Loss

I

We talked about death over Mexican food. A council of mariachi figurines looked over us benevolently. I asked, 

“Do you guys believe in an afterlife?”

It felt strange to bring up the question after spending every Sunday of my childhood and adolescence sitting in pews and singing about salvation with my family, but it had been 5 years since we sat in a church together and longer since it felt right to do so. 

My dad spoke first, 

“I don’t know. It sure is a beautiful thought though”

“I do”, said my mom. “When I was in the hospital I felt like I was in a train station with a bunch of people and their pets, waiting to go somewhere.”

My mom had spent several days in a space between life and death. 

My brother said nothing. I asked him again and he said, “I don’t know.”

I admitted a truth I had been trying to burying for most of my life, 

“I don’t know either.” 

“Once he died you could tell his body wasn’t him,” said my mom. “I still gave him kisses on his little face before we said goodbye. The woman said she would take good care of him and get his pawprint for us.”

I thought about my parents’ tear streaked faces coming to hug us outside the animal hospital. I thought about my brother and I walking through an empty business district on a cool afternoon, picking up dead maple leaves and talking about what it had meant to love an animal in the form of stories. Mostly, I thought about sweet dog’s ragged breath and loose skin when I held him for the last time. Cancer had ravaged his small body. His precious soul in an expiring container. I cried into his fur and kissed his hollow face. 

“We are definitely more than the sum of our parts,” said my dad between bites of rice. “There is a ghost in the machine.”

I let the need for certainty slip away. 

My dad continued, “a lot of people avoid loving anything because they are afraid to lose. They don’t have pets, or serious relationships, the potential loss is too hard.”

A man on the sidewalk had come up to me a few days prior, seeing sweet dog on his feeble legs barely able to stand while I looked down at him, wanting him to enjoy some air for one of the last times. The man had wrinkled eyes and looked on at us in fondness, emitting an unusual warmth for someone in California. He told me he lost his golden retriever to cancer five years ago and the loss was so hard he hasn’t had a dog since. He said that he still misses her.

I have lost quite a bit in the short span of a summer season. At times I feel soffocated in grief, so much so that I am scared to sleep in fear that I will actually stop breathing under the weight on my chest. Often I am so inspired by my fortitude, proud that I have had the courge to love things worth the pain of losing that I can’t bear to be still. Either way, I haven’t been sleeping.  

I swear I still see him from the corner of my eye, hear him padding down the hallway. I instinctively look for him. Nothing I have lost is ever far from skirting the edges of my current reality.