Waves

There’s a small wicker basket in our kitchen full of random stuff that really doesn’t belong there, but for which we have no designated space. Like a junk drawer, only out in the open, never really consulted for anything worth mentioning, but equal parts comfort and nuisance to have around. For months now, wedged between a lone cookie cutter, a broken tupper lid my daughter won’t let me throw out, and a LED tea candle, lies a conspicuously, farmacy-blue bottle of vaginal betadine. For months I’ve been very much aware of the people who move in and out of our kitchen and how they might react to the oddity of this, presumably private first aid item, being so blatantly on display right next to where they typically prepare their coffee. I imagine them spooning a dose of our awful soluble coffee granules into their chosen cups, adding a splash of oat milk, a teaspoon of sugar and mindlessly stirring it all into a sad little swirl when their eyes come to rest on it. The vaginal betadine I cannot get myself to throw out or, at the very least, disappear into one of the actual junk drawers in the bathroom. I’m not exactly comfortable with the idea of - even the very few - people I welcome into my kitchen pondering the wellbeing of my vagina though I do, obviously, see the humour in it. As do I recognize the irony of it having been described for our male dog. But there’s really nothing all that funny about it, just a daily acceptance of life as it was, as it would be and now, that all there is left after a year and a half of intense caretaking is this fucking bottle, as it will never be again.

Around three weeks before we had to let him go, I got up early to go on a hike - the way we used to do all the time. I prepared a thermos with tea, packed a granola bar and took off, up towards my favorite viewpoint looking out over the valley of Milcaminos. As soon as I picked my path and made the descent into fields barely lit by the morning twilight, it was as though something I had been holding tightly shut opened up in me. I took a deep, painful breath and let the tears flow the way I hadn’t allowed them to in more than a year. The same way I hadn’t allowed myself to go on a walk - our walk - without him. Doing so was finally admitting defeat, was finally accepting that, whether he was still here with us or not, I would be walking alone from now on. And as I loudly sobbed my way through the campo, I realized the idea scared me in more ways than one. I did not know how to move through the woods or this world anymore, felt unbalanced without him as my constant drishdi, my sidekick, the one I held on to for any type of support - how was I going to move through our home and life without him? It wasn’t just the emotional safety I was losing - even though our roles had long reversed and it was me now taking care of him physically. I felt afraid of walking alone for the first time since I was a teen, biking the long, dark Sonseweg on my own all hours of the night, clutching my phone tightly, always alerting my best friend of my whereabouts by way of a missed call. Just in case. And now, when I head out for my morning exercise - that I find difficult referring to as walks - I still catch myself jumping at my own shadow, because I no longer recognize it. It has changed shape beyond the physical.

A few days after it happened, I bought myself flowers. It felt weird as this usually brings me joy, a custom of self-love I have gifted myself regularly over the past few years. This time, it was a different act of self-care; not a reward or a simple beautification but a condolence, the love and tenderness and silence I needed from the world, wrapped into a small bouquet of purple margaritas. When my friend’s husband died suddenly, I left white lilies on her porch; it’s been three years and she’s told me many times that those flowers got her through the door when she first returned to an empty house. I didn’t quite understand until I granted myself the same sympathy without really thinking about what I was doing, just answering to an instinct born from tradition. Those purple margaritas got me through the door too, and the baked goods the same friend and my (chosen) family brought over in the first few weeks, helped me remember that our house still was a home, even though it did not - and still doesn’t - feel like it. We had portraits made of all four of our animals before my daughter was born. We lost three of them in just one year. Tonight, they hung crooked above her bed. As I carefully adjusted them, the one of our dog fell off the hook leaving a giant hole in the wall. How poetic. So symbolic of how this feels. Staring at the golf-ball sized hole in the wall, I remembered the botched job we did of drilling it and how, in the end, we resorted to bluetack to keep the frame in position. I remember the excitement, the surreality of the moment: the nursery now completed, just waiting for the arrival of this new being, and he was part of it all, supervising the crib build and intently watching the husband paint my swollen belly with eyeliner to announce the coming of “Baby Boognish”. There were so many similarities to the day we brought him home, one Valentine’s Day 14 years prior. Getting to know this strange creature and everything that made him who he was, knowing, from the very second he clumsily climbed into our car, that he would teach me another big piece in the enormity of what it means to love.

The first time my grandma came to visit us after my grandpa had passed away following years of illness, we were walking around the village and I repeatedly caught her checking her wrist watch. We had no place to be, no schedule to adhere to, so I asked her what it was she was worried about. I remember the surprise on her face, that split moment in which she was caught between two realities - the old and the new. Though her mind had accepted that he was no longer there, that she no longer needed to take his needs into account, her “biological clock” was still very much tuned into the rhythms of their life together. The “habit”, as she finally smiled, the grief clearly visible in its gentle curve, in the way it is recognizable only to those carrying it themselves. As we drove along the coastal highway and towards the seasonal family visit for Christmas almost a month ago, I was caught up in the idyll of the December sun turning the sea’s surface into its own holiday display, of the rolled down windows and the Chili Peppers spilling from the speakers, catching glimpses in the rearview mirror of my hair dancing in the wind. All guards down. The water was still, just a hum of a calm ripple as I looked out of the window breathing easily and evenly for the first time in days. I did not see the wave coming, recognized it only once it had already washed me out and pushed me back onto the empty shores I have long acknowledged and accepted, but my muscle memory is still struggling to adapt to. A confrontation with the clockface that was no longer ticking but with which my heartbeat had synchronized with for so long. The feeling that I had forgotten something: to stack all the chairs on the table so he wouldn’t get stuck between them; to position his bowl in a way so that he had a surface to lean against to stop him from slipping as he drank; to dry him properly after cleaning him with doctor’s soap and the infamous vaginal betadine and before putting on his diaper. All those responsibilities, those worries still somehow tangible but no longer on this plane. All that love and nowhere to put it. All those habits no longer embodied. 

For weeks after he died, I slept with my daughter’s cuddly toy Baloo hugged tightly to my chest, cupping his snout. It was a way to embrace the pain, quite literally, whilst simultaneously comforting my body in a way only I could in these moments. The pressure of Baloo’s snout against the center of my palm activated the same kind of habitual response as those muted clock hands still ticking away in my gut, only this was soothing. It was his snout and those crooked front teeth I loved so much; the weight of his leash in my hand, his clumsy paw giving me a high give, his tongue licking the residues of food or a hard day from my hand. At some point Baloo found his way back into my daughter’s rooms and I didn’t get him back - even though she would have gladly lent him to me a little while longer. It wasn’t for a lack of need that I didn’t get him again, though I didn’t know that myself. But the husband did. On Three Kings Day he surprised me with a “comfort companion” - a cuddly toy raccoon with weighted arms to sleep with and relieve anxiety. As soon as I held that coon against my chest and felt its weighted arms on my back, it felt like a sight of relief. I wonder if the husband knew that by giving me this pillow, he was gifting me the ability to grant myself further permission to feel what I feel, when I need to feel it. What he doesn’t know is that I still carry Blues’s leash with me in my backpack wherever I go.