Let's Take The Long Way Home Part 3

THAT GREAT HEART-OF COURSE IT TOOK HER A long time to die. They had put in a central line of morphine within the first few days after the bleed, and so I want to believe that her pain was contained enough by the drug to let her float somewhere insouciant and free. I cannot know this, any more than we can ever comprehend the next-door universe of the dying. But the question was what haunted me most, then and for months after she was gone. I do know that suffering witnessed is a cloudy and impotent world: The well, armed with consciousness, watch a scene they cannot really grasp or do much to alter. Suffering is what changes the endgame, changes death's mantle from black to white. It is a badly lit corridor outside of time, a place of crus.h.i.+ng weariness, the only thing large enough to bully you into holding the door for death. long time to die. They had put in a central line of morphine within the first few days after the bleed, and so I want to believe that her pain was contained enough by the drug to let her float somewhere insouciant and free. I cannot know this, any more than we can ever comprehend the next-door universe of the dying. But the question was what haunted me most, then and for months after she was gone. I do know that suffering witnessed is a cloudy and impotent world: The well, armed with consciousness, watch a scene they cannot really grasp or do much to alter. Suffering is what changes the endgame, changes death's mantle from black to white. It is a badly lit corridor outside of time, a place of crus.h.i.+ng weariness, the only thing large enough to bully you into holding the door for death.

Caroline lived for eighteen days from the night she had the bleed. Morelli had all but moved into her hospital room, bringing Lucille with him. (One night, to our battle-worn delight, a new attendant walked out into the hall and said, with a grin on his face, "There's a G.o.dd.a.m.n dog in there!") I had an unnerving amount of energy during those weeks; I knew that grief was somewhere down the line and I staved it off as long as I could. I would take dinner to Morelli in the hospital, or talk to Herzog on the phone with my forehead in my hand. One afternoon I stayed on the phone for an hour with Louise in Minnesota while we both read poetry; the phone call was mostly silence, punctuated with "Aah!" and "Oh." I reached out in ways that were transient and intense, wept with no warning or not at all, was exceedingly polite to strangers. I called my friend Matthew from my cell phone while walking at Fresh Pond, and when I got his voice mail I left a long, rambling message with a halting question that seemed to me profound, a child's effort to understand the universe. "What if ...?" I cried. "I mean, I know this sounds stupid, but what if death ... weren't a bad thing?"

However ingenuous the question, I know now that I was staggering toward the terrain of the other side of loss. Accepting a death sentence is like falling down a flight of stairs in slow motion. You take it in one bruise at a time-a blow, a landing, another short descent. I was on the verge of exhaustion, but I kept moving with a sense of frenzied purpose, as if I could outrun the fact of what was happening. I had found Herzog's home phone number the night after I got back from Texas, and called him that evening from the hospital. He came into the room carrying a handful of lilies of the valley-he knew that whatever else had happened, Caroline would be able to smell-and walked over to her and held them under her nose. It was a gesture that took my breath away with its exacting kindness, and in the next few weeks I spoke to him with a distress that I held in check around most everyone else who loved her. Near the end I asked him one night in the hospital corridor what he thought was happening, and he said, "Tell her everything you haven't said," and I smiled with relief. "There's nothing," I said. "I've already told her everything." The next day they took her off fluids, which was her wish, and when Morelli called to tell me it was done I let out a wail in my kitchen that was an animal's lament.

THE DETAILS OF dying are sad and grinding: breathing and waiting and breathing and waiting. The body, brilliant machine, knows how and when to close up shop. But Caroline was so strong, and so determined, that even in this final task she moved toward the end with bracing force. I had watched her on the water for years; now she was in the midst of what Anne s.e.xton had called "the awful rowing toward G.o.d." dying are sad and grinding: breathing and waiting and breathing and waiting. The body, brilliant machine, knows how and when to close up shop. But Caroline was so strong, and so determined, that even in this final task she moved toward the end with bracing force. I had watched her on the water for years; now she was in the midst of what Anne s.e.xton had called "the awful rowing toward G.o.d."

And G.o.d, for me, was proving an elusive taskmaster. For most of my adult life I had been a lapsed Protestant or foxhole believer; I was always surprised by people who seemed certain about the answer in either direction. But my belief in something larger and more unknowable than human consciousness had never been held to the fire at such an intimate level. Sometimes I would go into the small hospital chapel and sit there in the dark, wearing its silence like a shawl, and then shrug and go back upstairs to Caroline's room. One especially bad night I remember staring at the light in the outside hallway and feeling the horrendous finality of this road-it seemed for that moment that the end was simply the end, like driving a car into a brick wall with nothing on the other side. It was one of the most desolate moments of my life, I think, and I felt as if the only G.o.d in the room that night was a morphine drip. And it came to me with cold comprehension that this this was what it was to stare into nothing-a universe in which everything was pointless except the hardwired instinct to survive and endure and then die. What I was witnessing was as ordinary as morning, and now it was Caroline's time to fall, and I found the lack of light and meaning in that picture intolerable. No wonder we came up with the resurrection myth, I thought. It offered a crack in the blackness, the only way to tolerate this end. was what it was to stare into nothing-a universe in which everything was pointless except the hardwired instinct to survive and endure and then die. What I was witnessing was as ordinary as morning, and now it was Caroline's time to fall, and I found the lack of light and meaning in that picture intolerable. No wonder we came up with the resurrection myth, I thought. It offered a crack in the blackness, the only way to tolerate this end.

