Once in a while since Gus died on November 4, 2004 I will spend a whole day and night without tears. Not today, not yesterday and not for several days now.
Waves of sorrow well up and clog my breath and I sob aloud. Tears flood my vision 'til there's nothing to see but the empty places where Gus used to love to be.
When I sob like that it's like I've dived too deep in a limitless tide of bewilderment, I am lost in a feeling so intense I choke on my own air.
When he was still with me his immediate response to whatever sadnesses made me sob was to rush to my side, eyes filled with concern.
Each time this happened was another complete and multiple surprise to me: one, that he seemed to know exactly how much I needed comforting and two, how astoundingly immediate, how eager and willing he was to provide the support, the warm quick nuzzle of contact, a gesture of encouragement and instantaneously broken briefest token touch of comfort.
He'd touch my arm with his nose so gently. Every time it was a kind of shock, whether warm or cold, that unmistakeable tenderness, something I have never before known. Such love.
Yes, I am grateful. And, yes, the knowledge of how wonderfully precious was Gus; how incredibly lucky I was to have had him in my life at all does indeed continue to humble me.
Yes, but. I am continuing to be utterly lonely for him. This, more than anyone or anything else I have ever lost. Losing Gus is the deepest psychic pain I've ever been given to face.
Maybe my pain has been doubled due to the timing of his death. The first week of November, this year, has marked yet again, the final days of my mother's life. Yearly, thirty-three times now, this time frame has been a nearly unendurable ordeal but I have now this new sadness, this latest loss to add to that.
It's become too big, so heavy. The cumulative pain is increasingly hard to bear, instead of gradually abating it's weight exhausts me daily, eats my energy, slows my steps, confounds my plans.
Sleep or other diversions like reading or television or movie-going, taking long walks --- all these are like drugs I look to for respite from my grief. As soon as I wake, when I close the book, turn from the other things that I try to escape within, there it is again. It comes rolling in and surrounding me, a grief storm, an murky tide, the volume easily as big as a Great Lake, but compacted and pressing on me, downing my feeling state, restricting my mind, placing pressure on my heart, my ears, catching at my breath.
My decision to take home the little black lop-eared puppy that Gus had met in his last days was a hesitent one. I kept thinking it was too soon to take another one into my life, that maybe I would never again be able to commit to another little four-footed creature.
But, just as Gus had tolerated that little wiry fur bundle of puppy growls and squeaks fussing at him, just as it had grabbed at his harness and hung off him like he was some kind of a walking trapeze, just as Gus had seemed to like him and enjoy his playfulness, I found that this pup brought back a nowness to my world. His little dog happiness jogs me back to here, jars me out of the never, no more and only then of Gus, to the now completely present reality of KoBe the Dobie dog...such a silly little, happy little pit bullish pup.
This pup's intensity at play takes me, with an almost rude momentary reality, I want to say momentareality. These encounters with insistent life take me out of myself and thrust me back into the present moment's laughter, these minute, briefest of short whiles are definite, certain absolutely positive comforts. Talk about mood swings. I've become an emotional trapeziate. Shove those antidepressants up your black bags you pill pushers. This, as hard as it is, this is life.
KoBe perforates my deepest sadnesses, even if it is only sporadically. The little black freaky-toed dog daily makes something else of my mournfulness. He turns what feels like a heavy shroud into a kind of scratchy black lacery fabric of grief...torn, tugged at with warm struggles, insistent bites, deep throaty squeals and gutteral noises bespeaking insistent delight. He gloms onto me like some kind of fur barnacle, each scratch stings me back to myself and to the present. Never breaking the skin but feeling like I must be bloody from it I am repeatedly amazed. It's just his way of reminding me that we are both still here and alive. By this means I am required to notice his not being Gus my normally pensive even occasionally remote and often reflective, not even slightly contemplative Gussy Dog. Not KoBe, who is so much like himself, himself demanding that I be me, now.
What, meanwhile, can I say that will lighten this weight on my heart, while that little dog sleeps so deeply, invading my own pillow and dropping like a lead weight onto my blanket and my arm and whose corpuscles are relentless builders of hard young muscle to the end of making the increasingly larger body that will eventually be himself?
What will ultimately prevent the lace of my grief from repeatedly returning to the rough texture and wholely impenetrable dark cloak of pain, that surrounds me again and again? So far? What? My own death? Nothing, it seems, not a dog-gone fucking thing.