One year since we said goodbye to our dog Senga.
It feels like a year, and it doesn’t feel like a year. In bed at night, I can easily close my eyes and imagine she’s spread out at our feet, making it impossible for me to straighten my legs. The grind of our ice maker summons up the memory of her climbing off her spot on the couch and lumbering into the kitchen at the sound, even when one of her legs was useless from the massive tumor.
The grief has come in two phases for me, and there are likely more ahead.
The first phase was an inventory of every little thing I lost when I lost her. The persistent white noise of her breathing, the indulgent groans when she’d flop her big body into her bed, the deep a-woos we dubbed the “Senga siren” every time she got excited because we grabbed the leash or came home. The smell of her toes, the texture of her fur, the way she always joined me in the backyard as I gardened and got up early to sleep in the office next to me so that I wouldn’t be alone.
In her last days, I tried to take a tally of everything I missed, but I only caught the obvious things. There was so much more than I could never know until it was gone. We said goodbye to her in our backyard around 8:45 in the morning, and then the inventory began like a gunshot. The first item was the stillness in her paw as I held it through her last breath. The list continued achingly on for weeks, possibly months. There was so much to account for.
In those first few days, I didn’t want to hear anything about her waiting for me in heaven or crossing the rainbow bridge. I felt like fighting everyone who tried to console me. I was intent on living in the reality of the loss: she was gone, and I would never see her again. The thought of filling the fresh hole in my life with platitudes was treachery. I used to believe I understood why people turned to faith and pretty stories to deal with loss, but in those first days, spirituality was the last thing I wanted within a mile of me. Nothing but the brutal truth felt respectful to the moment.
As discovery of the things I’d lost slowed to a trickle, a new phase began. This, too, was an inventory, but not one I’d expected.
I’ve been discovering all the ways she’s still here.
She’s the peacefulness of my office, the lump in my throat, the sound of her siren that still echoes in my chest when I think about her. She’s the face of every fluffy black-and-white puppy I encounter, and her favorite spot in the backyard where she used to flop. She’s every dog who offers me a paw or a pink belly to pet.
She’s still around in the subtraction of all the physical things that were her. I know this not as a spiritual fantasy, but as factual reality. She’s everything that’s left. She’s here.
