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love came first

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It started with Molly getting picky about her food. The details don't so much matter, but here we are anyway. I took her to the vet. A huge mass, an urgent surgery, the relief when the call came, we think we got it all!  And then. Another restless night, a pre-dawn trip to the emergency vet, a heart arrhythmia and cancer that had spread aggressively to her liver, everywhere, thieving away her last days, dying from the inside out. She came home, one last night. Four dogs tucked up in bed, her elephant snores, my eyes filling with tears again and again, unable to believe that we were here. We all went to the beach the next morning, shattered, a cruel litany in my head, this is the last time I will have four dogs at the beach/in the drive-thru getting them vanilla ice cream/on a walk/at the park/on the couch/under the sunshine/in my arms.  I wanted to bring her joy until those worst last moments, when I could help her quietly pass on. I stayed with her until the end, whispering, I lov
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pure white stars, a wild navy sky

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People often ask, when I share that I lost another baby, how many is it for you, now?   I try to explain quickly, to get up-over-and-through the place where sharp shards of sympathy rake across the nothing that's left of my rotten and ruined heart. It's easier to speak lightly, to smile and change the subject, to pretend there's really no difference between losing three or four or five babies, as if at some point I can simply roll them all up together into one massive, tremulous loss, where the pain is no longer exponential but eerily familiar, the tick tock  of the grandfather clock, you're alone, you're alone, you’re alone, everything, always, on your own. I don't know how to talk about it; hell, I don't even know how to write about it anymore, my bothersome passion for snarky compound sentences and adverb abuse has completely deserted me. For months, there's been nothing but a cursor slowly blinking on a wretched blank page, because what could there p
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a garden that’s bursting into life

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Here’s to jeans with a blazer, to furry barking happiness, to something in my life finally working out just a teeny tiny bit the way I hoped it might. Here’s to moving forward. Here’s to being brave enough to try, to leap, to love as deeply as I do. Here’s to getting back in the classroom, here’s to Annie sneezing sand in my face until the end of time,  here’s to a garden that’s bursting into life. Here’s to eternal sunsets over the ocean, here’s to letting the world change you, here’s to doctor Katie. Here’s to joy. 
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it was worth all the while

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Graham spent the first year of his life as an 'only child' dog. He didn't know how to bark until Molly showed up, fourteen pounds of absolute chaos that tried to pull his ears off and stole his toys and collapsed on top of him panting after romping madly and muddily through the backyard. In truth, I was afraid to bring her home, because I thought my love for Graham had taken up all the extra space available in my heart. I was worried that the only way to love her would be stealing some away from him. But what I've since shared with everyone who seeks out my counsel as the unofficial Should I Get Another Dog spokeswoman, and more importantly, what I've learned from the decade I've lived in Colorado, is that love doesn't work like that, boneheads. Love is an infinite resource, it is the most durable power in the world. It sounds overly simplistic, but it's true. Share it freely and more will twine up around you, love beams back, a joyful boomerang of plent
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