Trying to recapture that bleary insight, I find that most of the power of it eludes me; we are wired to forget. We have to keep on: build bridges, learn language, have babies, beat a stick against a rock and find rhythm. When death shows up, the fragility of all this is revealed. But not for long. Remembering the suck and force of death is like trying to hold water in your hand. What I took away from that dark alleyway was that, when it came to G.o.d, I needed not to know-needed the humble ignorance as to whether anything existed outside that grim tableau. In the months that followed, I kept thinking of the phrase "requisite mystery," as though that could capture my necessary position in the universe now, poised on the line between Knowing and Not Knowing, between what seemed to me the arrogance of religious certainty and the despair of a G.o.dless world.

I MET A DEADLINE the day of the night she died. Not because I was acting tough, but because I knew she would die in the next twenty-four hours and that afterward I would collapse, and for now writing would buy me three or four hours in a relatively pain-free zone. I wrote that day because it was the only thing I knew to do, and I suspect it's what she would have wanted, and would have done herself. the day of the night she died. Not because I was acting tough, but because I knew she would die in the next twenty-four hours and that afterward I would collapse, and for now writing would buy me three or four hours in a relatively pain-free zone. I wrote that day because it was the only thing I knew to do, and I suspect it's what she would have wanted, and would have done herself.

I had been at the hospital until late the night before, a Sunday, and left her brother and sister and Morelli there and come back home and slept a frighteningly deep sleep for ten hours. Caroline had lost consciousness three days earlier. I had sat by her side counting breaths until the numbers themselves stopped making sense. When I last held on to her, she was burning up with fever and seemed to be working with furious energy, even in her stillness. She had left us all days before.

Monday night my phone rang a few minutes after midnight. I sat in bed staring at it while the machine picked up, and when I heard her brother's voice I thought for a split second, If I don't pick up the phone she won't be dead If I don't pick up the phone she won't be dead. Then I grabbed the phone and said, "Andrew?" and I heard his gentle voice telling me what I already knew. After we hung up I turned out the light and lay in the dark for a little while, and then I got up and called Sandy, Caroline's friend in Philadelphia, who answered on the first ring. We stayed on the phone for a long time, and we lit candles together at the same moment, like children capturing fireflies in a jar.

I stayed composed over the next few days in a way that alarmed me. Caroline knew concentric circles of people in and around Cambridge-dog people, writers, rowers, people in AA-and by now her illness was public enough that people often stopped me in the neighborhood to ask how she was. The afternoon after her death, I walked over to Fresh Pond with Clementine, and two or three people stopped me, and one older man broke down in tears when I told him. I had the unnerving calm of a chaplain. "I'm so sorry," I said, my hand on his arm. "She died last night at midnight."

I would learn to accept these periods of equanimity for what they were: reprieves from the vortex. But they startled me at the time, as did the foggy memory I would have of this later, along with a few other primal responses. I went home and started cooking enough black beans for an army, even though no one was scheduled to appear. I found myself counting friends with a child's cruel pragmatism-who was remaining in the tribe? When I realized I was doing this, with a singsong interior list-making, I scribbled down the names and posted them on the refrigerator: These were the people I could call at three a.m. I never called anyone at three a.m., probably because I had the list.

The black beans were gone by the end of the night. People started coming to my house and then kept coming, wandering through the kitchen into the backyard or sitting on the front steps. Marjorie, whose seasoned wisdom was born from her own losses, walked into my garden with a beautiful smile on her face; Tom called, crying-"Oh my G.o.d are you all right?"-then appeared with bags of Chinese food. Francesca, who didn't know Caroline but cared about me, walked in with a honeysuckle vine that's still growing in the tangle of the garden. Kathy, the dog trainer who had first connected us and had become a good friend, stood in the kitchen with her husband, Leo, crying and laughing while I told the story about Lake Chocorua and Caroline's mission to teach me how to row. There were dogs and people and empty plates all over the house until midnight, when I finally took an Ambien to sleep. Alongside all this heartache was an irony and a wonder. Caroline and I had reached out to each other from similar shelters of quiet and solitude. Now she was gone, and her leaving had flung open my doors in every direction.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence and linear expectations, where I thought grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that gradually receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity. I would move as though I were underwater for weeks, maybe months, but those first few days between the death and the memorial service were a dazed cascade of tears and surprises. A part of me went through the appropriate motions with frightening alacrity: finding the poem to read at the chapel on Friday morning, practicing it aloud. But another part of me had the simple conviction that I wouldn't be able to get from point A to point B-that giving her over, in spirit and in public, was as perplexing and unfathomable as string theory. My old friend Pete, out of town when she died, called from Ohio to see how I was. I told him what I had been afraid to say. "I don't think I can do it," I said about getting through the service the next day. "I don't know how how to do it." to do it."

He was quiet for a minute, and then he said something of such consolation that I will hear him saying it forever. "You know, Gail," he said, "we've been doing this as a species for a long time. And it's almost as if-it's like the body just knows what to do."

CAROLINE, WHO HALF BELIEVED that her circ.u.mspect existence kept her relatively unknown and thus protected from the ma.s.ses, would have been amazed by the service. The chapel at Mount Auburn Cemetery was filled and overflowing. There was a cold, pelting rain all that morning, and Kathy had come to my house to get me; when we drove up to the entrance of the chapel I told her I didn't know if I could get inside. To her great credit, she did not rush to rea.s.sure me or a.s.sume I was speaking metaphorically. "Can you get to the door?" she asked. It was four yards away. So I got to the door, and Morelli was there waiting, and from there I was all right. that her circ.u.mspect existence kept her relatively unknown and thus protected from the ma.s.ses, would have been amazed by the service. The chapel at Mount Auburn Cemetery was filled and overflowing. There was a cold, pelting rain all that morning, and Kathy had come to my house to get me; when we drove up to the entrance of the chapel I told her I didn't know if I could get inside. To her great credit, she did not rush to rea.s.sure me or a.s.sume I was speaking metaphorically. "Can you get to the door?" she asked. It was four yards away. So I got to the door, and Morelli was there waiting, and from there I was all right.

