♥ If I had a daughter, I would tell her what a funny thing love is, how it never looks the way you think it’s going to, how no matter how old you get, it is love that keeps surprising you. How in the songs sometimes it involves beaches and champagne and chocolate-covered roses, but in real life it is just a prematurely balding man standing in a drought-dried field telling you that he loves you, and that you should do whatever on earth you want.
But I don’t have a daughter. I have dogs instead, and they know more about love than anything.
♥ She cries and cries every day now. Howard is doing his best, but he’s not a natural caretaker. Rose is trying in her way too, and it warms my heart to see her do it so badly, a hedonist in Joan of Arc’s clothes. My human is trying to keep me here, with hundreds of photos, with thousands of words. I know the worrying doesn’t do my tumors any good, but what she is feeling now is my responsibility. I convinced her to give me her heart, lock stock and barrel, in a way that she had never given it before, and she gave it. That is a good thing. It is, perhaps, the only thing, but now her heart will have to break. I pray my future niece will have inherited some of my qualities, will demonstrate them even in puppyhood, I whisper her name in my human’s ear at night, whether to ease her mind or mine I cannot say.
♥ Dante is still with me, sort of up and to my left. I’ll never hear that big tail thwacking again, never feel his big grey chest roll toward me in sleep, but what I have instead is everything he taught me, like how without loss, life isn’t worth a hill of bean. And without love, life is nothing more than a series of losses.
When I’ve lost people in the past, my mom or Jackson, Jonathan or Esther Robinson, or even people who didn’t die but just left, it was different. Because once they were gone it felt like there was nothing left of me, or maybe there was, but I didn’t know it. I thought that if the people I loved disappeared I would disappear too, and now I see that’s why Dante was always looking and looking at me, so I’d know that I really do exist, and could keep on existing after he was gone.
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Sight Hound by Pam Houston.
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chipper
