In the memory of my dear, beloved dog

How do you grieve? I usually just laugh it off.

Trigger Warning: The story contains themes of grief and loss + strong language.

Light falls like it never does, not too much, not too little. The perfect amount of sun-drizzle, perking up the hair on his face, his brown eyelashes, the honeyed cosmos in his eyes – ripples and ripples of golden light, like heaven engulfed itself into him.

My brother sits on a wooden adirondack, staring at me, petulant and sharp-jawed. Not a single ray of light on my side in this garden. A piercing silence between us, a bright blue sky above, some seagulls dropping mussels and diving to save them in an infinite process. The breeze, cool enough to keep us tempered, but not let us forget that, this morning our dear, beloved dog had passed away. 

Now, this news, of our dear, beloved dog - Tom - had made it to us in the most cumbersome way. Not through an emotional phone call, but a public announcement by our father on an extended family group chat, and an unexpectedly horrifying image of Tom’s very dead body wrapped in his favourite blanket, sent by our mother. 

While these are not moments that phase me, they do horrify my brother. Do not worry about the age gap, that has nothing to do with our manners. I am the oldest and I still carry a lack of emotional intelligence. For it was not just the sad news that had put my brother in this sullen mood, but also my disgraceful reaction. I had ended up in bouts of laughter and fallen on the floor. 

Something about pure agony is comical to me. I seem to welcome every grief with convulsions, as if the guffawing is going to scare away my pain, and along with it, the reality of what is in front of me: an awful lot of tears I don’t have the courage to confer. 

So, the question in this moment was not, ‘Right so how do we practically get on with our lives with a gaping hole of emptiness that a four-legged, pale, malnourished, mostly moody creature, who consistently scared an angry mob of street dogs and pissed on all our stuff, has left on us?’ – but more of, ‘No. This has not happened at all. Tom was supposed to live forever.’ and a shutdown of all senses. 

And that is fine. A loss is a loss, and with every loss, comes an initial reaction that is a combination of denial, confusion, and disarray. So I look up into the blinding sun rays, and at the silhouette of my brother. 

He has barely moved in the last five minutes, and it is starting to bug me. I know he is upset with me mostly because I am still holding back a chortle or two. ‘You know this is not okay. You should allow yourself to feel sometimes. You’re fucked. Stop laughing,’ was the last thing he had said to me before he gave into his mind’s supercut of all happy memories with Tom. 

I mean, we are so far away in another continent, I can barely convince my mind that this is true. It all seems so false, that it feels mostly funny. It has to be false right? 

I look down at my cold hands, the plate of strawberries bleeding now with blueberry juice, a fly drowning in it, sound of something, a cicada, a grasshopper, a bee, and in that blur, a memory of Tom, when he would jump on the bed and sit next to me, give me puppy eyes and put his paw on my lap till I gave in and got up to give him treats. 

That was about seven years ago. I was at home, in school, things were different then. Tom had been with us for almost fifteen years. Do dogs even live that long? He wasn’t supposed to die, I almost convinced myself that he was immortal. 

And that one time when my parents were fighting, and Tom was sleeping on our bed, and I had an exam due the next day. I told him about all my problems and for the first time, he let me hold him to sleep. Somehow he always knew when I was scared or sad, and he would become kind in those rare moments. 

Tom barely ate anything, but he loved holding onto his treats for midnight snacking. He always said yes to tomatoes and he ate all the skin on milk. He waited by the window every afternoon for our grandfather to come home. It felt like he was older than me sometimes, he protected me, and even though, as a coping mechanism, I will convince myself he and I were never that close, he was the only one who was a living treasure of all my childhood memories. 

Anyway, a grey cloud must have run over the sun, for it has snapped me out of my joyless daydreaming. The garden feels bare with shade, vulnerable and cold from the lack of sun. It exposed what lay behind the silhouette – my now sniffling brother. 

For the first time, without a smile, I look up at him with acceptance and acknowledgement. And this time, he finally looks back at me, with peace. Tom is gone, and we can’t remember the last memory we had with him. So whatever was our final goodbye to Tom, wherever he is now, and however we will process it, eventually it’ll all turn to dust in the end. And next time, I will crack up like that again. 

xxx

Thanks for reading this autobiographical fiction.

Tom (2009-2024)