A hundred hairpin heartbreaks
Links is taking a brief hiatus.
Jason came home a day before I did to mop our grief off of the floors. Fold it back into the linen cabinet. Hide it in cupboards and basements and drawers.
He moved the dog’s bed somewhere; I haven’t seen it. There’s a Magnolia-for-Target planter in its place. Our house smells of cologne, something dark and spicy, sprayed to mask the scent of rubber gloves and catheter bags and sardines and antiseptic — the fog of our girl’s final days.
This is what Jason could not know to do: He did not open my computer. He did not ex-out of my last 50 tabs, each a desperate, screaming question with no possible answer. “Imaging and surgical outcomes of spinal tumors in dogs.” “Spinal lymphoma dog prognosis.” “Featured clinical trials at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine.”
I had not previously known this about myself — not having to know it then — but my first instinct, when confronted with a crisis, was to beat it back with information. I knew all the reference doses, all the likely differentials, all the academic backgrounds of the vets who treated her; and in a day, it came to nothing. Less than nothing. I feel a tiny, hairpin heartbreak — one of many hundreds — when I come home that first day and turn on my computer.
Links is going on a brief hiatus now. It is, most proximately, because I lost my dog, and I want more time to read and do the things I need to be okay with that. It is also, less directly, because this experience has caused me to reevaluate my values and my work, and I also want to sit with that a little. (How many times did I skip walks with this dog I loved so fucking much so that I could write this stupid newsletter?)
I do plan to return, and soon, but I’m not putting myself on a timeline just yet. In the meantime: Thanks for your compassion and your patience — to my advertisers, in particular, who were *unfailingly* kind as I blew past the dates you booked for ads.
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What I read this week
… this is a departure from our regularly scheduled (read: fun! upbeat!) links, since I haven’t spent much of the past week on the internet. But I was straight-up unsettled by the eerie timing of this New York Times’ piece on resilience and losing a pet.
This is also a lovely essay on grieving a pet in the pandemic, by Deborah Copaken in The Atlantic. I’m really interested in animal cognition right now, and am reading a lot about what dogs feel and how we study that. On a slightly different note, I took two days off to care for Dory at the end, and two days to mope around and drink too much after she was gone. It’s sad but utterly predictable that, while about half of Americans own pets, few workplaces accommodate this type of loss.
Finally: This and this (neither paywalled) both helped me understand my own devastation, which has been greater than I expected. And I expected to be crushed. As a side note: I’m surprised by the apparent lack of rigorous, thoughtful stories on the science of pets and grief. Please get in touch if you’re an editor interested in this topic.
The biggest balm, however, has been messages from our family and friends who loved Dory, too. Hug the ones you love today, everybody. I’ll be back soon.
Warmest virtual regards,
Caitlin