Rusty

What a love!

I’m in an empty hospital room outside of London. Not for anything scary thank god- my son is having elective surgery on a torn meniscus and the nurse just wheeled his bed out to collect him from recovery. So it’s now bare in here but for the chair I’m sitting in next to the window and my Diet Pepsi and crisp packet. Not a lot of choices in the vending machine.

My house is empty too. Our beloved dog, Rusty, suddenly and very unexpectedly passed away recently, only a few days after I left for a trip to LA. Devastated doesn’t really describe how I felt. How I still feel. The shock of getting the news from my poor husband left me, both of us really, suspended in the ether where your brain and your heart center can’t quite grasp reality. Like a very long pause of disbelief. And for us, it’s hard not to then add the word…again. Again the reminder that something or someone held so dear to our family can be ripped away from you in a moment’s notice. Again shock and grief. Oh boy.

Rusty is everywhere in my home. It has been both comforting and unnerving when I think I can see the image of him. The same dramatic loss happened to my friend who told me she coped by continuing to talk to her dog. So this morning, when I was the first to wake and would normally take Rusty outside, I did just that. ‘Morning Rusty dog, c’mon let’s go outside.’ I turned my coffee machine on and looked to the side as if he was next to me. I sat looking out at the garden with him at my feet, basking in the slightest bit of sunshine. Joyful rituals turning into pained memories, turning into deep grief, turning into quiet sorrow, turning into a woman talking to herself way too much.

For 12 years that dog literally followed me everywhere. It was our family joke- you’d know if I was in the shower or outside or wherever because Rusty would be sitting there, waiting. Even the day of the fire, his senses were on high alert but he wouldn’t leave my side as I paced all over the place for hours. I must have driven him nuts. Back in London he was the most loved dog of the high street. He’d walk with me into every shop, bank, hairdresser, coffee shop, home goods store. ‘Hey Rusty!’ Treats ready, good vibes shared. ‘He looks so young’ is all I’d hear which is probably why I was surprised when a neighbor said how great he looked for a senior dog. Senior??? Like a woman reminded she isn’t actually a young twenty-something anymore, I was momentarily perplexed.

Losing him in such a sudden way has kept me in that strange in-between stage where I’m not ready to embrace life without him in it. My LA trip was meant to be a shift of energy - my husband with me, seeing the remains of our house, dreaming again for our boys, being with family and friends. But Rusty’s passing seized my heart and I honestly didn’t know how to function. Before one gets to grief, I’ve learned, shock needs to be processed first. I experienced that 24 years ago with my dad leaving us way too early. But this time I chose to compartmentalize it, a new technique for me. Take all of what you’re feeling- recognize there is no space to properly address it- and put it aside for the time being. It’s not denial, denial is an avoidance without admission that the feelings exist so potently. Rather, it’s an active placing aside, not a push under a rug, strategy. I will get there soon enough. I want to go there and feel it all. But slowly and consciously and in this instance, in London.

Lady Time deals with shock as well and that has helped yet again with this loss. It allows for the crawl to occur into the new space as opposed to having to leap. How do you go through life playing the video of your regrets and longings in your mind and then just be present and move on? Of course I should rejoice in all my blessings happening right here, right now, but my beloved dog just died? How to mend my broken heart?

Consciously, and with Time. Rusty is morphing into shadows and echoes and occupies a forever place in my heart as if my heart expanded instead of retracted. Like with having a new baby, that phenomenon of how I will love the second as much as the first gets answered in the delivery room. Our hearts have the capacity to grow, and grow, a sensation that still brings me wonderment. And so, with Rusty, the trick is to continue loving him, think about him, see him in the ether, move forward with him by my side as the animal spirit I knew he always was.