Anna and Troy’s Weblog

Saturday July 11, 2009

Dear Booda:

This morning we woke up to a thunderstorm and pelting rain, which we needed badly. I am sure that you remember; the back yard has been horribly dry and brown for the last couple of weeks. But I am so grateful that your last days were sunny days.

I have to look up all the “phases of grieving” because I think that there might be something to it all. I have definitely felt sadness, denial, anger, bargaining…..is hysteria one of the phases? I am not sure how many phases there are, which order they are supposed to come in, or what it is all supposed to mean. After time, I think that you are supposed to finally come to “acceptance.”

Well I can tell you, we aren’t there yet.

My goal for today is to not cry quite as much as I cried yesterday. That seems like a good goal.

The grief of your loss is overwhelming. I suppose I can feel lucky that I have not had much experience in grief. Perhaps that is why the weight of this grief seems so monumental – just my lack of experience. On the other hand, it is likely that just IS that monumental. Daddy feels the crippling weight of it too, and he has experienced more death and loss in his life than I have. In fact, I am a little worried about Daddy. He is in a lot of pain, and processing it in his typical quiet way. He said yesterday that he isn’t sure he remembers EVER being “sucker punched” like this.

I suppose that is the risk in truly loving an animal. You are so unconditional, and the complete unabashed adoration of your love gives your people permission to love you back in that same way. The walls come down, and the love has a pure holistic innocence that is often not seen in human to human love stories. That naked emotion leaves us unwittingly vulnerable. I don’t think that we, especially Troy, were conscious of or prepared for the ramifications of that vulnerability.

One of the things that I feel very strongly right now is a great frustration – I want everyone to understand what a BIG DEAL this is, what a BIG DEAL you are. It makes me frustrated and angry that very few people will really understand the incredible impact your loss is having on this family. That they don’t understand what a special and wonderful spirit you were, and what a monumental and tragic wound your death is to us – not just to us, to the cosmic order of things. It is just SO WRONG, and there aren’t capital letters big enough or words eloquent enough for me to appropriately convey the measure of the wrong-ness, the intensity of the impact.

We have several friends, fellow dog/animal Lovers (love with the capital “L”), whose words and deep empathy have been of great comfort to us – they GET IT. When I called Grandma to tell her, she immediately started to sob. The Rosases represent a long line of dog lovers. I felt bad that I had made her cry and I felt bad that she felt bad that she didn’t know what to say – really there is nothing to say, but she understood, and she cried with me. We cried for ourselves and we cried for you. Maybe that is how hearts start to heal.

I write to you for myself, as part of my grieving process. I write to you for Troy and for Emerson, so that our family’s memories are preserved. I write to you because maybe, just maybe – just in case, if I actively throw our love for you out into the cosmos, you will somehow feel just a little bit of it. And you will know that for this brief life, you were in exactly the right place, at the exactly right time – that you were born into this family. I write to you because my greatest fear is forgetting – forgetting some small, but ever important idiosyncrasy or nuance of you, something that will eventually become the impetus of a funny story or a cherished memory. I want to write down all of the things that we can remember, so we can always remember them.

One night last winter, when I was really pregnant with Emerson, you and Max got out of the back yard. Daddy and I were watching TV in the living room and you two were playing outside. When we realized that we hadn’t heard the appropriate amount of racket from you, we went outside and realized you were gone. Panic ensued. Daddy ran around the neighborhood like a mad man for several hours looking for you. Lesley and Jody came to help track you down. It was dark and the first really really cold snowy night of the winter. A lady two subdivisions down eventually called us about Max. She found him playing with her dogs in her invisible fenced in yard, but you came back ON YOUR OWN.

I was standing outside in the driveway, freezing my big pregnant butt off, and all of a sudden, there you were, a couple blocks down, your little black doggy silhouette trotting down the sidewalk towards the house. I screamed, “BOODA!” Daddy heard me, and by the tone in my voice knew that we had found you, or more accurately, that you had found us. I ran towards you, and for a moment you froze, like “Oh my God. I am in BIIIIIIGGGGG trouble.” Then when you realized that I was not angry at you, you started running towards me full tilt boogie. By the time we got to each other your Daddy was rounding the corner behind me. After greeting me with relief and enthusiasm, you barreled past me, sprinting the last half a block towards him, almost knocking him down in your excitement. “Thank GOD, I found my way home!” you seemed to say.

That night was one of the WORST nights. We were so worried, so completely panicked, so unbelievably grateful that it all turned out alright, that we got both of you back. But that image of you, running towards me at full throttle through the snow – so happy, so relieved, is one of my FAVORITE memories. It comes to me often, any time that I am pulling out of our driveway in the car and driving down that little stretch of road. Now I think about it all the time, that picture I have in my mind of you – of the three of us, reunited on the sidewalk.

(As a side note: You found your way home first, before the nice lady called about Max. When we brought you inside, you paced and paced the house – wondering where Max was. When we finally brought him home, maybe an hour later, you were ecstatic to see him and immediately stopped your nervous pacing.)

So I will keep writing, until I feel better, and I until I am sure that I haven’t missed anything important.

Love,

Mommy (Daddy, Emerson, & Max too)