On the Bearing of Unbearable Loss, or, an Ode to a Best Friend

By Catherine DiMercurio

Like any major grief, the pain you feel when you lose a pet is one of those soul-bruises that you feel every day. Your heart remembers, your muscles do, before your brain does. And then upon waking fully, you realize that this is a different world now, you are in a new phase of your life, the one without your sweet baby in it.

I lost Phin, my dog of 14 years, last week. Lost is such a nice way to put it when the reality is much graver. We bear witness to a painful decline and no matter how much we want to avoid it, we bear the responsibility for making a decision guided by love and empathy, and the desire to protect our loved one from further suffering. It doesn’t matter if the vet and countless other people tell you it’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t matter if you’ve known it for a while. You still have to make this impossible decision, and then follow through on it, and then live with it every day.

I picked up Phin’s ashes recently. It is a startling thing, to see what a body is reduced to.

When the grief hits the hardest, I try to remember how joyful Phin looked when galloping across the yard toward me. I’ve combed through all my photos and videos of him, but I don’t quite have one that matches the memory of him I hold in my head. He loved to run. He loved his walks. I aways used to say he could be at death’s door and still want to go for walks, and this was true to the end. His last walk, the day before his death, was brief, and only lasted a few minutes, a few steps. But he still stepped into the harness the way he always did, certain and eager.

In the mornings he would greet me with a wagging tail and lean into my legs the way big dogs do. Countless times during his life, he upended beverages, either by sweeping them across a coffee table and onto the floor with his tail, or by bumping into a side table and sending everything clattering and spilling.

We don’t get the same death rituals for our pets that we get with people, not in the same structured and expected way. But my dogs are the ones I talk to every single day, there for me when I wake up in the morning and when I go to bed at night. Constant companions since the pandemic sent us home from the office, never to return.

Phinny loved bread, sardines, and pancakes more than just about any other foods. Pita was the food that brought him back from the brink after a bout of pneumonia sent him to the ER a couple of years ago. The day before he died, after refusing rotisserie chicken, hunks of cheddar, a tin of sardines in olive oil, I offered fluffy, fresh pita bread. And he just turned his head away.

I want to remember all of his youthful frolicking more than his painful last days, but it’s not working like that for me, not yet. I’ve lost dogs before. I know how sharp the pain is in the beginning. I know how narrowly focused my brain is on the suffering that prompts the call to the vet. It is such a horrible call, and I think I am self-soothing, in a way, by reminding myself of what was necessary.

My dreams are haunted, but not by him. I’d welcome a glimpse of him in my dreams. I’m eager for any sign I can find that he’s out there, on the other side. I don’t know why I wholeheartedly subscribe to the lore of the cardinal being a sign of a passed loved one, but I do, and I saw one the other day when I was getting ready to take the puppy for a walk. I opened the door and there it was, flitting in the burning bush right in front of me. To be clear, the bush was not on fire; that’s just the common name of it. But a nice touch for a sign from the other side, no?

My big emotions are operating within me the way they have in the past, leaving me longing for connection but also resistant to comfort. Nothing feels quite right. I only want the softest fabrics against my skin, I can’t find anything that tastes really, really good, and there are few sounds that soothe me. I heard a bird this morning chirping in a quiet, rhythmic way that reminded me of the way Phin used to whine when he wanted something. He always sounded like a bird when he whined. When we first brought him home as a puppy, I used to think that a bird had gotten trapped in the house but then I’d realize it was him.

Overzealous gardening a few days after Phinny’s death left me with a very sore knee. Apparently “gardener’s knee” is a thing. The pain is more prolonged and sharper than I imagined anything gardening-related could be, but I think in general my body is telling me to slow down and let myself feel the things I’d rather avoid feeling. But it’s hard and it takes so much out of me. And while anyone who has gone through this understands how ongoingly brutal the pain of losing a pet is, as someone pointed out, there’s no bereavement time from work or anything. You walk into various situations expected to keep performing and sometimes it’s fine, the compartmentalizing, but gosh is it tiring. There are no shortcuts. We’re either exhausted from feeling the pain or exhausted from all the ways we try to avoid it, and we have to do both in order to make it through. Feel it, and take breaks from it.