I read a poem that morning from Louise Bogan, "Song for the Last Act," the first lines of which are "Now that I have your face by heart, I look / Less at its features than its darkening frame." For two days after the service, I carried the meter of the poem in my head, a sweet interior background to the walks I took, the laps I swam, the last thoughts before sleep. It was as though some ancient choir had taken up residence inside me, giving me this exquisite chant, a measure of my own movement and accompaniment to an otherwise unspeakable sorrow. After two days, it disappeared as naturally as rain on pavement.

THE RAVAGES OF EARLY GRIEF ARE SUCH A SHOCK: wild, erratic, disconsolate. If only I could get to sorrow, I thought, I could wild, erratic, disconsolate. If only I could get to sorrow, I thought, I could do do sorrow. I wasn't ready for the sheer physicality of it, the lead-lined overcoat of dull pain it would take months to shake. Whatever I thought I knew about loss-what I had antic.i.p.ated about the After Caroline state, when the fear would be over, the worrying ceased-I had no inkling that it would mean deliverance into a new, immutable world. I lived in the reality of Caroline's absence all the time, it seems, and yet sometimes the fact of it would nearly knock the wind out of me. One night a couple of weeks after the service I tried to make dinner for two friends, and I managed to get about half a meal together before I realized I didn't know what I was doing. They sat there kindly before their spartan plates of chicken and rice-I had forgotten to make anything else-and I excused myself and went into the kitchen and held on to the counter. She's sorrow. I wasn't ready for the sheer physicality of it, the lead-lined overcoat of dull pain it would take months to shake. Whatever I thought I knew about loss-what I had antic.i.p.ated about the After Caroline state, when the fear would be over, the worrying ceased-I had no inkling that it would mean deliverance into a new, immutable world. I lived in the reality of Caroline's absence all the time, it seems, and yet sometimes the fact of it would nearly knock the wind out of me. One night a couple of weeks after the service I tried to make dinner for two friends, and I managed to get about half a meal together before I realized I didn't know what I was doing. They sat there kindly before their spartan plates of chicken and rice-I had forgotten to make anything else-and I excused myself and went into the kitchen and held on to the counter. She's dead dead, I thought. The word itself was brutal. I had always disliked the euphemisms the culture embraced for dying: "gone," "pa.s.sed on," "pa.s.sed away." They seemed avoidant and sentimental, a way to bleach the concept of death of its declarative force. Now I knew why we'd diluted the vocabulary. She's dead She's dead.

I read everything I could to comprehend what I was going through. Mourning and Melancholia Mourning and Melancholia, W. H. Auden, Emily d.i.c.kinson. Poetry helped more than Freud. Painstakingly, probably automatically, I began separating the Gordian knot of dual loss: My distress for Caroline in the last weeks of her life was a different matter now from my own battered loneliness. Everything about death is a cliche until you're in it. I was half mad with desolation, and it often came masked as anger. What the books don't tell you is that some primitive rage can invade out of nowhere, the only bearable alternative to being with the dead. Death is a divorce n.o.body asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage from what you thought you couldn't stand to lose.

I found myself doubting or dismissing the intensity of our friends.h.i.+p, as though I could discard the love and therefore skip the pain. This worked for about twenty minutes, or until I would say to someone we both knew, "Oh well, maybe we weren't that close," and the listener would burst out laughing. I started trying to remember all the things I didn't like about her. There weren't very many. Or I would take the boat out on the river and talk to her aloud-so much and so often that I began to refer to a certain stretch of water as the Church of Caroline. I gave her reports on Lucille, told her about generous or foolish things people had said or done, let her know how all of us were holding up. One afternoon I had an inkling of how I must look-a solitary woman in a scull, smiling and talking to her invisible friend-and my chest seized with the potential nuttiness and emptiness of my one-way conversation. "What's worse?" I asked her. "If I talk to you and there's no one listening, or if you're there waiting and I don't don't talk to you?" I thought how helpless, probably irritated, she would feel at my silence. So I kept talking. I complained about incidents that had happened years before. "I don't think you should've been mad about my losing the boat seat," I would say. "It was an accident!" Or, "You were always in a hurry. Why were you in such a hurry?" talk to you?" I thought how helpless, probably irritated, she would feel at my silence. So I kept talking. I complained about incidents that had happened years before. "I don't think you should've been mad about my losing the boat seat," I would say. "It was an accident!" Or, "You were always in a hurry. Why were you in such a hurry?"

On a cloudy, windless day in late summer, Morelli and I met to move her boat from Riverside Boat Club, where Caroline had been a member for years, to my boat club a couple of miles upriver. It was a day we had both been antic.i.p.ating, maybe fearing, for weeks, because we knew what Caroline looked like on the water and what rowing had meant to her. We parked my car at Cambridge Boat Club and drove together to Riverside, where a rower who had known Caroline helped us locate her scull and carry it from the inside bay down to the water. I had brought my own pair of oars; Morelli wanted to keep the set Caroline had used. No one spoke while we put in the boat and attached the oars. Then I hugged Morelli and they pushed me off from the dock, and Morelli stood there watching while I rowed away. Caroline had loved this boat and taught me to row in it; she had logged some five hundred miles a year for the last decade of her life. She had been a picture of stillness itself, carried by flight. I didn't want Morelli to see me break down, and for the first fifty yards I could concentrate only on this: that I had to keep going or he couldn't stand it. I got to the first bridge and made the turn, just beyond the last point where I knew he could see me. Then I squared the blades and pulled the boat into the shadows, and put my head on the grips and cried.

11.

