RIP, Pinky
In which Jill remembers a dog who defied the odds.
In the morning, somewhere between skimming your work email and signing into a Zoom call, you check your social media. You scroll through vacation pictures, pregnancy announcements, and ads for alchemic powders to sprinkle in your coffee.
You pause at an RIP post in which a friend announces the loss of her beloved dog. You type a short condolence, capped with the cliché of a rainbow emoji. It’s become part of your quotidian routine.
Amidst the sympathy, a twinge of gratitude: Thank God, it’s not our turn.
And then one day, it is.
There are few surprises when you take on a 10-year-old pit bull with a pendulous mammary mass the size of a cantaloupe. After a complicated surgery, she was given 3 months to live. That was in 2019.
We said goodbye this week.
Of course, the grief takes you down. The vacant dog bed. The silence, no longer pierced by old-dog snoring. Pill bottles, arranged like tiny soldiers on the mudroom counter. The liver treat subscription from Amazon, arriving an hour after the vet leaves the house with her body. Used wads of Kleenex floating in the sheets, inadequate for the nighttime waves of grief.
I’m prone to magical thinking. A small yellow bird, one I’d never seen before, alights on the sill of my office window. Is it her? I sprinkle the remaining water from her bowl on a potted begonia. The flowers will have her DNA. A secular humanist, I insist that the rainbow bridge is real. It has to be.
The routine changes. There’s extra time in the day. My attention span is jagged. I try to make myself smile, hoping it will change my brain chemistry. I tell myself that an upcoming trip will do the trick, especially since there’s no dog at home to worry about. The house seems so empty. But anhedonia has pulled up a chair.
“We never get over it. We just get used to missing them,” I tell bereaved friends. I’m far from that place. My workaday life is an island I don’t want to swim to.
German poet Lisel Mueller wrote:
“What exists, exists so it can be lost and become precious.”
I wonder if it was all worth it.
Of course it was.
Of course it IS.
Rest in peace, Pinky. I’ll see you in the flowers.
