run this amazing day

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

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