I’m not ready for this part. I don’t want it. But I guess that’s the way it is when we lose anyone, either by death or other circumstances. But I certainly would never wish away a moment of the time I had with him, and I get that what I’m going through now, what my kids are, is the price of all that time, all those years of love and joy. I miss his earnest face and his big goofy smile and his big dog lean and his ability to see a simple neighborhood walk as expansive and fulfilling. And maybe it wasn’t just the walk. Maybe some of it was his appreciation of the company on the other end of the leash. I’d like to think so anyway. I’d like him to know I tried to give him a good life, and I’m sorry for the mopey years when everything was a struggle. Miss you, my sweet boy.

I wish this wasn’t such an inelegant attempt at expressing what this first week has been like, but we have to start processing somewhere. To anyone who has experienced this, I’m sending you big hugs.

Love, Cath

On Feathers and Full Moons, Equinox Rain and Wheel Barrows

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes we find lost things and lose sleep.

On a recent early, early morning when I couldn’t sleep, I pulled out a notepad to try and capture the things that were making me anxious and unsettled. I often can’t sleep around the time of a full moon. When I return to such notes, I’m often saddened and alarmed at how amplified my worries can be at this dark hour, how they reach and seep, inky and dark. For me, so many of the things that keep me awake at night hinge on the notion of self, on what I believe I am and am not capable of.

I think of the line from the William Carlos Williams poem: “So much depends / upon a red wheel / barrow.” So much depends on how I view myself, so much depends on the idea that I can be depended upon. On the longing to depend on myself, and the fears of falling short. So much depends upon the notion that I must be useful, effective, sturdy as a wheel barrow waiting to carry the weight and do the work.

How quickly when something isn’t going well my brain shifts all its patterns to shame. Many of us worry that we will be perceived as weak, unable to handle this or that. Not worthy of the work, not useful, not effective. Why is it, when we acknowledge that we struggle, that we are compelled to feel shame or embarrassment? I see how readily people judge one another on social media, how prevalent the notion of shame is in our society, a hungry mouth fed by religion and class or other similarly contrived ideas about worth.

I often wonder how to let go of expectation – mine and yours. Is it an act of will or fatigue?

What I wrote on that sleepless notepad was this: If hope is the thing with feathers (as Emily Dickinson suggested) then I must be doing it wrong, because there is no downy softness, no lightness, no promise of flight. And I have felt it leaving me sometimes, like a lover in the early morning. I have wondered if hope is more thorn than feather, but maybe I’m getting it mixed up with something else. Expectation, maybe.

Sometimes I try and think about what connects us all, and I think about love and loss. We have all loved and lost in so many ways, yet we get stuck in our own heads. I do. I get stuck. It’s easy to do, isn’t it? So much of life is pulling oneself out of the muck. For some of us, it takes a lot of endeavoring to cleave to the higher ground, to keep our perspective focused on what moves us forward instead of what is wrong, what has gone wrong, what might go wrong. Our accumulated griefs are heavy and they conspire against us in the form of fear of future pain. We anguish over the possible fading of strength and loss of will to do heavy work, to carry and pull our weight.

The persistent rain outside my window has erased the steamy summer days that preceded it. It is an equinox rain and you can feel autumn in the space between the rain drops. I have set things in motion to look forward to this fall – a writing weekend away, a pottery workshop, a pile of books that I vow to turn to instead of collapsing in front of the television at the end of a workday. I know that when I feel as though I’m falling, I have to throw myself a rope here and there in the near future. Maybe that can be another thing that connects us.

A few moments ago, I heard a bird singing in this downpour. I thought it strange, wanted it to seek shelter. But also, I considered the rest of Dickinson’s opening stanza:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all –

And then some magic drew me into its circle again. It is often like this for me when the changing season corresponds to a personal transition. Things feel weighty and moods shift in pendulum parabolas. It is a time of deep thinking, of reflection on where I’ve been and where I’m going. This is my way. I’m not sure I truly was cognizant of it before now, the way sleeplessness coincides with full moons, and a deep sense of reckoning coincides with changing seasons.

This is what writing does for me. It crystalizes things, translates and distills it all, so I know what to focus on. Some people find this through nature, prayer, meditation, physical exertion, this clarity. But I think we all seek it, each in our own ways, which is another thing that perhaps connects us.

