I fucking miss my dog. I miss him so much, my packmate, Buddy Guillermosson. And the thing is I know, I know he's having a good time, eating better than I am, hanging with all the ladydogs, grateful to have his strength back after the cancer, tearing arse across Fólkvangr, probably tussling with boars, defending against lone wolves, and stopping to smell all the flowers that don't even grow here. I know it in my heart, and I know that I will be with him again someday, and just like me coming home, he'll be the first to greet me, and I'll kneel down, putting his paws on top of my shoulders, and we'll hug like we used to every day after work, and we'll smile, and feel that inimitable sense of relief that no matter what, we'll have each other.
But right now, I don't have that. I have loss, and heart-wrenching grief that attacks me everyday, unexpectedly, in a sort of double-edged mercy that bleeds my eyes of tears and scrapes my insides of their seemingly endless blue wells of sorrow.
They gave me the three days off work for bereavement right after it happened, but I knew it wasn't enough. I suspect at least a month just to adjust would've been better, and now I totally get why the funeral-centric Victorians would just check out for a year after someone passed.
Buddy died in the kitchen, me laying sideways on the floor with him, looking him in the eyes, my hands holding his front paws. He'd stopped eating only the day before. I'd called the vet the next morning to make the appointment to take him in to put him to sleep the next day, droppering a bunch of palliative oil in his mouth until he wouldn't take anymore just to make him comfortable. Then I thought, wait, medicine's not the last taste I'd want in my mouth before I go, and I grabbed a little slice of cheese and a pulling of pork, and I just rubbed those around his mouth and over his tongue so that would be it, those two final flavours. Maybe half an hour after that, he spasmed, and jerked, and spasmed, and paused, and quickly twitched, and exhaled, and his eyes went from looking at me to looking so far past and beyond me that I realized he was beholding the road he was going to take into the afterworlds. And then this friend, this more than friend, this companion, the thing that had been the most forgiving of who I was, and loving of what I am, and consistently loyal to me beyond anyone in my life, was gone.
Picking up Buddy's box of cremains a few days later, it was like he'd returned in a sense. There was a comfort in it, having the presence of it, it suddenly filled the newfound absence in its way. And of course it's not the same -- it's displaced, it's passive. I still talk to the box of my dog's lich of ashes. I speak to him, I sing it sweet nothings, I ask it questions, but in my heart's eye I summon his reactions to all those things, those rituals of communication, and that way those reactions play back to me, echoing forward into the now, séanced from beyond. I place the box on my left upper chest before I go to bed and it's just as if his boxy 20-pound bully head is resting in the crook of my shoulder, that priceless thing that would happen before we went to sleep, which it physically is because that dog's head is in that very box.
I still hear him moving around the house. I hear the dogtags clinking in the hall, or in the backyard. I hear him step up into the creaking frame as a hey-it's-late sign that I should go to bed, I hear a chuf, that breath of a dog who is waiting to be fed.
For six years, those sounds were the ticking of my domestic clock, that clicking of his toenails on the livingroom's stained concrete just as much delineating the patterns of our shared life together, chasing me around the couch, drifting that S-turn into the hall, running circles after me in and out of the kitchen doors, being startled when he caught up to me, lunging at each other on the back porch, quickly collapsing into his panting exhaustion and my laughter at his exertions.
But my mind is still reeling, stumbling in some now awful space without his pro-action to mark that time, to reciprocate attention, to give me a reason to go walk, or do the hundred cyclical rituals that dogs compel us to do for care & love. Without Buddy, I'm no longer a master, owner, dog-dad, packmate, and that's also what really troubles me, because we need words to define us and give us roles and more importantly help us relate to each other. Those terms have been removed, and left a terminological void, because I don't know what I am now, I only know I'm no longer what I was.
Socially/societally there's words for other human loss dynamics like widow/widower, orphan, the recently adopted Sanskrit loan word for someone who has lost a child, "vilomah". I would think that a process so widespread as the death of a pet would've generated a handle for it, something to encapsulate that loss and give people not only a term towards situational acceptance & self-understanding, but as a communicative signifier to others that, hey, that guy's going through a really sad thing and to give them the room & consideration they probably need in the wake of that.
I'm in the in the wake of that, and more honestly, the fucking undertow of that. And what I need is a handle, a word to use for this specific more-than-terrible dog-loss, dog-mourning, post-dog rending of life to grab on to. The lack of this word is also so fucked up because many people seem to discount that loss as something less-than when its not. I realized my dog's love was quite probably the most pure and near to unconditional love I'd ever experienced, and the absence of that word only reflects a shortcoming of how people regard dogs as mere accessories or living adornments, when they're cognitively smart as 3-year-olds, and perhaps even more emotionally intelligent, and certainly far more empathic than they are. I mean, fuck, my dog actually spoke, so, yeah, exceptionally so.
I've recently asked people in my life who're animal-centric or for at least a time actually worked professionally with animals if they'd ever heard of some intracultural word that puts that grief into a proper label, and while they especially understand and have endured my loss many times over in their relationship with dear animal companions, they still don't have a word for me as a mourner in the shadow of that loss, and that only adds to my personal despair and the fucking awful aching that I'm just barely able to endure every night over the past month.
Fuck all.
And, as a writer, I'm going to coin a word that will hold me, that will define what this is, not only for myself, but for the first man who lost his canid outside of his cave to predators, for the blind who never get to see their guide dogs but whose dogs bear their lives visual witness with love, for the children who find their beloved friend flattened by uncaring cars in front of their very houses, for all the open-hearted who rescue older dogs made to fight and can never be re-socialized and so only have those especially willing owners, for those who prematurely lose their animals to parvo or lyme or lupus or cancer, for those who have their dogs stolen or others who through no fault of their own have lost their animals, for you who are sad and grieving and miss your friend and find it oh so very hard to now to take that dogwalk alone. I feel you. I feel all of you.
I miss my dog, Buddy Guillermosson.
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