MORELLI AND I TOOK CARE OF HER HOUSE ALL THROUGH the first winter, before it was sold, taking turns driving over to pick up mail or start the car or check on the heat. It was a particularly fierce winter, and I would walk into the foyer, where it was about fifty-five degrees, and feel the sadness ahead of me; it was like walking into fog. Life interrupted: Caroline's shoes were still lined up by the door; her coats-one for every kind of dog-walking weather-still had biscuits in the pockets. On her refrigerator door was a photograph of the two of us, our arms flung around each other, that Tom had taken that first summer at Chocorua. I could never bear to take the photo from where she had placed it years before, and one day when the house was being dismantled it simply disappeared-no doubt thrown out with the old spices and plastic bags and everything else that const.i.tutes the bread crumb trail of a life. Morelli had taken Lucille to live with him since Caroline's last trip to the hospital, so her scent was gradually fading. I always made these trips to the house with Clementine, who barked with excitement and looked for Caroline and Lucille only on the first visit. Her nose must have told her what I could not, and after that she simply stayed by my side while I made my way through the house. the first winter, before it was sold, taking turns driving over to pick up mail or start the car or check on the heat. It was a particularly fierce winter, and I would walk into the foyer, where it was about fifty-five degrees, and feel the sadness ahead of me; it was like walking into fog. Life interrupted: Caroline's shoes were still lined up by the door; her coats-one for every kind of dog-walking weather-still had biscuits in the pockets. On her refrigerator door was a photograph of the two of us, our arms flung around each other, that Tom had taken that first summer at Chocorua. I could never bear to take the photo from where she had placed it years before, and one day when the house was being dismantled it simply disappeared-no doubt thrown out with the old spices and plastic bags and everything else that const.i.tutes the bread crumb trail of a life. Morelli had taken Lucille to live with him since Caroline's last trip to the hospital, so her scent was gradually fading. I always made these trips to the house with Clementine, who barked with excitement and looked for Caroline and Lucille only on the first visit. Her nose must have told her what I could not, and after that she simply stayed by my side while I made my way through the house.

Some days I would sit in the cold living room and let the ache run free; it was the only place that I felt mirrored my heart. All my other places in the world-my own house, my connections with friends, my days with the dog or on the river or in the pool-were a refracted version of my grief; they all contained me, reflected the story, even helped me forget for a while. Here was the story itself. Here, in all its subcomfort temperatures and museumlike stillness, was Caroline, gone. It broke through my disbelief, my G.o.d bartering, my every other defense, and for this reason I both needed and hated to go there.

One afternoon when I had gone upstairs to check on things, I started going through her closet, the way we used to do together and like my sister and I had done when we were girls. I tried on sweaters and blouses that we had both loved, looking in the mirror while Clementine lay on the floor, watching me. "This looked better on you than it does on me," I would say to Caroline, and the dog would c.o.c.k her head, and then I'd try on something else. I felt desperate while this was happening, and confused and guilty, and it has taken me years to remove myself enough from the pain of the incident to comprehend it. I wanted to claim whatever of her was left. I'd always heard stories about grief-stricken families arguing over ugly lamps or cheap coffeemakers; now I understood. The frantic hunger I felt was not trivial or greedy; it was possessive, in the most primal sense. I still have her gym bag and her rain jacket, and for a while I even tried to wear her winter boots, an entire size too big, which was absurd but comforting.

Memento mori: reminders of the dead. I think we must long for these signatures of history-the baseb.a.l.l.s and ornaments and playing cards left on people's graves-because they take up the s.p.a.ce left by the departed. The physical void after she was gone seemed alarmingly like a thing of physics, as if daylight had s.h.i.+fted or a house on the street had disappeared. Whenever Clementine heard the distinctive beep of a Toyota RAV, which is what Caroline had driven for years, she would wag her tail and start to head in that direction-pure conditioning that seemed to me a haiku of what was missing in the world.

YESTERDAY I FOUND a note I had written to myself, in the piles of outlines and narrative maps that are a writer's building blocks. "Let Her Die," I had written at the top of a legal pad, a shorthand reminder to get to that part of the story. Then I saw it the next day and half gasped; for a moment it was as though someone else had given me this instruction. Let her die: a three-word definition of the arc of grief if ever I heard one, and it takes a long time. a note I had written to myself, in the piles of outlines and narrative maps that are a writer's building blocks. "Let Her Die," I had written at the top of a legal pad, a shorthand reminder to get to that part of the story. Then I saw it the next day and half gasped; for a moment it was as though someone else had given me this instruction. Let her die: a three-word definition of the arc of grief if ever I heard one, and it takes a long time.

THE SUMMER AFTER I had learned to row, one evening on the river in 1998, I remember thinking that someday soon I would lose my beloved dad and that rowing and Caroline would help me through. We all count the tribe whenever we're scared. Modern Western society has mostly corralled this task within the realm of the nuclear family: The husband will clean out the garage or balance the accounts; the sister will be there to help after our folks are gone. But a huge portion of the world makes other allegiances, unconscious plans. Because of circ.u.mstance and desire, Caroline and I had each s.h.i.+fted a degree of that dependence onto each other-along with our siblings and Morelli, we were in line for the quotidian closeness, the emotional proximity of day-to-day life. Who has spare keys to the house, emergency contact numbers in the wallet? These are the lists you don't even consider before a certain age, when you're trying to get away from responsibility rather than acquire it. Then the list takes shape along with the attachments. Caroline and I had so thoroughly insinuated ourselves into this primary position that we joked about it for years, even after she reunited with Morelli. One afternoon weeks after she was gone, Morelli and Sandy and I were sitting on a park bench at the pond, talking with the combat candor of her three closest friends about how any of us could go on. "Oh G.o.d," I groaned, with mock distress. "Now I guess I'll have to get a boyfriend." Only the three of us, I think, would have found this so germane and so revealing. I had learned to row, one evening on the river in 1998, I remember thinking that someday soon I would lose my beloved dad and that rowing and Caroline would help me through. We all count the tribe whenever we're scared. Modern Western society has mostly corralled this task within the realm of the nuclear family: The husband will clean out the garage or balance the accounts; the sister will be there to help after our folks are gone. But a huge portion of the world makes other allegiances, unconscious plans. Because of circ.u.mstance and desire, Caroline and I had each s.h.i.+fted a degree of that dependence onto each other-along with our siblings and Morelli, we were in line for the quotidian closeness, the emotional proximity of day-to-day life. Who has spare keys to the house, emergency contact numbers in the wallet? These are the lists you don't even consider before a certain age, when you're trying to get away from responsibility rather than acquire it. Then the list takes shape along with the attachments. Caroline and I had so thoroughly insinuated ourselves into this primary position that we joked about it for years, even after she reunited with Morelli. One afternoon weeks after she was gone, Morelli and Sandy and I were sitting on a park bench at the pond, talking with the combat candor of her three closest friends about how any of us could go on. "Oh G.o.d," I groaned, with mock distress. "Now I guess I'll have to get a boyfriend." Only the three of us, I think, would have found this so germane and so revealing.

