The First Day Without You
Today, everyone else woke up to another Friday morning — some slept in, some were late to work, some greeted the day with the exuberance of the coming weekend — but I woke up to a world without you in it.
I hit my snooze alarm, the way that I always do, and I rolled over to reach out to you, the way that I always do — but this time, you weren’t there.
As I grapple in semi-consciousness to understand why the painful memory of the night before begins to tug me back into reality. I turn back over to the other side and will my mind to fall back into slumber; a place still protected from the horrible truth that I am desperately trying to hide.
Squeezing my eyes tighter and tighter, I try to force myself back into yesterday as if by the power of will I can move space-time and rewind. I have to tell you one more time how much you mean to me, how much I love you. The harder I squeeze, the more I realize that the space where I am squeezing is always — always until right now — filled by you. The emptiness between my arms feels like an endless and vast universe, where the tighter I try to hold you, the larger it expands.
My alarm goes off again, resentfully open my eyes. I lift the blankets and search for you. I wander into the bathroom and await the pitter-patter pattern of you following behind me, but it never comes. I check the bed again. The shock pulls me rapidly from my daze and I crumble to the floor and wail, waking your brothers. They are shaking from the violence of my erupting grief.
We make our way downstairs, but my arms are empty again. You are so delicate and tiny that you need me to escort you in my loving arms safely down the stairs to be placed gently on the floor — you put so much trust in me. How many days did I tuck you into my elbow nook and occupy my hands with something else? I want to scream at the top of my lungs that there is nothing else that could possibly matter so much as to fill my elbows and hands with anything else than you.
You need me to carry you down the stairs so you wait for me to lift you up and shuffle you to that little place on my arm where you fit so effortlessly like the final missing piece of a puzzle. You have always been that piece for me. I had found you. You had found me. I don’t know what use I am this morning without you to carry — who will need me now?
The first day without you suspends me between two realities; one I am not prepared to live in and one where I can no longer be. Time marches on, the world is spinning — faster it seems, too fast — and every second is pulling me further from the reality I long to stay in; the one where you were still here with me.
Your scent, your smile, your sounds, your ‘-isms’ and everything that makes you you, feel right there in front of me; yet I cannot touch you, hear you, see you, or experience you with any of my deficient human senses. And yet, I know that all the pieces of you are right here, in a dimension I cannot access. Are you still here? It feels like you are and selfishly, I want you to stay right here with me forever.
I want to freeze time, even if I cannot go back, maybe I can stay in this exact moment for the rest of my life — with your memories, scent, and every last thing that you touched, still fresh. I am very still, we all are as if our collective immobility protests against the seconds tearing us further and further to the last time we knew you in the flesh. I sit frozen for hours in an attempt to delay the inevitable firsts to follow.
The first day without you has already meant the first morning waking up, the first walk (I crumbled), the first moment you didn’t hop up our front steps and refuse to step on the wood floor to eat, preferring the tattered welcome mat instead.
Then there are harder firsts; the first time I sit in my reading room and there is no warm mass cuddled close to me while I try to read. There is no friendly sigh or the weight of your head stretching across my lap mid-meditation. In my office, the bed at my feet is empty; this is the first time you don’t ask to crawl into my lap while I pretend to work as you droop your head down my elbow. My elbows really miss you.
The first time I come home, no one greets me; there is no scampering of excitement or little whines of pleasure when I ascend the stairs and meet my eyes to yours. This is the first time I find myself staring at the shabby hall closet wood instead of the dark pools of your chestnut sharky eyes.
I get carried away on the first day without you. Things I never even did with you begin to put up their own stakes of significance, etching out barriers in time, dividing it into where you were, and here, where you are not. My first drive to the store without you; my first shower without you; my first time folding laundry without you — none of these things I ever did with you but now it’s my first time doing them since I’ve existed without you.
My first time doing the dishes brings me to my knees. For here, these dirty elements of dining ware represent a bridge in the portal to yesterday, when I used this cup while you were here.
I find myself caught in a vortex where time is particularly magnified. Everything in my world moves in slow-motion but the world around me spins faster and faster. I beg it not to. Eventually, it strikes me that time is really not actually mine to control. That it is not promised — nor was it ever — and the trouble is that we believe it’s something that we have, when really, time is just something that we experience.
We cannot buy time, we cannot control it, we cannot change it — a second will always be a second. Every moment we are alive brings us one moment closer to the same inevitable ending, where we realize that we have all taken for granted that we thought we would have more time.
The first day without you, I came to terms with how much I had taken for granted with you. I just assumed that my love and your love was enough to surpass time. I ignored the signs of slowing down, I refused to rethink my suppositions that because I wanted you to live longer, you would.
Today, I woke up to how ridiculous I have been and how foolishly I have been living. Why bother being stressed, angry, jealous, sad — why bother with anything but love?
Why bother looking outside of myself or my home and this family that we created for anything when we have love?
Why numb ourselves with screens and the busyness of accumulating things when we have love?
You taught me to pay attention; to be present; to put away the outside world and just be alive, in love, with you. You awakened me to the everyday miracles of just existing, in the fragile dance of hearts beating, lungs breathing, neurons firing, and the damn earth, rotating around the sun. The tenacity of your life, as well as the improbability of it, has had me pass many hours contemplating what a true wonder you are.
We learned a long time ago that you had an enlarged heart. This is no surprise to anyone who knew you and felt the expanding influence of your unconditional love. You certainly taught my heart to grow — so much that it now presses gently on my rib cage until it aches a little.
The first day without you, I realized that I will never be able to go back to the person that I was before you, none of us can, nor would we ever want to.
Thank you for being here, once with us in a body, and forever sleeping in our hearts.
In tribute to our beloved rescue Italian Greyhound wonder dog, Bruce Wayne.
