Upon the Death of My Dog (or your dog)
The universality and specificity of grief
We buried Harper’s ashes five days ago. I still wake up every morning feeling an ache that isn’t familiar yet, a missing, a question of where she is. My subconscious is constantly looking for her.
I’ve lost a number of babies, a brother when we were teens, a stepfather, close friends, all my grandparents, half my uncles and aunts. I tell a grieving friend this week that no one knows how to do grief because our relationship to grief is as unique as our relationship to the one who has gone, which is to say it is as unique as I am, you are, and the one who has gone was. No one in the history of the universe has ever navigated the steps you are wading through and no one in the universe can tell you how it will go, should go, could go, might go, or won’t go. The only way to know is to go.
Despite all this, going feels like the most impossible task of all when staring down a lifetime without the one who was beloved.
I’ve been writing about the loss of Harper a lot because I’m a writer and that’s what I do, but also because I think it’s rare to write about grief while we’re going through it. It feels shameful to write about grief publicly when it’s a person and shameful to feel it when it’s a pet. And I feel interested in the juxtaposition of the two.
Friends who have lost pets have told me the recent things I’ve written have been helping them grieve—even five years on—the loss of their pet. But a few friends have said all these words have helped them grieve the loss of their people too. Which doesn’t surprise me, though maybe it should. Harper was my pet, but she was also my person. If that offends you, it’s likely you’ve never known the love of a pet which is the most unconditional love I think a human can experience on earth.
I wanted to gather all the writing I’ve done about her the last five and half weeks in one place, since most of it is on Instagram and most of you aren’t on Instagram. Most of it is raw, some of it you may have read already, all of it was in real time. I’ll add some of the photos that accompanied the writings.
This is my eulogy, these are my memories, this is my grief.
Maybe you recognize your own in it too.
June 16th, the morning after
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. 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.
June 17th, morning
Things I want to remember about the past 36 hours.
How our right hands hold the left sides of our faces, our fingers tracing the line of our sinuses where it hurts so bad.
How the flower delivery person who hugged me and held on until I let go first.
How Rilke runs to the door if he hears someone pass or a slight noise or hopes he heard someone pass or a slight noise because it might be her.
The face of the woman at the ER counter when I walked in holding her barely breathing body and how quickly she commanded everyone out of line and sent techs running and how it all happened in two seconds.
How the people spread like the Red Sea even though they were all there for their own emergencies too. How unspoken and yet communal our language of love for these creatures is, we triage instinctively.
How gentle the tech who pressed the plunger of liquid death into her was.
How it feels like I’ll never get over this grief, my heart split in two.
How experts say grieving pets can be worse than grieving relatives and how, having now done both, it’s a field I have no interest in becoming an expert in.
How the first two people we saw when we got out of the car at home without her were our neighbors on either side, one getting out of her car, one taking out the garbage. Their faces. Their kindness.
How a friend stopped by this morning and made me realize not everyone knows how to share space with a grieving person but he did.
How sad Rilke is. And how aimless.
How active the squirrels are now that their primary aggressor has been eradicated.
June 17, evening, two whole days
Harper: gone for 48 hours
I called her my shadow but
the thing about shadows is
they have no substance and
when they disappear
nothing is really missing
but she is gone now
and everything is missing
and now I am the shadow
June 18, morning
Mornings are hardest because she slept until I woke, her body pressed back against my belly. Stretched long as she shadowed me to the bathroom. Waited while I peed and washed my face and sang the good morning song to her.
They’re hardest for him because dogs are creatures of habit and their habit was potty, walk, food, water, play, sleep, but together. He keeps looking for her and finding only himself.
Someone sends me this dedication from Richard Rohr’s Universal Christ and, damn, if you don’t get this I don’t know if you’ve ever known the love of a dog which is the most unconditional love I’ve ever known.
Someday this will all stop feeling so acute but we’re reading a lot of poetry this week (because any poet worth their weight has loved and lost a dog) and writing some too and letting it all take the time it takes.
I sat this morning and read through all your comments here and on FB and Sayable this morning. Most of them were through blurred eyes, your sorrows and stories shared of lost pets reminding me of how universal and specific these particular griefs are.
I’m not making this up. In the weeks before this week, six of my friends—some of you who are reading this now—lost your beloved creaturely companions. Mostly dogs but one cat, animals who were quiet witnesses to your marriages or your births, your loneliness and deaths, your most naked and revealed selves.
I wrote a poem about Harper having been my shadow but the truth is she was something more like my skin. She stuck herself to me from eight weeks old, suckered herself to my every movement. Maybe someone thought she was my emotional support animal but there were times when I thought I was her emotional support human. No other living thing has ever depended on me like she has.