LIFE'S IRREFUTABLE forward motion, a one-way arrow pointed past the dead. For months I felt the violence of time itself, as though some great barge carrying the rest of us had left Caroline stranded on the sh.o.r.e. I was raking leaves one day when I felt such a vast chasm of what was gone that I had to stop and sit down on the porch. All this raw material, from new shoots to compost in what seemed a single breath. Caroline was bone and ash and memory now, and I was raking dead leaves in the shelter of my garden while the bulbs, patient and thoughtless, waited to be planted. It seemed obscene. forward motion, a one-way arrow pointed past the dead. For months I felt the violence of time itself, as though some great barge carrying the rest of us had left Caroline stranded on the sh.o.r.e. I was raking leaves one day when I felt such a vast chasm of what was gone that I had to stop and sit down on the porch. All this raw material, from new shoots to compost in what seemed a single breath. Caroline was bone and ash and memory now, and I was raking dead leaves in the shelter of my garden while the bulbs, patient and thoughtless, waited to be planted. It seemed obscene.

"They take it all," I cried on the phone to Louise longdistance. "This husk of a life. And then you get to the end and you find out that death is G.o.dless, imminent, and cruel." Louise, who believed above all in the power of words, wrote this down while I was talking. And so she captured for me that moment none of us wants to remember, probably central to survival. What if dying weren't a bad thing? What if dying weren't a bad thing? Caroline's death had left me with a great and terrible gift: how to live in a world where loss, some of it unbearable, is as common as dust or moonlight. Caroline's death had left me with a great and terrible gift: how to live in a world where loss, some of it unbearable, is as common as dust or moonlight.

And then finally, unwittingly, acceptance wraps itself around your heart. Late that year I was wandering through an open house in the neighborhood, and I saw a framed Pablo Neruda sonnet on the wall; it spoke to something spatial about loss that I had never before found articulated. Caroline's death was a vacancy in the heart, a place I neither could nor wished to fill. I had been confused by the prevalence of these feelings, the sense that her goneness was a thing unto itself, a memory outlined by crime tape it would be an outrage to remove. Now here was Neruda, entreating mourners to inhabit death as though it were a dwelling: Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pa.s.s through its walls and hang pictures on the air.

I LIVED IN THAT house of absence, took solace in it, until sorrow became a stand-in for what was gone. "Grief ... remembers me of all his gracious parts," says Shakespeare's Constance in house of absence, took solace in it, until sorrow became a stand-in for what was gone. "Grief ... remembers me of all his gracious parts," says Shakespeare's Constance in King John King John, about the loss of her son. "Then have I reason to be fond of grief." I knew I would never have another friend like Caroline; I suspected no one would ever know me so well again. That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her.

Grief is fundamentally a selfish business. Stripped of its elegant facade-the early onslaught of flowers and ca.s.seroles and understanding-it is a place of such particularity that its arc is as complex as the relations.h.i.+p itself. People miss the warm presence in the bed, the laugh in the evening, the gestures or countries or shared awareness traveled together. I missed Caroline in dozens of ways, but through them all was the absence of the ongoing dialogue, real or imagined. "I miss us," us," she had said that morning outside the hospital. For years, through the trials of writing or dog training or life's ordinary bruises, Caroline and I had been the soothing, modulated voice in each other's heads. Now my thoughts were clanging around unnoticed and unheard, lonely music with too much ba.s.s. For months, I kept wanting to call her, half a.s.suming I could, to tell her what her dying had meant, what her death had done to my life. she had said that morning outside the hospital. For years, through the trials of writing or dog training or life's ordinary bruises, Caroline and I had been the soothing, modulated voice in each other's heads. Now my thoughts were clanging around unnoticed and unheard, lonely music with too much ba.s.s. For months, I kept wanting to call her, half a.s.suming I could, to tell her what her dying had meant, what her death had done to my life.

