Grief, Denial and the Will to Rise Again.

An old friend scheduled a c-section after enduring a complicated, high risk pregnancy. The doctors were taking no chances. “It feels so strange to be scheduling a birth like a dentist appointment,” she told me. “Monday at 1p I’m going to walk into the hospital and have my baby.”

I am thinking of this now as I call the vet for the third time in two days to reschedule Bruno’s euthanasia appointment. I am scheduling his death. It feels grotesque and surreal. I am asking his death to accommodate my life.

I want to do it on a Friday so we have the privacy and down time of a work free weekend to let our grief loose, like a let-go-of kite. But the kids aren’t ready. They want more time. And he’s not in pain. He’s just already so far over the threshold of being gone that he’s not really here. We’re down to bodily functions. The practical stuff. His soul, his magic, is a dim light at the end of its wick.

Bruno is the same age as my youngest child. We joke that they’re litter mates. He’s grown up in the thick of our family, always under foot, on a lap, sitting shotgun. Always included. Even in the awful stuff like the wrecking ball of divorce and the displacement it brought and the ceaseless rebuilding that feels sometimes like the drip drip dripping of a lopsided castle at the edge of a hungry sea.

Dogs are like houses in the way they contain the record of our days spent living. The big moments but also the quieter ones that no one else sees. Opening mail and closing cabinets. Stacking clean shirts into a drawer and peeling carrots. Turning on lights as the night crawls in. Running a bath or running the dishwasher or filling a vase of tulips with tap water. They are the keepers of our stories, grand and insignificant. They know our rituals and our truths. They were at our side, in their eternal loyalty, feeling it with us all along.

I am holding Bruno in my arms tonight. His shaggy blonde hair looks like dried sea grass in winter as I move my hand through it. His pudgy pot belly has diminished noticeably. His bones are the branches of a tree who has let her leaves go to reveal the bareness of her being.

At his full weight Bruno was 17 lbs. The same size as my daughter when she was 6 months old. That was my favorite age. Toothless and smiley and filled with awe for the little things in life. Like the wind chimes by our window or a button eyed sock puppet. It was so easy to keep her happy then and to keep her with me.

It only recently occurred to me that Bruno has been my surrogate all these years. That when I hold him on my hip like a koala bear and dance with him in the kitchen or spoon him in bed, sharing the same pillow, I’m reliving the perfection of that stage in the motherhood journey.

That 6 month old baby girl is a teenager now, about to get her driver’s license. She’s grown like a sunflower while Bruno has remained a tiny violet at her feet. He’s been a space holder. I haven’t had to mourn the loss of the innocence, the snuggle-bear-bundled-up-baby-ness that consumed every last molecule of bandwidth in my heart. I’ve had a permanent baby with me for the last 14 years who never outgrew my lap or my arms.

Is that why the mourning feels supernaturally hard now?

Nearly a year ago Bruno suffered a stroke. I rushed him to the vet and his prognosis was bleak. For the next three days he barely ate or drank a thing. The subcutaneous water pack on his back was the only thing hydrating him and keeping him alive. I cried in a way that felt violent. Like being punched in the face over and over again. My eyes were so swollen I couldn’t fully open them. My stomach convulsed against my will as the reality of losing him took hold.

Bruno was completely indifferent to my unhinged falling apart. I wrapped him a fleece blanket and rocked him and played Enya’s Shepherd Moons. I only put him down to pee in the front yard. I was willing him to live, hating myself for making it hard for him to go and gripped by the metal teeth of grief, digging mercilessly into my heart. It hurt to breathe.

On the fourth day I woke up to the sound of Bruno lapping up water at the foot of the bed like a fragile kitten. Later that morning he was willing to eat vanilla ice cream from a small spoon, his favorite food on the planet. Then he ate some tiny bits of boiled chicken and he walked with me in super slow motion at the park. He turned a corner dramatically and I turned it with him as the days turned into weeks and then months. I started to feel like he was immortal. And my horror at having lived through the dress rehearsal of his death shifted into a kind of deep rooted denial that assured me I would never have to.

What we lose when we lose a being we love is so much more than can be measured. It’s more than the raw hollowness of sorting through toys that will never be played with again, a bed that will never be filled or a food dish left empty, as we round up the reminders so as not to be caught off guard and propelled unexpectedly into a wave of unpredicted grief.

What we lose most acutely, in surviving our beloveds, is the wholeness and depth of our connection with them.

When we love someone and they love us back, in a way that is pure and uncomplicated and real: it’s a miracle. It’s incredibly simple yet incredibly hard to come by. That kind of love can change your whole life. To be witnessed. To be wanted. To be accepted without reservation. To be depended on. To come through. Over and over again, even when it’s not easy, is to experience ourselves as deeply worthy and deeply capable. These are the ingredients of a purposeful life.

I am walking with Bruno now as the sun sets over the river. I walk with him in a baby carrier across my shoulders; he’s too weak to make the trek across the rocks and broken branches at the shore.

My phone is filled to the brim with pictures of this scene. Every time I see a thing of beauty I’m compelled to capture it despite the fact that not one of those shots comes close to doing justice to the actual feeling of standing at the edge of the water, looking out at the mountains on the other side, watching the sky turn pink-streaked and majestic.

Not one of them has ever been able to trap down the ineffable feeling of what it was like to be there, with a dog at my side, watching another day toss its glitter around and sing its finale. Trusting, over and over, that the sun, as it sinks silently, gracefully, knows how to rise again.