It’s funny how long it takes. My dog Trixie died in October 1991. I finally think I could love a dog again.

But still any eyes, dog or human of just that brown, or hair coloring like a blue-tick, or energy like hers and there’s a pang.

Not crestfallen, but something. It took me years to even say the word dog without choking up.

The next time around was easier. I can happily be greeted by cats again. I get happier to see dogs in the park or cats in the window.

It makes sense that that need for closure goes both ways.

I thought of a cat as a lifetime commitment because of their living 12 or 18 years but it’s longer than that — lifelong. My dad had a Shep who he missed even 50 years later. A friend said her father’s death still seems recent after that amount of time as well.

Death doesn’t make sense. It is irreconcilable to the brain stem. Each human death or cared-for death causes a re-priming. Dad became conflated with Valderbar. They made one common smell of aging and decay and in the same rubble of building that I needed to rescue them from. Recurrent nightmares of them both calling. It wasn’t until 2 years after dad died that he was restored to me as any dream character, alive and interacting.

Some sounds still make a reflexive response — like could be a hairball. Finally I’ve stopped responding to cat-shaped shadows of sweaters on the chair or sofa, the double take of seeing her, happiness then realizing, no. Sometimes I still come home to an empty house and hear the expectation of being greeted meet silence.

I travel a lot. It doesn’t seem fair to live with a pet. I wouldn’t be able explain that this isn’t abandonment but I’ll return. There’s such distress for dogs and cats when schedule changes, when one goes away.

And then there are my allergies. My head is fuzzy and breathing was harder around Valerie. Even away for a weekend and I felt more “myself”. The companionship and contact and communication of living together was healthy for us both tho. People hugs are nice. But the simple touch of being sought out for nothing but companionship. No word to speak about. No thing to do together. It’s a kind of hanging out that’s been left hanging.

Towards the end of the year could finally return to cute overload or daily squee without ache.

I can look at cat videos, cats at play. I can greet cats and dogs without ache these days.

Eyes smart at any image of the Valderbar tho. Stomach still drops.

The times of giving IV, the 3 visits to vet and being told to reconcile with death and her rallying takes a toll of months. The sense of helplessness, frustration and anger at the helplessness at trying to induce her to eat, all manners of coaxing and cajoling with all kinds of food wore me down until my own health suffered too. Mental and physical.

Every few weeks I still have a nightmare on the variation of finding her, under rubble, crawling in, still alive, desperately thin and hungry and I go hunting for something she’ll eat and bring her back from death. I don’t know how to bring closure.

When our dog died in ’91, it took a couple years before I could look at any dog or hear the word dog. Even now, a black and white dog of the same size gets me. I don’t know why grief is so much easier to access than pleasant memories of joy. There must be something in how I’ve conditioned myself. How I’m predisposed?

It’s been six months since dad died and hearing the word “dad” still pangs, tailspins me.

But so far as Valerie, there’s the start of healing finally, isn’t there.

I can see pictures sometimes and remember some good of her company, remember her pleasure at rushing up to us, as if she were a dog, greeting us, curling on us, wanting to sleep in the crook of my arm or legs. Waking up with her as close as possible to me.

I have even begun to tell stories of her personality and her trouncing of her colleague in crime. How they divided the house. How Valderbar divided the house with most of it hers alone.

I sometimes share with hesitation, usually bite my tongue, since some people are so hostile. It blindsides me. I never know who will turn in rant against pets in principle and/or say sadistic things, irrespective of my feelings or what is compassionate to say of any creature under any circumstance. When a friend’s dog was hit by a car, a passerby kept repeating. It’s just an animal. A couple people eventually told her to shut up but she didn’t. She was looping what she imagined, trying to shake it.

Verbal speech is an evolutionary loss of intelligence.

Maybe because human lives are longer, give more years to enjoy against the tradeoff of loss. I don’t see myself committing to another animal foreseeably.

Yet life seems long with no kids, no fur kids. Friends are lovely but when problems come, and ranks close…I’m a dependent of no one and no one depends on me in that primary way. There’s a gap. Most days I can’t feel it.

Bit by bit. Could look at cats, cat calendars, and see the beauty without pity and grief.

Not back to cute overload by any degree. But bang of pangs are softening, flattening out to appreciating what was good. Cat without the catch of the back of the tongue…

The years of back and forth adding up to nearly 1500 comments were good ones here too.

All the best to you for spring…

Another stage of distance. Moving house from where Valderbar last lived.

Over 4 months have passed and moving furniture we find her hair caught here and there.  Allergies flare. 

Still have her carrier and brush and toys. 

She is not in these walls alone.

We moved though 3 homes with her.  

Her character is in us, memories internalized. Still occasionally expect her to greet us at the door, realize having been seated this long, she would have complained at my leg tension and clatter as I type by now. Intervals are longer.

Whoever you meet stays somewhat. Not as brightly. There are still times when I can exactly remember the texture of Pinkie‘s head butt or Jenny’s slobbering polyfidelitous affection. We swore she’d disappear one day climbing into the car of whoever next opened their door.

It’s cat lifetimes since the 80s and the silent mono-loyal ways of Suzy for whom only I existed, even the bringing of food was a shadow to her shadow.

Or Bearess who was silent shadow who would sit near with when concern, hovering when needed.

Rex is one of my oldest memories of security and Penny my oldest of authority. Trigger, the pony of my first hot memory of grief. 

There have been so many. Trixie‘s loss was the most potent as as an adult because it was a car accident yet even she still is vital. The pure joy she could exude as she capered still brings smiles at unexpected moments. She was tired after she ran but she never tired of running.

Each brought something different to the equation.