I DON'T KNOW MUCH of what I did that first year after Caroline's death, beyond the usual rituals that were now cloaked in a velvet silence. Walking, reading, watching the light change. I sat on the couch in the living room and read letters and cards from people who loved us both, then reread them so that I could remember who we were together. My friend Andrea dragged me to holiday gatherings on the days I had usually spent with Caroline. Rowing-G.o.d, I rowed until my hands were like leather and my whole body ached with the fatigue my heart felt. I would get back to the boathouse in evening light, pull the boat out of the water, and wash and dry it as though I were hot-walking a horse. I know I wrote, though for months not much of it mattered. I puzzled, often and in private, over some promise of consciousness or design beyond the cold triumph of pure biology, muck and creation and reproduction and then muck again. Mostly I couldn't bear the indisputable lack of her, or the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fort.i.tude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead. Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive. I had a friend who years before had lost her firstborn when he was an infant, and she told me one of the piercing consolations she received in her early grief was from a man who recognized the fierce loyalty one feels to the dead. "The real h.e.l.l of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it." Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation. of what I did that first year after Caroline's death, beyond the usual rituals that were now cloaked in a velvet silence. Walking, reading, watching the light change. I sat on the couch in the living room and read letters and cards from people who loved us both, then reread them so that I could remember who we were together. My friend Andrea dragged me to holiday gatherings on the days I had usually spent with Caroline. Rowing-G.o.d, I rowed until my hands were like leather and my whole body ached with the fatigue my heart felt. I would get back to the boathouse in evening light, pull the boat out of the water, and wash and dry it as though I were hot-walking a horse. I know I wrote, though for months not much of it mattered. I puzzled, often and in private, over some promise of consciousness or design beyond the cold triumph of pure biology, muck and creation and reproduction and then muck again. Mostly I couldn't bear the indisputable lack of her, or the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fort.i.tude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead. Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive. I had a friend who years before had lost her firstborn when he was an infant, and she told me one of the piercing consolations she received in her early grief was from a man who recognized the fierce loyalty one feels to the dead. "The real h.e.l.l of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it." Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.

12.

FOR YEARS I HAD TRIED TO PROTECT MYSELF FROM the psychic weight of New England winters by staying inside with tea and radiators, until I got a northern sled dog. Clementine took me out into the world in myriad ways, the most relentless of which had to do with the seasons. We walked through snowstorms and over icy trails; we walked in six p.m. darkness and single-digit temperatures. Because of her I had learned to love the light in winter-the rose gold of the sky an hour before dusk, framing the minimalist branches of the bare trees beneath. I fixed my routine to the light and to Clementine's desires. After Caroline was gone I vowed I would take the same walks, eventually finding solace in the missing s.p.a.ce by my side. the psychic weight of New England winters by staying inside with tea and radiators, until I got a northern sled dog. Clementine took me out into the world in myriad ways, the most relentless of which had to do with the seasons. We walked through snowstorms and over icy trails; we walked in six p.m. darkness and single-digit temperatures. Because of her I had learned to love the light in winter-the rose gold of the sky an hour before dusk, framing the minimalist branches of the bare trees beneath. I fixed my routine to the light and to Clementine's desires. After Caroline was gone I vowed I would take the same walks, eventually finding solace in the missing s.p.a.ce by my side.

So when I was through writing for the day, the dog and I would walk the few long blocks to the edge of Fresh Pond, an established oasis throughout the year, but populated in winter mostly by diehard joggers and dog walkers. Our usual path was a couple of miles round-trip; we would stroll through the woods to the deserted golf course, where Clemmie would chase geese to her heart's delight and bark at the exhaust signatures of planes across the sky.

One Friday afternoon at the end of January in 2004, I had driven over and parked by the soccer field on the edge of the reservoir almost a mile from my house; it was sixteen degrees outside, and I wanted to head straight for the woods. The days were growing longer and the light itself seemed brighter, and we walked for an hour under scudding clouds, nodding or saying h.e.l.lo to the other stalwarts who were on the path. Clementine was eight years old, at that point in a dog's life at which dignity and vitality are in step together, and she rarely strayed from my side, even off-lead in the woods. Whenever we left the reservoir, all I had to do was say, "Wait," and she would stop wherever she was, standing like a horse with her reins down while I attached her leash.

We had just come out of the woods onto the edge of the soccer field when I heard a man yell, "Get your dog!" Clemmie was next to me, unleashed, and we both stopped in our tracks, partly in response to the alarm in the man's voice. About ten yards away, by the bleachers, I saw a young muscle-bound man crouched on the ground, trying desperately to hold on to two pit bulls without collars or leashes. A second later the dogs broke free of his grip and came hurtling toward us. The larger dog, a gray-white male, knocked Clementine to the ground and grabbed her by the neck; the other dog went for her hindquarters. Clemmie weighed sixty pounds and had a full winter coat, which on a Samoyed is a three-inch-long double coat as dense as a carpet. She was thras.h.i.+ng and snapping at both dogs and I was screaming at the top of my lungs-"Get your G.o.dd.a.m.n dogs!"-while the man tried in vain to get ahold of the pit bulls.

I didn't yet know how badly Clemmie was hurt, or if the man was a tough guy or a fool, and there wasn't another soul around to help. The man finally got an arm around each dog's neck, and I grabbed Clementine's collar and cried out, "Please, just let us get to our car." The field was ab.u.t.ted by a chain-link fence, separating it from the street; I knew we had to get to that gate. He was struggling to maintain his hold on the dogs, and nodded, out of breath. "Go!" "Go!" he called out. "I've got them." Clemmie was whimpering, panting to break free, and I held on to her and we started loping across the field. he called out. "I've got them." Clemmie was whimpering, panting to break free, and I held on to her and we started loping across the field.

We had made it halfway-about thirty yards-when I heard the man holler from behind, "Look out!" I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. I turned around to see both dogs charging at a full run. Then I saw a flash of gray flying toward me through the air. The next thing I remember is being on my hands and knees on the ground. The gray missile was the larger male, who weighed about a hundred pounds; the female had gone after Clementine. When I scrambled to my feet, I saw Clemmie on the ground a couple of yards away, with both dogs on top of her. One was at her throat and the other had its teeth on her belly. They had never made a sound.

My bladder emptied like a water balloon. I was wearing jeans, and realized with an almost serene detachment that they were drenched. I was in that state of adrenaline-soaked alacrity when the vision is sharp but tunneled and you feel you can do anything, and I felt not so much fear as a kind of wild horror. I had the flash that this must be what it was like to be in combat: The sympathetic nervous system mobilizes the body, which then gets rid of everything it doesn't need. Through no conscious effort of my own, I'd gone into automatic warrior mode.

