I didn’t know it before; the way death takes memories. How it paints over them all in one broad stroke when it comes, leaving every good thing marred and blackened so that it’s impossible to imagine the softness of love ever again unbruised. In this way, grief binds itself to life, inextricably.
It would be easier to stay here, in this knowledge. To bleed out what I know now to be true. Reluctant goodbyes, a gaping wound. But it asks more to speak of what was good when the hurt is greater, and do I not owe this to those I loved, love still? Is there not a place in time where their spirits linger, untarnished? Because it is this place I pray to, and yearn for, and worship. The realm of forgiveness for my loss: in one place, their absolute bliss.
I’m ten years old in the passenger seat of my dad’s van, paint tins in the back shimmying against each other’s edges over speed bumps. My dad takes it slow around the turns, goes gentle on the brakes, looking between the road and the soft thing in my lap. I’m wearing a knitted blue jumper, so clear in my mind. In the gaps between the threaded yarn, a puppy’s claws cling onto me. His shivering body is small enough to cup in my hands, for the vet to warn us, don’t leave this one outside, a bird could get him. Neither my dad nor I speaking - too in awe, too in love - we drive on to the sound of his whines barely perceptible over the movement of the paint tins. I remember: my hand up and down his back, whispering, it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay.
Even thinking back to him with me for the first time, I can feel again that rush of pure joy. The kind of excitement that makes you red up to your ears, that asks for effort in pulling down the corners of your mouth to stop yourself from breaking into a laughter you don’t know you can stop. And there it was, the home to that kind of laughter. A home that I would have for nearly 14 years, in the form of brown fur, and hazel eyes, and a swinging upturned tail. Whose scent I’d come to know better than any other being, curling beside me in my bed last thing at night, first thing in the morning. Knocking at my legs, putting his small face by mine, breathing deeply what I exhaled. Growing with me and yet, always finding a way to fit perfectly in the crook of my two arms. There he was, more than an animal, more than a pet, from that very first time. There, was Max.
He was a shivering, gentle thing in the beginning. Gummy mouthed, too shy still to gnaw on a soft finger. A baby’s howl always brewing ready in his throat. I’d press him to me in the night. Across my chest, over the hollow of my collarbones. Saying to him childish things heavy with wonder, and friendship, and a pure and boundless love. I like to think he heard me, and listened. That it was the hum of vowels coming from me that lulled him to sleep, night after night. But who am I to say that it wasn’t the other way around? My feet not yet reaching the end of the bed, could there have been anything sweeter, anything safer, than that puppy love?
It took days to coax him out of my room. Treats scattered down along the hallway like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, leading, always, back to me. And when we left the house, it would be with him sleeping in a shoebox, stuffed warm with a fluffy blanket. In those early cocooned moments laden with innocent vulnerability, I learned what it was to care in a way that had no end at all. To love and give wholly, excessively.
I didn’t realise that this love expanded, still, with each passing year; that there could be different measurements of infinite. As his legs grew (long enough to jump on the couch), as his ears flicked up (strong enough to be held upright), as he traded his whines for a steady bark (loud enough to confuse for a bigger dog), I wasn’t realising that greater time with him wouldn’t make his loss easier (in gratitude) but harder (in every single way).
That it increased, still, as death turned from an eventually and one day to soon, too soon. When the lumps formed in his stomach, when his gait slowed, when his appetite lessened - then stopped, denying even chocolate for his last meal…when his ribs began to show, when his eyes grew cloudy, when his hair began to break apart. When his head turned away from touches, and to sleep, always to sleep. When, most painfully, the whines returned. Still, my love grew, in tenfold. In medicine placed on his tongue and massaged down, and food blended and fed with a syringe, and specialist appointments booked and begged for, and prayers and tears and kisses and a place over my chest.
I knew that in the loss of my kindest constant, I would be untethered in a plane of unreality. Questioning if home was the place with him, where to go now? And if my bed was warmed by him, where to sleep now? I knew that I’d lie awake in search of reprieve, through the sound of phantom whines echoing, open my eyes to the reality of him somewhere without me, me somewhere without him. That I’d see his bed, his food, his toys, and feel myself unrooted in the lack they represented. I knew, that I’d never spend another night in that old bedroom again, the place that was only mine because it was ours.
On his last night, I held him to me and walked the hall in the dark a hundred times. I kissed his face for an infinity that was larger still than the one I loved him for; the infinity that would come after him.
And yet, he showed me that somehow his love was even greater. I kissed him goodbye for the last time at the door, whispered into his fur, thank you, I love you. And moments later, he passed.
In the end, there was little I wouldn’t have given to exist just a while longer in the shadow of that bark, the tapping of his nails on the floorboards, the loll of his tongue mid-yawn. It took a long time to recognise that this, in essence, is what grief is. That to hold onto grief is to hold onto a shadow, so large you can almost be convinced it is the one you lost themselves. The shadow becomes your love, your bliss, your pain, which however difficult, feels better than nothing at all.
“how to spend each day without you here?
kissing your head,
touching the soft part of your ear…”
6th November 2021 (one day after)
But to linger, always, in his death, would be to lose the complete story of his life. Did I not experience the burn of joy from which laughter always brimmed? Did I not hear his first bark, did I not throw him his first ball? Did I not hold his shivering body in my lap, vow to love him, and that; did I not?
Beyond the guilt of forgetting, I think of these moments and feel loss as not a remembrance simply of life, but of love for that life. Love to which there is no end, that grows, even beyond death. Year after year.
It’s this that gave me the strength to open my hands again to another. This one, sharp-toothed, dark eyed, with a mischievousness that I can appreciate now that I’ve known the curse of stillness. When he pulls on the lead, when he runs his paws along the toilet paper, when he wakes me in the morning with kisses to my face, I feel nothing short of infinite, ever-growing, wholly excessive love. I call him Sir Henry, and he becomes everything.
There is bitterness, always, in every goodbye. There is no grief, no death, that is ever as clean and pure as positive hindsight. I mourn for the loss of Max; I fear the mourning that there is still to be done. I find no part of me that isn’t touched by that elusive shadow, that forever looming haunt.
But I am sitting down to write this, and Henry is nibbling at my feet. He is pulling me to the open door, and he is calling me, so sweetly, back to life.