I ache for her in a way I have never ached for another living being, not even the babies we’ve lost when they were still barely there. My arms feel so physically empty, they hurt, like a phantom limb maybe.
I told one of my six friends who is also grieving that I think, if it’s possible, my heart was so softened with empathy for them in the previous weeks, that in some ways, as traumatic as Harper’s end was, my heart was pliable enough to receive the grief. I barely cry in most of life and I can’t seem to stop crying this week.
I think a lot about grief, that’s no surprise to most of you, but it’s one to think about it and another to truly feel it. And I believe—for better or worse—shared grief is the way we metabolize it best.
I guess this is just my way of saying thank you for sharing in our grief—a grief I hope you never feel personally and also know, statistically, most of you will. Thank you for filling our house with bright blooms and gentle cards and treats for Rilke.
The emptiness is palpable because she was under our feet and in our way constantly, and in a way Rilke never is or will be, but your softness and empathy helps fill the space a little more.
So thank you 💙
June 21, Father’s Day
Somewhere in that first year, after we learned about the “Wheaten Greetin’” (a half adorable, half obnoxious habit Wheatens have of greeting their most special people), we also learned that when Nate got home from a long day at work + three hour commute, if he picked her up, she’d flop her head back and smile as if “Gotcha dad. See mom?”
And we did. We did gotcha and we did see.
I never got to see Nate be a dad to all the babies we lost, to all the babies we wanted, but I got to see him be a dad to her. I got to see him tender and attentive, gentle and stable. Nate is a creature of habit and so was she and they meshed those habits into one another until there was no separation between them.
It’s hard for me to unsee that last hour of her life and I don’t know if I ever will. It was not sweet or safe or full of last selfies and unhurried words. But every once in a while I remember how her dad would walk in the door and how she would wait for me to hug him for however long it took and then she would fling herself into his arms and throw back her head and smile, her pink tongue slick and long, her tail wild and free.
I never got to see Nate be a dad, but I got to see him love her and I’ll never forget it.
July 13, four Mondays since we lost her
Every single morning for four weeks, I’ve awakened with a first thought, unbidden, unconscious: I miss her. I wake already aching.
The presence of her absence is everywhere. I can’t escape it. I haven’t slept alone, peed alone, walked alone, cooked alone, worked alone, or awoken alone in ten years. Rilke is an indifferent pup, happy to be apart, cuddles only on his own terms, has to be coaxed into keeping company. Harper was like glue, attached to me in ways I wondered if were healthy for her. Surely it was anxiety?
But in these four weeks I realize it’s *my* anxiety she was abating. Maybe she sensed it. Maybe she knew her role was to be like glue because glue was what I’ve needed all these years.
I apologize to a friend because my grief feels silly, too big, she wasn’t a person. But she was more than a person to me in some ways. She did what no person had the power to do. What I would never expect a person to be able to do.
Four weeks without her. I still can’t believe it happened. I still can’t believe we have to adjust to a whole life without her.
July 26, Remains
The ashes will be heavier than you expected
And lighter than you feel
They ought to be.
Mass is measurable
But there is no accounting for absence.
The scientists say
there is no such thing as absence,
matter having vaporized into water, gas,
and air:
breathable air.
When you take turns pouring
what remains
into the bottom of a terracotta pot, and you inhale your grief,
you inhale her.
July 26, the day we buried her
She was a good, good girl, and we all miss her dreadfully. I keep waiting for my heart to feel whole, for the split down its center to seal, for the cavern to fill. I’m beginning to accept it won’t ever happen, that a broken heart is always going to be the most expensive and most inevitable cost of love.
She was my heart, my healing, my safest space. I used to think she was an anxious dog but now I see she was just holding all of mine. She was my shadow, my glue, my favorite smell and quiet presence. She was my friend, my witness, my constant—amidst moves, hurt, loss, pain. She was immeasurable to me and I can’t even imagine ever loving another being as much as I love her.
I say to Nate yesterday that there is a shame in the grief of a pet that isn’t there in the grief of a human. I have lost my fair share of humans and I know this to be true. With a pet, though, you have this shadow of shame, as though you’re not allowed to feel the loss so potently, that there is genocide and suicide and accidents and old age—and this is what we reserve our grief for.
But I am what I am and I am in part because of her. And to lose her is immeasurable.
I wonder where she is constantly, in the house, in my heart, in the universe.
They say dogs can’t smell the remains of their fellow dog in the cremated remains, but Rilke wouldn’t leave this pot alone for the first few days after we buried her ashes in it. I choose to believe he knows she’s there.
Thank you for indulging me the sharing of these words, the keeping of them in one place. I know someday I will wake up and feel a little less heavy, but I’m not there yet, and maybe you aren’t either, and maybe this helps. Either way, it helps me.
Thank you 💙
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