I walked into the fight and started beating on the dogs' backs. Dressed for the frigid weather, I was wearing a heavy down jacket and fleece-lined mittens, and all the futility in that moment was captured by those mittens: I remember looking down while I flayed on the dogs and thinking that my hands looked like a child's. Then the female pit bull grabbed my forearm, almost casually, as if to move an obstacle away from its prey. The scariest part of this fleeting moment was not the violence the dog exhibited, but the control-my arm might as well have been a branch, for all the interest it held. You can generally gauge the seriousness of any dog attack by the noise and the restraint exhibited-the quieter it is, the more lethal the intent-and I had known from the start that this was a deadly situation. The pit bulls were after Clementine, not me. The female's hold on my arm gave Clementine the chance to wrestle away from the other dog, and she went tearing, at sled dog speed, into the woods.

By now the man had caught up to his dogs and was trying to get them under control. I went running after Clemmie, not knowing how severe her injuries were or where her panicked flight had taken her. I started calling her name and realized that my voice was nearly gone from yelling. It was after five p.m. and getting dark, and I was stumbling through snow in monochromatic woods. No one else was in sight. I remember thinking, with nonsensical logic, that I could probably search for her until about two a.m.-that I had that much time before I would need water or food, or before I would physically give out.

Years later, most of my visual memories of that afternoon have a cinematic purity-I remember what I was wearing, where I was standing, how my arms and face and voice felt while I scanned the blackening woods for a white dog. Micromoments have disappeared-I remember reaching my friend Peter's voice mail by cell phone, but I don't remember calling him or thinking to call him, only the sound of his recorded message. He lived four houses away from me and knew more about dogs than anyone I had ever known, and when I got his voice mail I coughed out something like "We were attacked by pit bulls and Clemmie is hurt and lost in the woods." He told me later that when he heard the message, he barely recognized my voice. Then I called Avery, who lived on the corner near the pond; she started heading in my direction. By the time she got to me ten minutes later, the first wave of adrenaline had pa.s.sed and I had realized Clementine was lost, and I was shaking all over and finally terrified. Because my voice was gone, Avery kept calling out for Clemmie, and then my cell phone rang and I heard Peter, out of breath, say, "I'm running toward you."

In all the free falls of one's life, there are moments that stand out as a hand reaching across the abyss, and this, for me, was one of them. Without thinking I said, "No, go to my house first"-he lived down the street in the direction of the pond, which was separated from our houses by a major parkway. Two minutes later the phone rang again, so soon that I knew it had to be either good news or bad. Then I heard him cry, "I've got her!" and my knees went out from under me. Avery got me to my car and drove us to the house.

I've always wished for some witness to that day, someone who could come forward to tell me what Clementine's path had been. Once she broke away from the dogs, she had gone running into the woods alongside the reservoir, and she had had to cross a field beyond the woods and then a four-lane thoroughfare during evening rush hour. Then two more streets to the block where we lived, a trip of nearly a mile in city traffic. Peter had found her trembling on my front porch. She was bleeding and covered in pit bull saliva, and she had found her way home.

FOUR HOURS LATER, the vet and his a.s.sistant had shaved half of Clemmie's coat and begun closing the gaping wounds on her back and sides. Peter, whose father had been a horse trainer and who knew how to contain a thras.h.i.+ng animal, held on to Clemmie while they put her under anesthesia. The people in the veterinary practice had known me and my dog since she was a puppy, and Beth, my vet, had gone silent when I'd called to tell her about the attack; the two people left at the clinic had stayed late to wait for us when they found out what had happened. It was almost ten p.m. and none of us had eaten in hours, though I had remembered to grab a loaf of bread on my way out the door; I knew it was going to be a long night. After they got Clemmie under, I finally sank to the floor of the operating room with Cleo, Peter's Belgian shepherd, beside me. Clemmie was covered with puncture wounds on her hips and belly and violent gashes across her back; her thick double coat had probably saved her life. When they had finally closed the wounds and she began to emerge from the anesthesia, I crouched down by the operating table so she could see and smell me when she woke up. Maggie, who had been a.s.sisting the vet and holding Clementine while she was under, smiled at me across the table. "You know," she said, "you're doing a lot better than I thought you would be."

I was beaming. "Are you kidding?" I said. "She's alive." alive."

IT WAS MORE THAN a week before Clementine could get beyond the driveway of my house without trembling, but as a sled dog, she had strong social instincts, and I think she recovered psychologically faster and better than I did. Besides being sore and exhausted, my only physical legacy from the attack was a black half-moon on my forearm I had found the next afternoon, a bruise the size of a pit bull's jaw where the female had grabbed me. The dog had bitten through a thick down coat and two sweaters to leave this mark, but I didn't feel or notice it until a day later, when the adrenaline had been replaced by a crus.h.i.+ng fatigue. I fell apart on the phone to Louise, who loved dogs and loved me and knew how to care for both species in the worst of times. She sent white roses for the immediate pain and-ruthless acolyte to narrative-had an even better solution for the long-term damage. "I know this sounds cold," she said during our first conversation, "but are you taking notes?" a week before Clementine could get beyond the driveway of my house without trembling, but as a sled dog, she had strong social instincts, and I think she recovered psychologically faster and better than I did. Besides being sore and exhausted, my only physical legacy from the attack was a black half-moon on my forearm I had found the next afternoon, a bruise the size of a pit bull's jaw where the female had grabbed me. The dog had bitten through a thick down coat and two sweaters to leave this mark, but I didn't feel or notice it until a day later, when the adrenaline had been replaced by a crus.h.i.+ng fatigue. I fell apart on the phone to Louise, who loved dogs and loved me and knew how to care for both species in the worst of times. She sent white roses for the immediate pain and-ruthless acolyte to narrative-had an even better solution for the long-term damage. "I know this sounds cold," she said during our first conversation, "but are you taking notes?"

