love came first
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 love you I love you I love you. I carried her collar out of the vet, my heart flattened, paralyzed, spent the next few days simply staring, stubbornly unwilling to try and process that my Moo, miss Molly, moozle girl, my teeny tiny little butter croissant, making me laugh every single day with her Tina Turner hair and her indignant little grunts, was gone.
And then. And then. Not three weeks later, Graham had a stroke.
You don't move on after loss. The last few years have given me quite the unwelcome master class in grief, how it hops onboard, joins you for the ride, is now a constant companion, forever. I'm good in a crisis, I can usually - not always - keep my shit together enough to calmly move forward into the difficult decisions of the moment. It's later, when the time comes to sit still and allow myself to feel the brutality, the bare anger of being alive, that I fail. After losing Molly, I was dealing with a medical issue of my own that had me traipsing from doctor to doctor to Santa Monica at 9:45pm for a stat as in right-the-fuck-now-we-are-doing-this MRI to a surgeon to a surgery. Graham spent most of his life cheerfully following in my wake, doing what I do. He sat next to me on the bath mat while I brushed my teeth; when I was done, we would have Grammy hugs, I'd kiss him on the ear and say, good morning I love you. I hurt when he hurt; he was strong when I was weak, as constant as my own goddamn northern star, he would never have left my side, he spent his whole life prancing along next to me, there when no one else was. So when I couldn't lift anything, or really walk all that well or far, it was both ironic and tragically unsurprising that I woke up one morning to find he had vomited and lost his bowels and couldn't move either. I called one of my neighbors who carried him down to the car so I could rush him to the emergency vet, terror-stricken, not again not again please God not him too not now I can't I can't I can't.
But you can. You do. Because so often in life, you must.
Loving something - anything - as deeply and completely as Graham taught me how to love, it is an act of courage in this world. How different, how drab and uncolorful it all would have been otherwise. These old dogs, the good dogs, my peaceful library puppies. I had no idea, when I decided to bring him home, that I was making a choice that would shift the trajectory of my entire life. How much I would learn, how huge my heart would grow, how watching them get old would change me, finally teach me a little bit about how love could be given and maybe even received with gentleness instead of daggers and shards and shots fucking fired. I could see my failures so much more clearly, because of the way I loved my dogs. It pressed me to want to be better, more patient; in coming to realize the fragility of their existence, my soul twists with remorse about all the ways I've failed in love before. I know, now, how rare it is, and to experience it even once with Graham somehow makes up for all the times I've poured love out, flawed and impossible but trying my damnedest, and the world has wrenched me in half or maybe even just backed away slowly, hands raised, I'm sorry, I can't, gotten in the car, driven away.
People say this thing, I've probably said it myself at some point: we leap because we aren't afraid to try. I think that's wrong, it's not about being fearless (it might be about being stupid), I think it's about being fully entirely completely aware of how fucking terrifying the world is, and leaping anyway. Losing Sofie, living through the emotional devastation of coping with her death, spending weeks wanting nothing more than to run shrieking from how much I was feeling, it was peeling shards directly off my stupid heart - even after surviving that, I still brought Annie home (then nearly had a nervous breakdown from crate training; I will learn nothing from this). Grief comes from love that can't be given, sorrow for an absence, raw and new. Grief is hell, and I would know. Losing Molly and Graham, I'm not only grieving them now. Somehow these twin deaths have flipped over a rock and the wriggling putrid worms of everything I've lost have come alive again, chewing and screeching and gnawing with their sharp little grief teeth, yanking it all up from where I had carefully buried it in the ground, my husband my babies my family my dogs. My entire identity, I never truly understood how precarious it all was. Grief. It's incomprehensible how enormous it is in these moments, it's too much to bear, I cannot bear it. But also, grief is here now, because love came first. Love came first.
By the time we got to the vet, Graham couldn't walk at all. Someone came out and carefully wrapped him in a towel and carried him, my big butt huffalump, my darling, inside. We curled up on the same couch in the same room where I had only just said the same devastating goodbye to Molly. I talked to him quietly, said all the things he already knew in his bones, what I'd spent all these so many miles showing him, love is a verb. It had all been said, but to be fortunate enough to know this would be the last time - I haven't always gotten that chance, with someone I've loved. He dozed off in my arms, and with very little fanfare, simply just - stopped breathing. All these mountains we've moved, the tennis balls we've chased, all those times we fought for each other, the dragons I've thrown for him alone, when he collapsed on a walk and my friends helped me carry him, how my arms ached for days and I welcomed it, fourteen years of realizing that a critically important chunk of my soul was now living outside of my body, it drifted slowly, gently, with a sigh, to a stop. The room stilled to a pinpoint of pain, balanced in the overwhelming hush of his absence, and the astonishing tearing sound that came up out of me - I've heard it only one other time. I knelt down and told him, one last round, a lifetime of prancing forevers, Mr. Graham, it was the greatest honor of my life, to be so loved by you.
And if Graham could talk, once he was done asking for a car wash and a dragon and a wrestling match with Annie, I know what he would whisper back to me. The honor, mamas, was mine.