Falling Away

Grief is an anchor dropping from the bow of my heart, bent on sinking the buoyancy of my spirit. My resistance only toughens its resolve. I cave to its weight. It is a duel of wills based in love and cold facts. I am no match for its power. I find the poison of its position both fascinating and evil. The surreality of its effects are as crippling as the unpredictable sting when the recall of this particularly cruel tragedy taps me on the shoulder. I order an English Breakfast tea at Sullivan Street Bakery. It’s been a week. A young man walks in with an adorably curious French Bulldog, and with crushing strength I hold back brimming tears. I cauterize my cries with a surgical skill. My eyes are wet behind the Hollywood dark Ray Bans I wear. They create the impeccable lie of a guy who hasn’t a trouble in the world.

A day later, I take a fast break from writing at the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library. The abbey like silence to its intellectual purpose isn’t enough to soothe my emotions. I walk to the men’s room. Hot tears stain my face at a urinal that I pretend to use. I need an excuse. Real men never cry. I’ve discovered a secondary appreciation for urinals. They are the perfect cover for expressing one’s emotions to a wall. At the sink I splash water on my face, dabbing it dry with a napkin to prevent blush evidence of my fragility. That evening, I go to dinner. I order a martini, drink it like a pro and engage in normal chat. No one around me has forecast the fog in my head and storm in my heart. I wake each day. I shower. I eat. I engage in life. I appear to the world as normal. I walk outdoors where the atmosphere feels as if it is holding its breath, depriving me of more than just enough to keep me alive yet in pain. The heaviness of me has made the sidewalks too thin. I am unsafe in a duality that has opened a fissure in my identity. I’ve become the master of faking it, present when I am in fact falling away.

Grief feels like a systemic infection. It can settle into parts of your body that ache and tighten. It can migrate from the area of your brain that controls emotions only to return in the strangest moments. Grief is a trauma not unlike suffering from an act of violence. It is a punch to the face every time the startling fact rises that the most unlikely and horrible event has really happened.

Her name was Sydney. I called her Bebe. She was a blue pied French Bulldog, sweet as could ever be at just five. We met when she was three months old. She belonged to my friend Alex who generously shared her with me and our friend José. She existed in a world of travel, luxurious bedding, grooming appointments, playdates, a cadre of toys and organic dog food. She and I played a lot. I grew to believe she saw me as a fellow dog. I petted her incessantly to the point of being told that I was spoiling her. I spoke to her as I would a person. Her head in cute semi-circular twists from left to right as she puppy-signaled me that she was either understanding or at least trying. It was all love and tenderness between us. I also supplied her with chicken heart treats that she was crazy for. My undeterred affections towards her were the rewards for her alluring innocence. When she stayed with me, we slept together. If I awoke in the middle of the night to pee, I would return to my bed finding her seated upright at the edge awaiting my return, as if I would ever abandon her. We would slumber back to sleep in the darkness with sporadic licks from her little tongue against my skin, assuring herself that she was safely with me. I now believe the assurances were for me, she making sure I knew that I was safely with her. In loss, the depth of sorrow is measured by how hard one has loved another, not whether it was a human being or an animal. It is not species-specific. Love is not hierarchal.

Bebe was fawned over by everyone who came across her. She was the dog that elicited the “Oh My God,” from scores of people on the streets of New York, in restaurants, coffee shops and airport terminals. She had the face and curious disposition of an innocent little angel. I loved her as deeply on day one as I did on her last breath five years later. Bebe only experienced love in this world, never a harsh moment in her five short years. The mesmerizing effect she had on everyone makes her sudden absence an unforgivable act of cruelty from God. I’m struggling to reconcile this terrible event. The once beautiful recall of my entering a room and her running to me, releasing small yelps and sweet cries of joy has been replaced by a stigmata of emptiness. It has become a dead zone within me. I pray for a reanimation of sorts.

A few weeks ago, I held her as I always did upon greeting her, rubbing her belly, exchanging kisses with each other, hearing the whistle of air flowing through her narrow nasal passages. Her sweet grunts and purrs from a euphoria that caused her throat muscles to relax when I would pet her. Yet this time, I felt an odd vibration, a quiver from her chest. I paused. Something was off.

Alex brought her to the vet the next morning as a precautionary measure. He had taken her to the vet countless times in his beautiful hyper-protective mode, as he loved her so and wanted her healthy and happy into the longest stretch of her expected lifespan, 10-12 years. He was the most loving dog owner I’ve ever witnessed. In fact, to call her a dog, seems imprecise in my grief. She was a loving young girl who happened to be born as a puppy. I would joke with friends that I’m in love with the most beautiful French girl. She was smaller than most French Bulldogs, and thereby had always appeared as a puppy, even at five years old. This truth imbues her death with an added layer of tragedy. The news from her vet examinations were stunningly grim. It was a cancer I had never heard of with a wickedly evil name, Hemangiosarcoma. I despise that word. It is a word that brought a tsunami of change to each of our lives. It is a cancer that killed Bebe and a piece of me somewhere in the chambers of a magical place only she could access. I avoid looking at the 4,563 photos I have taken of her. The vibrancy of these moments are too raw for me. If I look, I’ll simply break down at a moment when I’m trying hard to pick myself up, which has become every moment. I sleep with her toys. One of them, an inch worm we often played tug of war with, squeaks when I move onto it in the middle of these despairing nights. It brings me comfort.

There’s a tender yet sad short story by the American writer Bret Harte called “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” It’s a particular favorite of mine, written in 1868. It involves the tale of hard living western men mining gold in a newly American California valley. A prostitute lives within the camp of all men, as her services are valued and needed. She becomes pregnant, then dies while giving birth. The baby boy is left for the mining men to care for. None know who the father is, so they all become his father. They name the boy Thomas Luck. They become obsessed with his care, each taking turns in protecting, feeding and raising him. In his innocence, the baby awakens a love and tenderness amongst the hardened men, the likes of which none had ever known. The toughest of the men, Kentuck, develops a particular bond with baby Thomas Luck. A beautiful peace settles over the men until all is destroyed by a sudden flood that tears through the camp taking the life of baby Thomas Luck. Kentuck, heartbroken and barely alive, holds the baby in his arms and allows himself to be swept down the torrent river to be united with baby Luck in death. While I don’t want to join Bebe in death, I dream that I will one day see her again. I am Kentuck who hopes.

This grief I feel is an affliction, not an emotion. Time will heal me as it will Alex and José who are suffering as quietly and deeply as I. It will give way to sadness, which is symbol of hope and a manageable emotion. One day the sadness too will soften. Yet the gift of Bebe in our lives strikes me as a parallel effect that Bret Harte’s baby Thomas Luck had on the hardened men of Roaring Camp. The fictional men, much like us three, became more patient, tender, loving and sensitive through the blessing of an innocence. These now burning days mitigate the pain. There will be a soon future of joy, humor, fun, and inevitably some new sorrows. I have come to see that the beautiful gift of Bebe has a price, as all love does. The brevity of her life has created a wound that I will keep hidden. It will not destroy me. Yet behind every smile and laughter of the grown man I present lies a crushed boy pining to hold and play with Bebe again. Though she was technically never mine, I was and remain forever hers. She now belongs to everyone in a swelling freedom that commands us towards a spirituality I dream will one day answer my teary question…why did such a terrible thing happen to our beautiful Bebe?