When hope was more than fleeting (a mere breath against my face), when the shapes of the world were incongruent with reality, when I sat at an intersection of grief, I met my final therapist.
I can’t remember the weather on November 5th, but I know that although it was spring I was wearing a thick yellow sweater, which would forever be stained with my dog’s last breaths. That night I would take it off and place it at the back of my wardrobe, never to be washed, but before that, I would make an emergency call to my therapist. I’m not certain of much that I said, what I told her about Max. I imagine I described the colour of his coat (chocolate brown), the hue of his eyes (hazel), the way his paws were a different colour to his body so it looked like he was wearing slippers. I might have mentioned the first time I held him (a rich image, 10-year-old me in my dad’s van, beaming from the weight of having something that was mine to love), the way he clung to me on that first drive home, and how today would be the last. I know whatever I said, I said through tears. But my reason for calling was not that I was simply upset – it was that more distressingly, I felt I was going to die. I recall it being said between apologies, unable to be vocalised but hinting at the understanding that he was an animal, that I knew this day would come. And yet, from my bedroom with the green walls and south-facing window through which neither the rising nor setting sun could be seen, I couldn’t comprehend how I would go to sleep that night in the bed alone. I saw myself reaching a hand out, and finding an empty space where Max would usually be – emptier than if there was nothing there to begin with, an absence where was once whole – and I couldn’t think that the pain of this, the loss of it, wouldn’t surely kill me.
My therapist spoke quietly between the static of the line, calm. The call lasted no longer than 15 minutes, and she left me with this: that grief is a wound, and to feel its pain would mean I’m surviving it. And when Max passed, soundlessly in my Mum’s arms right before the vet, I saw that it was true. I felt it, I felt it, like this: a physical shredding, from my chest to the bottoms of my feet. A place I didn’t know where the tears came from, how they could end. My hands shook, my stomach turned, I burned hot and cold with the separation. Still, that night I would sit at the table, listen to my boyfriend tell stories about his neighbours as a distraction. The lights in the house would flicker on, then off again, and I would sink into my mum’s bed, unable to ever face again that green room. Sleep would come only with dreams of him. Horrible, cruel images of his soft, still body, broken by a reality that was even worse; one void of him completely. In the quiet of the hallway, in the emptiness of his daybed, I would disintegrate into the realisation that while before I had thought death was a moment, it was actually forever. That there is time still, after, a whole eternity to be spent without.
And still, it would not kill me.
My therapist missed the next few sessions. A death in the family, she’d told me, and again that urge to apologise returned. I wanted to make my own grieving smaller for her hurt that no doubt, even in my despair, must’ve outweighed my own. When we spoke again, I put the laptop at full volume, but her voice still came to me muffled. I caught the ends of her sentences, the middle of her words, convinced that it was not the laptop, but me. Her black-clothed figure would move across the screen in glitches, and it felt no different to how the rest of the world around me appeared. Distant, unreal, a thing to perceive but not be a part of. In those first calls, a lot of time was spent affirming my grief, inviting me to a place of sadness that was not both inherently difficult and additionally shameful.
On one zoom, the call cut out as she asked, and do you fear death? The question stuck to me, reeking, and I let it, knowing it would stay with me for a while yet. When the call reconnected, she apologised for the rocky connection, for the missed sessions. I’m usually very reliable, she’d assured me. I laughed, I can’t say the same for me.
With time, I come to understand through her that there is no “just” when you lose an animal. That it is a bond broken, a relationship cut at the height of a long accumulation of love, one in which those universal thoughts of grief linger. In our matching mourning, I sit in the silence more than I speak, and she allows me. I feel her care, outstretching, coaxing me into trust where I believed I had been cheated. And strangely, its presence on my shoulder grows more warm than heavy, and for the first time with a therapist, I begin to realise just how much it means to be heard.
I spend ensuing session unravelling, marking every passing Tuesday with a relief I can rely on. On Tuesdays, I know, I can laugh, and cry, and come apart. I can share my fears, see them fall flat in the daylight, in the sound of my words that reach another. I speak of dreams, their perceived impossibility, to which come shrugs. A why not where I expect there to be a no way, a step where I envision a million. Slowly, I begin to fall in love with the promise of a promise, just as something to hold on to. For the first time in months, I leave the house. I look to the street, the skies. I hold my grief in the palm of my hand, rub it along the dirt where we bury Max. It stays with me, everywhere, and I recognise that at the core of it is love. Endless like the days to come, unconditional, flowing over, and I decide it’s okay to give it also to another.
In those calls I see more than anything, myself. A black donned figure, utterances of grief and fear and sorrow, whisperings of joy. With enough Tuesdays, I see it. That the thing I so desperately search for, the evasive keys at the bottom of the bag, is simply just me. A thing to be rummaged for, brushed past and missed, before gripped on to properly, tightly: the only thing getting me out of where I’m at.
And it’s there, the promise of a promise. The potential to one day hold myself close, to look back without anger. To be relieved of regarding me at 20, at 17, at 6, with envy, with hatred, with regret. To leave questions unanswered, to refuse to suffer twice. To return to myself, brave, climbing to the top branches of trees in the backyard. Letting go of my mum’s hand when crossing the road. Deep breaths and head underwater, a bike pedalled downhill, jumps from a great height with only my feet to catch me.
I tell it all to my therapist, and she guides my hand in drawing my picture. The image starts to form; someone who is more than this, more than a moment; a whole eternity. Someone who can be friends with the part of them that hurts, finding always, peace in reassurances muttered by their own voice. There lives, in the hopelessness, the chance to turn my face to the dim sunlight, call its cool rays summer. Knowing it is just the beginning, I stand at the precipice of something terrifying, and facing only my reflection, I begin to walk myself home.
ohhhh this resonates so much. so beautiful. my dog (shih tzu) is 14 and though he is in decent health, i’m still trying to prepare myself for the day though i know it’s futile. he is everything to me, like a son to me. i am his sole person right now and i got him when he was a puppy when i was only 7. just the thought of him dying makes me cry so i know i’m in for a ride when he actually leaves me. any video i come across of someone talking about their pet facing the end of life makes me sob uncontrollably. i’m really scared but this post and what your therapist said provided me some solace. i’ve had experience with grief, i’m still grieving someone now actually and i know i will survive, but i just feel like it will fundamentally change me as a person and my heart might literally shrink a little. they will always be with us in our hearts. thank you for sharing this grief and your relationship with your therapist <3