Our dog, Brian, is still missing. In some ways his long absence has settled in and become part of the past. In other ways it’s more painful. Now when I see an image of him, I feel a stabbing pain in my chest. I hadn’t had any dreams of him since I dreamt of his death until a pair of nights ago, when I dreamt that someone had him and I couldn’t find a way to prove that he was my dog so that they’d be forced to give him back. (In reality he’s micro-chipped and registered to us but dream logic ignores that kind of stuff.) On the lost pet sites, I see dogs found all the time and reunited with their families and wonder what I did wrong, why my furbaby wasn’t found by a kind-hearted stranger and turned in to the Humane Society, or why he didn’t come home on his own.
And because I’m a horrible human being I’m finding ways to incorporate this sense of loss and failure into my fiction. At times I feel like a vulture picking over my own flesh and the flesh of my dog. The fact that I admire vultures and used to study their flying creates further ambiguous and uncomfortable nuances in what is okay for a writer to do, and what crosses what lines. When does a writer stop being genuine? When does a writer become so aware of feelings and how they might be employed in writing that the feelings are no longer truly felt but snatched from the mind and immediately placed under a microscope to be categorized, analyzed, and defined?
OMG I just remembered I have to return a certain book to the library. I was supposed to do that… I’d better do it after I drop off Finn, Brian’s brother, for oral surgery tomorrow morning. He has gorgeous teeth, except that for some reason his gums in the way back in a small patch above one of his teeth have gotten ragged and bloody. And maybe that is the real source of the dream, this sense that I want the universe to see that I’m a good dog owner, that I take care of my animals as well as I can and yet the universe, like the person in the dream, continues to require proof that I deserve to have Brian back.
Which is all irrational, of course. Whatever we deserve or do not deserve, the physics of the universe, especially the socio-political and physical factors of our immediate environment, can not be argued with. Brian is dead, or he’s with someone else. I will or will not see him ever again. What I deserve, and what he deserves, doesn’t come into play at all, except perhaps in the kindness I’ve been shown, the help I’ve received, and the vast number of people who still look for the big white dog because they feel in their hearts that he’d be happier at home with his brother. And even that’s not ‘deserved.’ I didn’t earn any of it. It was given freely by good, well-meaning people who know very little about me beyond my posts, my pleas, and my thanks when someone offers help or has a potential lead.
In a way, I’ve disappeared too. There’s a part of me that’s no longer present, that’s hiding itself while I try to figure out if I’m the woman with the lost dog that will one day be reunited with her pet, a woman mourning a dead dog, or if I’m simply a person with two dogs, Finn and Chase, six goats (we sold four of them recently), five cats (I know, I know, but I’ve been told crazy cat lady doesn’t start until six cats) and a bunch of chickens. Because I’ve had pets since I was a little girl. I remember them all, lovingly, poignantly. But at some point they become a memory. They aren’t this ever-present thing that consumes in tiny bites, this thing that occasionally stabs me through the heart as I drive up the road to my house and see a patch of white snow that might have been a dog like Brian.
Some people call it looking for closure. I think I just want that part of me that’s missing to come back. Until then I’ll be guarding, keeping watch, bracing myself for news that will tell me if I’m supposed to light a candle for Brian and say goodbye, or keep looking.
I’m afraid part of me will always be looking, for Brian, and for the part that got lost along with him.