OK. So, should I mark my calendar for July and hope the despair would just drop away? Like magic?
“Does anyone have something they’d like to share?” Sandra said. “Remember, you don’t have to speak if you aren’t able to.”
A middle-aged man across the circle from me spoke up. “My dog Louie got out of the house and disappeared. He hadn’t been acting like himself for the days before, but he’d never run away before. He just never came back. I didn’t know what to tell my kids. I didn’t know if Louie had passed away that night.”
The man began to sob. “I didn’t know if he was out there alone, trying to get back home.”
He took a moment to regain his composure. “We put up posters all over town with his picture. We put together a reward, even. But it’s been a month now. I don’t think Louie’s coming home.”
I cried openly then, lowering my head, trying hard not to sob. Sandra passed around a box of Kleenex.
“We feel your pain,” Sandra said gently.
I swore after all the crying I’d done over the past year, I would start carrying a handkerchief. Maybe something embroidered with my initials. With lace on the bottom.
“My cat Paisley went out one night and didn’t come back like she always did in the morning,” an older woman said, clinging to the handle of her straw pocketbook. “I left food out for her, but I had to go volunteer that morning at the food pantry. When I came home that afternoon—it was just a few hours later—Paisley was at the back door, already…already passed away. She had tried to come home to me to say goodbye, but she was too weak to make it up the back steps. She was all curled up in a ball, looking more like a doll, or something else, not my Paisley anymore.”
I closed my eyes, feeling her pain. We were all connected by grief.
“I watched my little pug Gracie get hit by a motorcycle,” said a man wearing a fly-fishing baseball cap. “Middle of the day; the douchebag never even stopped to see what he ran over. My little girl landed on the curb and was gone before I even got to her.”
“Can we talk about the stupid things people say after we lose our dogs and cats?” the man with the baseball cap asked. “Like, ‘Time to get a new one to replace it.’”
“Or ‘Someone needed a new pet in heaven,’” spoke up a woman wearing a long gauze skirt. “Or ‘It was just their time.’”
It was quiet in the room for a moment. I looked at the pet posters on the wall.
A young woman smoothed her hair with shaky hands before she spoke. “I got home and found my black lab Toddy lying with his sister’s body. He refused to move away. He growled at us when we tried to touch her. My husband had to pry him off her. We cried, all three of us, all night long.”
“Animals can sense even before we can that a member of their pack is ill,” Sandra said. “They frequently sit and wait with them to bear witness as they pass away.”
“I’m not sorry her brother stayed with her, because I never wanted her to die alone,” the young woman said. “But now Toddy is mourning right along with us, and we want him to feel better.”
“Are his sister’s things still around—her toys, blankets, dog bed?” Sandra asked. “It might be easier on Toddy if you put those things away for now, because they all smell like his sister, and he may be still waiting for her to come back home.”
“I kept my dog’s ashes in the car for a year, because he always loved going for a ride,” said a woman who had been silent until now. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get another dog.”
“You may need to wait years before you can love another pet, and welcome it into your home,” Sandra said. “Remember, every pet is unique; you will never replace your lost pet with an identical new one.”
We all nodded in agreement.
“I have the ashes of many pets I’ve had during my life,” Sandra said. “I’ve told my kids when I die, mix our ashes all together and scatter us in the ocean.”
The young couple holding hands, both of them openly crying, said they started their cat Sassy on chemo after finding a lump on her belly. She was from a feral litter. Their mail carrier had seen a hawk swoop down and take one of the kittens. But their kitten had been rescued.
“Feral cats have shorter lives,” Sandra said. “You gave Sassy the best possible life she could ever wish for. She would never have had a family on the streets.”
The hour-long meeting ended after Sandra invited all of us to the next meeting two weeks later. I gathered up my coat and walked out with some of the others.
“See you next time?” the woman who’d had the feral cat asked me.
“See you then,” I answered.
I started the engine in my car and put on my seatbelt but left it in park. I watched through the window as Sandra finished stacking the chairs in a utility closet and turned out the lights in the rec room.
Lights on. Lights off. Lights off.
“I miss you,” I said out loud, quietly at first but then my voice swelled into a wail. “I MISS YOU!” I screamed at the top of my lungs over and over, tears running down my face until my voice became a whimper.
“I miss my girl,” I whispered into the night.
83
One week later, Eddie, the kids and I picked up a small paper bag with a handle tied with raffia. It wasn’t at all heavy. We carried it into the kitchen and set it
