An Etch A Sketch I Carry

The sun catches the orange pill bottles scattered across the counter, lighting them like tiny lanterns of hope or faith. But they are also a reminder that each day, I am rehearsing for his death.

My heart breaks now because he fades a little each day, like an Etch A Sketch I carry through the house with both hands, afraid that one careless movement will erase what remains. No matter how delicately I hold him, he continues to disappear.

What do you call grief before death?

Is it permissible to mourn the living?

Am I selfish for doing so?

What if loss begins while the heart still beats?

"He was just a dog," someone will say after he dies.

"You can always get another one," someone else will offer, intending to mend what cannot be mended.

I haven't decided which is worse: missing my dog while he lies panting at my feet or knowing that the day is quickly approaching when I will have to make the awful decision for him and say goodbye forever. Is it better to have pieces of him, even as more are chipped away each passing day?

My first dog is not dead. He lies at my feet this afternoon. But the day is coming, and I feel it following us from room to room.

A sprinkle of Parmesan cheese over his food is sometimes the only motivation he has to eat.

Going outside must now be scheduled and strategic. I coax him toward the door with small pieces of bell pepper or potato, his favorites, and consider myself fortunate if they buy him five minutes in the fresh air.

There was a time when I had to put on my shoes and wander the yard looking for him. I would find his younger self sprawled beneath the summer sun, asleep and perfectly content to roast in the August heat. Calling him inside accomplished nothing. As with most negotiations with Jack, his cooperation could only be bought with food.

His body no longer remembers that it loved the sun. It no longer remembers that dinner once required no Parmesan cheese. He only needed to see the exact time glowing on the microwave and hear the crunch of the dog-food bag; his tail would answer before I ever called his name.

A leash still dangles in the garage, dusty now, weathered by years of hanging untouched. Dogs walk past my window each morning, pulling their people behind them, and I am reminded that it was once Jack and me.

For a long time, all there was at all was Jack and me.

Fourteen years ago, I drove home with an eight-week-old black Labrador asleep in my lap, a newly signed lease to my first apartment, and my dad's warning that getting a dog was a big mistake. That small Labrador puppy got us lost somewhere in rural California, and we drove four hours in the summer heat while the puppy settled against me and slept. I didn’t know the ordinary drive home would become one of the clearest memories of my life, preserved in more detail than events I once thought mattered more.

I remember the heat.

I remember his weight in my lap.

I remember looking down at a puppy who knew nothing about me and trusting that we would somehow figure out life together.

I never imagined the day he would be gone.

You don't think about the end when you are holding the beginning.

A fourteen-year-old dog carries not only the lifetime in which he has lived, but the one in which I walked beside him.

Jack knew me in my first apartment. He knew me before the life I have now was fully formed, when I was still learning what adulthood would ask of me. He sat beside me through my injuries and endured his own. He howled whenever someone knocked at the door, chased ducks into a pond on our walks, and drove me mad in all the ways only a dog you love can. He has watched one version of me disappear after another and somehow loved every person who replaced her.

When I look at him now, I don't only see an old dog.

I see the puppy sleeping in my lap.

I see the dog stretched beneath the August sun.

I see the leash pulled taut as we once walked together.

I see every home in which his black hair gathered along the walls, and every version of myself that existed inside them with him.

My first dog.

When I mop the house now, his black hair gathers in wet clumps. I sweep it from corners, pull it from clothing, and feel my eyes swell, because one day those hairs will still trace my hallways, and he will no longer be here to leave more of them.

"Enjoy your time with him," people say.

I know.

I know.

But as he fades, as his face greys, and as his whimpering accelerates each time he tries to rise, I mourn the dog with whom I grew up. Some days he is still unmistakably in there. Other days it feels as though a stranger lies beside my bed wearing Jack's aging body. Then I feel guilty for thinking it.

He is still here. He still looks toward the kitchen when food is involved. He still accepts Parmesan cheese as though I have prepared him a delicacy rather than shaken it from a plastic container over his dog food. His tail may no longer strike the cabinets with the force it once did, but sometimes, it still moves.

Tonight, I will sprinkle Parmesan cheese over his dinner. I hear him shift on the kitchen floor before I've even opened the container, the click of his nails against hardwood, slower than it used to be, but still coming. He will lift his head when he smells it because, despite everything age has taken from him, he is still a Labrador.

For now, his heart is still beating.

For now, his tail still moves.

For now, Jack is not a memory.

He is here.