There’s a loss of the daily constancy. A new era shifts. Strange how no two griefs are ever the same. Good that older memories rise and wash over the last ones of any one individual.

I’ve said Never Again to share house and lives with someone so dependent, so reliant. It is a kind of slavery this taking an individual from their family and species. Even if a kind bondage , even if bonds form, if I can’t allow them to make families and spread and find their own mates who choose their own destinies…it is such a responsibility, a burden that yields a mutual dependence. The furrier animals may have their own lives, own thoughts and rhythms and moods but they don’t move off in the same way. They are eager for touch and want to communicate.

In old age they move off into personality shifts of aches or strokes. They may change the territory and break up friendships with other animals at home but not with the person they bond to. There is a guaranteed constancy at one’s disposal as long as one is willing to interact kindly.

There is family far off and friends near and far. There are acquaintances, activities and hobbies. There are ideas. But none of these are interchangeable for another.

Will never again be amended to Never Forseeably?

After a certain age, get a woman a baby or a puppy perhaps is a law for health or loss.

Perhaps neither. This is a grief and a neutrality both.

silence to reenter home

motion in the corner of my frames 
a smudge that turns with me
long lump that my chair wheel bumps
 a corner of sweater fallen off its back
form by entryway doesn’t move
 solid tripping shoes
closet opening and stepping back
 at the spirit that is apt to leave
orange zest spritz causes no withdrawal 
 no wince of guilt at indulging
the hips that swing autopilot
 down an irrelevant aisle
italian wedding soup eaten 
 undisturbed, no caroling wish
darker sprawl on evening’s bed
 a dark blouse, a jacket, jeans
the feet that pause to check level
 water in bowl that hasn’t been
list for business trip one fewer box
what my hand glances off of
 a night reach pets into book
pat and scratch of sheets
 low voice has no jumped reply
not the cat, habit is only inhabitant.

With more grief than words can say, for those who knew Valderbar… she crossed the rainbow bridge yesterday. It was after a series of medical cascades, being given hours or days to live 3 times over the last year, the toll was showing. Her weight was continuously falling over the last couple years, with vomiting increasing. She was treated and rallied against odds but each rallying didn’t get to as well as before the last bout.

There had been years of medication and living with thyroid problems, irritable bowel, arthritis and heart murmurs, added in the last months to her list of challenges, kidney and liver disease. The daily subcutaneous fluid wasn’t enough to offset her systems shutting down. 

At the same time, even when these systems were going, she remained patient and friendly, curious about visitors, getting onto laps of friends and strangers, sucking up to visitors, and investigating workmen who came into her space. She loved climbing around on the desk for naps and taking over an unlikely amount of bed or floor real estate given her petite frame.

 We lived together for under a decade of her life. We adopted her and another, Zoe, together about 7 years ago from the shelter.

Valderbar, her Royal Purrness, would wait for us by the door, eager to see us. At night she’d sleep in the chair by the bed, or on us, or between us. Or on our heads or pillows.

Most mornings she was the first eyes I’d see, hubby waking earlier. I fed her. He does laps. She knows for food, it was me she has to bug. She loved being on a lap, or ideally, on both laps at once, sprawled over us both. Whenever we took a Sunday nap, she’d hop up beside us, napping as long as we napped. She’d prefer to eat, only when we ate. She even got in the habit of sitting on hubby’s lap at breakfast and supper. And to think, she once had a terrain of only the floor, no sofas, no tables, no couches, no beds, not upstairs.

She came to want to be carried around, loving body contact especially when she was feeling ill. She preferred books to computers since reading people are quieter and move less. When reading was done and we needed to get back to the real business of life of petting her, she’d groan and adjust and push the computer off the lap or sit in the middle of it.   

She was mischievous. Such as when she climbed onto the dinner table and ate half a bowl of mashed potatoes while our backs were turned. She, for years, delighted in stalking me at the computer, creeping up slowly, and then when I am deep in task, leap over the back of the laptop at me, making me shriek than walk off with tail high, amused. 

She added affection and a welcoming face to years.  Initially a behind-the-scenes girl who would make requests only by purring louder and head-butting, or tapping a paw, she found her voice and became quite vocal over the last couple years years.

A few years ago, she was closed in the basement by a real estate agent and left in there all day despite the door having a door stop and note to ensure that wouldn’t happen. She sat on the top step without complaint and when we opened the door she bounded out.

She always liked small spaces, finding herself closed into a closet when she went to nap with the shoes and would not scratch or meow to indicate where she was.  She gained her voice in the last couple years, especially when there was fresh cooked chicken. Then she could belt something like a doggy baritone bark to demand it while it was still steaming.

You all know the grief. Food bowls to absences of shadow underfoot. Soft warmth, eye to eye so that we feel we are the same size.

My favorite place – in contact with the two beans at the same time.

I put two feet on each of them to share myself fairly.

In the sun, with wind ruffling my hair the warmth sinks into my cold toes and bones.

In bean years I’m in my 80s. Beans age so slow by the sun.

My teeth, the ones left, aren’t good. My hips are stiff when I jump to the chair. I like to curl into the heat of the back of beans as they sleep, even if they do spike my food with medicine and abduct me to the v-e-t to needle me with liquid. I think they are trying to make me a camel.

But still, warm lap in warm sun and a good stroking even when I fart, helps.

That smells wonderful.

A long day since my breakfast call at 5:30 and my getting success by licking the female bean’s nose, whiskering her face and churning butter of her bladder.

Good to get fresh chicken. Tip for you all: Refuse to eat for long enough and they bring out the good stuff.

I wondered who were these people and where I was going to find the time and energy to get on all their laps. I’ll settled for two friendly stranger beans who scritched me under the chin. Then I went to nap in the back of the closet.