May the Lawns be Green and the Sun Warm on Your Fur

Tonight our Molly, our dog, who was our family for fourteen and a half years, fell asleep -- asleep asleep.

I felt sick leaving her on the linoleum floor, as we opened the veterinarian's door and exited, too quickly, undramatically. I wanted slow motion visuals and music with minor chords.

My dad wept, but I wouldn't even know how to do that. Out of practice I guess.

I feel no agony for her. She went peacefully. Just, awake one minute, asleep the next. You could see her abdomen cease struggling against the tumors in her lungs. Calmly, quietly she went. And then we went, without her.

If I feel any loss it's in the spaces she carved in our lives over a decade and a half. Spaces she created -- and thus spaces only she fills. Tonight, for the first time in 15 years, I ate a sandwich without her waiting, eyes and ears alert, for any crumb that I might offer. I considered sleeping on the couch beside the fire, but she didn't join me downstairs like she had every time since we moved to this house a decade ago.

Still, it's difficult to ignore Kurt Vonnegut's pragmatism now. "So it goes," he wrote after witnessing more death than any of us would care to. It's a truth that kept him sane. And yes, I agree: the world turns, our cells replicate, then mutate. That's decay. It kills us, all of us, every living thing. Or something else does first.

But it doesn't help me wrap my mind around permanence. That the spaces Molly formed in our lives will always remain empty. That it will take me months to break the habit of getting home and calling for her. That I can never recall her to my side to see her bright eyes or hear the roar with which she announced that she was ready to play.

Permanence haunts me in my drafty Castle Rationale. She's gone, and that leaves a void in me. Which is why death bothers us, right? And divorce, and foreclosure, and graduation. People, pets and places act as cues, as keys to our memories. Without them we can't get the whole memory. They carry parts of our selves, and take them with them when they go. Or when we go. Even if we reunite, we miss other pieces of the memories, or have new contexts that compel us to interpret them differently. We only have now. All else is inaccessible. My Molly, her, now, I cannot reach again.

Emily Dickenson wrote: That it shall never come again is what makes life so sweet.

And as I recently wrote:

I will chisel an Epitaph to my Home:

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Again, again, again, again: that's it, right there. The impossibility of an Again.

With what words do we conclude?

Adieu: To God? I don't know. Is there a soul?

Au revoir: Til we meet again? No, the impossible Again.

Bonne nuit: Good night?

Dors bien: Sleep well?

Yes, that. Fais de beaux rêves. Make beautiful dreams, Molly. I'm sorry to see you go.