Loved and Lost

Note: This is an Linguist-in-Chief Anne-Michelle Tessier guest post of a different stripe. She provided this content warning to go with it:
I wrote this piece in a suburban Asian mall food court, which is a great place to anonymously work and cry for an entire hour in public, FYI. You go into it forewarned that it is about deep and complicated sadness after the death of beloved dogs – but also assured that it is NOT about Howard or Bagel, who are both doing great.

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The other day was the third anniversary of Oscar’s death. He was a hundred-pound light brown golden retriever, whom we bought at 8 weeks old from a sweet-seeming couple living on a farm in the BC interior during the pandemic. He was supposed to be Howard’s younger sibling, to make every day a playdate, like living at the dog park only better. Oscar was chonky and goofy from the start; he sang us songs and found particular joy in stealing steak knives from the dishwasher, and we loved him so much. By his first birthday we were already struggling with his occasional, spasmodic aggression. We worked and practiced with trainers and behaviourists; we got him meds, eventually landing on a three-times-a-day cocktail that did help significantly; we tried to arrange our lives to provide him all the exercise and attention he needed.  

Oscar lived a big bright mostly great life with us till he was 20 months old, when one night he had one of his lightning-fast psychotic breaks. He freaked out at Howard out of absolutely nowhere, attacked and bit my husband when he intervened, and then turned on me as I dragged him out the backdoor, leaving two deep and permanent puncture scars in my upper thigh.  As soon as he was in the backyard, the red veil somehow lifted, his eyes were clear and quizzical looking in at us through the glass door, the remaining three of us panting and shocked. We all realized we could never be safe with him again … and that he wasn’t safe either, from his sudden vicious demons, and what if we rehomed him and then he got injured in an unexpected fight, or he killed a child with the kind of bites he had given us…

And so the next morning we took him to the vets we trust, who had been through so much with him and us already then, and by 10am he was gone. That was March 24, 2022, and I can still barely bring myself to type it here. I can say that he did not suffer, that he was typically absurd and playful until he simply lay down between our laps on the floor and went to sleep, and even now I feel my vomit rising into a scream for having killed this huge and most trusting derp of a sick dog that we could not save.

… That is one kind of grief and trauma.

There is another kind, that hangs as a different cloud over the death of our previous dog Hildy, who died at twelve and half years old in January 2019 very soon after we moved across the continent to start new lives in a new country. She was my husband’s life partner for many years while we humans lived in different time zones, and she was the dog who cured my fear of dogs; she was unique in a million soulful ways and there will never be another dog as best as her. Hildy had been diagnosed the previous November with a cancer that we knew would kill her, probably sooner than later, but she had a round of chemo and she enjoyed the roadtrip (always loved the smells of a novel bedroom) … Yet, again I find now I cannot type at any length about her last two days, where she was disoriented and awake at night, staring painfully at the unfamiliar walls – and so while we had already been making plans with local oncologists, we instead had to take her to a vet’s office where we were unknown, and stand either side of her on a gurney with her forehead pressed into us, as her beautiful heart stopped.

The trauma of Hildy’s death is in some ways more typical but also more complex, wrapped up in life changes and the desire for safety, for familiarity, for wanting to feel like she was going… home? I don’t believe in a heaven, though god fucking knows I wish dogs could have one. Her ashes are still with us here, but I wish we could bury some of them on the Northern Tier trails of our old Michigan apartment, so many thousands of miles away now.

On the third anniversary of Oscar’s death, a woman asked me “How old are they?” in the PetSmart parking lot. I gestured at their faces through the car windows: “He is six and a half, and she is almost three; very big brother–little sister energy”. I looked at the woman’s eyes and placed the note I’d heard in her voice and knew -- “I just lost my dog of many years” she said, “and now I see dogs that look like her everywhere and I have to ask…”

“I know”, I said. “I’ve been there, I understand, I know.” We nodded silently, walking in parallel, me into the pet store and her off somewhere else.

I was grateful that my memories are no longer so fresh. But I am jealous that her memories are still so fresh. This is the third trauma, I have realized in the intervening days: the things I cannot bear to write, even more than the tragedies of their deaths, are the things I can’t quite remember about Oscar and Hildy anymore.

I cannot tell you about them. But I know, I have to believe, that in some way I still remember them all.