This rumination begins in the middle of a stream of thought and seems to go nowhere when I read it through, but at the same time, it is doing what I need it to do. It pins down a moment, arrests a thought in flight long enough to view it a little more closely. And it reflects where I am and where I suspect a lot of us are in these turbulent times. We are uncertain, not confident, wondering what we are made of and what we will be when we grow up and into the next part of our lives. We are at once in the middle and at the end and at the beginning again, waking from a hazy dream during a full moon in the middle of the night. We are listening to a few notes of birdsong in equinox rainfall.

Wishing you wisdom and clarity.

Love, Cath

On Swarming and Signifying

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes a swarm has something to say.

A recent rain brought down a bald-faced hornets’ nest that had hung high on a branch of my neighbor’s silver maple. The nest was active last summer but its papery cavities, in the cold months, were excavated by birds for sustenance, or so my son has informed me. The silver maple branch of my neighbor’s tree juts across my back yard, so that the nest hung squarely above my yard, until last week. We discovered the nest at dusk, and in the fading light, it reminded me so much of a giant human heart, misshapen after the fall. When I took the dogs out in the middle of the night, they stood near its eerie mass, not indicating a threat so much as something I should take notice of. This, they seemed to say. In the morning, we studied the nest’s construction, the intricate cavities; we marveled at the engineering. I thought how wonderful it was that the hornets’ well-made home allowed them the safety and security necessary to live out a full life cycle, even if we, their human neighbors, occasionally needed to dodge them in the summer.

When I was little, we had a cluster of forsythia shrubs in the yard. Their long, arching branches wove together at the top, forming a little airy atrium. My two older sisters and I would spread a blanket on the dirt floor of this chamber, and spend many a spring afternoon escaping, planning and plotting, adventuring, and resting there. Sometimes now I would like to ask them: do you remember staring up at the crisscrossing branches above us, looking at all the yellow stars blooming, and feeling safe? And have you ever felt so safe in your lives since? Our baby brother was napping away the spring afternoon, our mother worked in the house, our father was gone to his job, his life away from the house mostly a mystery to us, except when he let us come to the grocery story on Sundays when it was closed, and we’d help him by turning all the cans so their bright labels neatly faced the aisles. It was years before our other sister was born, though sometimes I imagine she was there too, somehow. I think this is the safest I’ve ever felt, long before the sting of any loss, before we tumbled into our adult selves. Nestled in our flowering nest, there was no understanding of anything that couldn’t easily be made better.

Sometimes we are lucky, and we can recognize happiness when it comes along, feel the solid pressure of it aching in our ribs, patiently, until we notice it and name it. It is in these moments of recognition, where, feeling both solid and buoyed, I find myself most vulnerable. Where the mere whisper of a threat to what I’ve so carefully constructed feels like a storm of wind and rain, ready to send it all crashing to the earth. Everyone feels vulnerable to loss. I think when you have very specific memories and a set of circumstances that surround a past, significant loss, part of you becomes hyper aware of what you can lose, and how it will feel. Part of you becomes an ever-vigilant swarm of hornets, swirling in a confused haze around the nest, looking for threats. People talk about “angry” hornets, or wasps, or bees. They are not angry – they are instinctively protecting their collective heart, the nest, or hive. Yet it is easy to wonder, if our perceived-threat response is hornet swarm, how can we ever feel soothed, and what will it take to feel capable of being happy without feeling overwhelmed by the corresponding fear of its loss? I think back to the forsythia days, and how that was the magical quality. There was no fear of loss; we didn’t know what it was. Happiness and love existed like air and sunshine.

I have spent years trying to teach myself to live in the moment, to not what if my life away, to not swoop and swarm when I fear the world could give way beneath me. In no way have I mastered this. But in some ways, I’m managing to navigate, sometimes. In some ways, it is only the swarm of words that can calm the other swarm. I talk my way through, I write my way through, and I talk some more. I wish it were easier. And I’m ever thankful for being loved in returned, and listened to, with empathy. I’ve also considered that there is another way to think of the swarm that tries to protect me from losing what I love. Rather than thinking of the swarm as the dark shape of past fear protecting me against future loss, it can be viewed as a signifier, one that underscores that this love I have is something worth protecting. Like the dogs in the yard hovering over the nest, and the forsythia blossoms hovering over three little sisters, the swarm says simply, This.

Love, Cath