Phoenix

We said goodbye to my dog on Saturday. I resolved to write something with her name in it.

It seems to me like every eulogy for a lost pet will either be a testament to the pet, or a broader rumination on everything else a pet can represent. For people, it would be gauche to do only the latter, but every dog is unimpeachable, and so the former can sometimes be elided: you have or have had or have known a dog, you understand this implicitly. The preciousness of ours was a personal one, shared with only a handful of people, and for right now I'm perfectly okay to selfishly keep it to us, except to say that when I held her in my lap she would tuck her nose under my mouth to beg for kisses.

I'll know when the despair has abated because it will be replaced—at least at first—with the bitterness that, having been flushed backwards by the impact of the loss, rushes back in to fill the crater. And it will be a relief to experience it, because it's mere common bitterness, ambient in the air right now, and the odds are you reading this know its taste. I will be 40 in March—some achieve a mid-life crisis, some have a mid-life crisis thrust upon them—she was there for almost half of it.

You take solace from silly things, and you don't turn away a cliche if it's offered to you. My wife told me that yesterday she saw a rainbow, somewhere that you wouldn't expect to see a rainbow, and I think that's wonderful. Our last walk together, we pursued a big buck down the driveway, too slowly to even put it off the idea of eating the ravages of our arborvitae as it went, but it technically qualifies as a hunt. It's beautiful weather for fall, if disconcertingly dry, and she drifted away in between two nights where the moon was so grand and yellow that we couldn't tell which had been the "full" one. All signs of change, both fast and slow. It's enough to know that it comes.