door. She learned sit, stand, still, shake, and she was the sweetest person who wasn’t a person.

But she was my person. She was.

She bore witness to every beautiful and broken thing in this decade of mine and there were a lot of them, more than I ever wanted her to see.

We thought we had years left. She was healthy and happy. “Can’t you see her smiling?” I said to him the other day while she sat at my feet and looked at the trees, which is to say she was looking for squirrels to chase, which is to say she was content.

I wish I had one more day with her. I wish we’d had a week to say goodbye. I wish I’d had one more hour to say I know you’re hurting girl and that’s hurting me and this is the kindest hardest thing I know to do and it’s killing me but it’s killing you harder.

I wish I’d taken more photos and videos.

I wish I’d never looked at my phone once while I still had her.

I wish she could have known how she saved my life and then kept on saving it over and over again every day. I wish she was here now because I can’t stop crying and that was her earliest memory of me and so she knew exactly what to do which was to stay.

“Our house

had been lifted away from its foundation

during the night, and was now adrift.”