My intrepid Texas mother, who had just turned ninety, displayed a different brand of loyalty, more sword than pen and fierce enough to make me laugh with grat.i.tude. She adored Clementine and was horrified by what had happened to both of us. "It just makes you want to pick up a gun, doesn't it?" she said on the phone one day when I was particularly shaken, and I answered, my voice trembling, "Yeah, it really does."

"Now, honey," she said, as though she were trying to placate a determined child, "you just can't."

THE PIT BULLS HAD been picked up by Animal Control and quarantined the day after the attack. Months of court appearances lay ahead, as well as a long campaign by the city to euthanize one dog and permanently sequester the other. For me there would also be flashbacks and fears and seemingly misplaced worries, the detritus of trauma that tends to insinuate itself into the psyche only after the danger has pa.s.sed. I had already armed myself instinctively against some of this refuse with the simple power of narrative: From the moment I called Peter from the woods, the events of that day began shaping themselves into a bearable truth. And Caroline, who had long been the search-and-rescue spirit in my pantheon, was as essential as air to the retelling of the tale. been picked up by Animal Control and quarantined the day after the attack. Months of court appearances lay ahead, as well as a long campaign by the city to euthanize one dog and permanently sequester the other. For me there would also be flashbacks and fears and seemingly misplaced worries, the detritus of trauma that tends to insinuate itself into the psyche only after the danger has pa.s.sed. I had already armed myself instinctively against some of this refuse with the simple power of narrative: From the moment I called Peter from the woods, the events of that day began shaping themselves into a bearable truth. And Caroline, who had long been the search-and-rescue spirit in my pantheon, was as essential as air to the retelling of the tale.

For about three weeks after the attack, I was certain that Caroline had saved Clementine that day-that she had gotten her away from the dogs and guided her through speeding traffic to safety. I believed this fully and categorically, with a sincerity that helped to s.h.i.+eld me from the random iniquity of what had happened. Clementine had achieved legendary status in the neighborhood within days after the a.s.sault, both for the horror of the story and for her odyssey home, and her wounds and shaved coat drew enough attention that strangers stopped to ask about us. When people who had known Caroline would see us at the pond, I would say, probably with the eyes of a madwoman, "I think Caroline saved her!" I was not known for such p.r.o.nouncements, having a slant more empirical than mystical, and if people looked surprised when I told them this, they were kind enough to let me be. I had had a semiawake dream in the first few days after the attack in which I woke from a deep sleep and said to Caroline, in the dark of my room, "Oh my G.o.d-it was you, wasn't it?" And she responded with her soft, knowing laugh, amused by my slowness in recognizing the obvious. I wore my conviction like a Kryptonite s.h.i.+eld for as long as I needed its powers, until I could stand in a field with the dog again without scanning the horizon for disaster.

And now? I doubt that I will ever be convinced in either direction. It is a story I still tell myself, framed within the magical thinking of a children's tale, where the forests are enchanted and the monsters vincible, where love and courage always trump danger.

"THE DEAD PROTECT US," I said to my friend Andrea at dinner one night when that bleak day in the field was behind me, long after I had stopped announcing that Caroline's spirit had shepherded us home. The words came out of my mouth with the certainty of litany, though I was only half sure of what I meant and unaware that I thought it until I spoke aloud. I said to my friend Andrea at dinner one night when that bleak day in the field was behind me, long after I had stopped announcing that Caroline's spirit had shepherded us home. The words came out of my mouth with the certainty of litany, though I was only half sure of what I meant and unaware that I thought it until I spoke aloud. The dead protect us The dead protect us. I feel this now with an almost fierce relief. Caroline's dying had forced me into courage under fire; now I had her inside me as a silent sentinel. And whether one attributes this attachment to memory or to G.o.d, it is a consolation unlike any I have known. Thou art with me. "They take it all," I had cried on the phone to Louise that night, knocked down by despair. Turns out they don't take everything after all.

I LEARNED SOMETHING in the aftermath of the attack on Clementine that confused and alarmed me at the time. After so much fear and violence, here was my dog, safe and alive, and yet I worried about her with such maternal vengeance that it seemed to eclipse my grief for the dead. I was ashamed by the inconsolable quality of my anxiety; Clemmie was alive, and Caroline was gone, and yet my anguish now was about the one who had been saved. Then I realized something else they don't tell you in the instruction books for mourning: that we only fret about the living. I might well grieve Caroline for all my days, but I wasn't worried about her anymore. in the aftermath of the attack on Clementine that confused and alarmed me at the time. After so much fear and violence, here was my dog, safe and alive, and yet I worried about her with such maternal vengeance that it seemed to eclipse my grief for the dead. I was ashamed by the inconsolable quality of my anxiety; Clemmie was alive, and Caroline was gone, and yet my anguish now was about the one who had been saved. Then I realized something else they don't tell you in the instruction books for mourning: that we only fret about the living. I might well grieve Caroline for all my days, but I wasn't worried about her anymore.

Years after she was gone, I found the inscriptions Caroline had written to me in two of her books-the first written a few months into our friends.h.i.+p, the second one two years later. We knew from the beginning, I think, that this friends.h.i.+p was different, that we would work to make it immune to the erosions of time. "For my dearest Gail," she had written at the beginning of Pack of Two Pack of Two, "with more love and grat.i.tude than I have words to express. Your presence-in the world, in the woods, in this book-has altered the very texture of my life. Here's to all we have shared, and to many more years, many more miles with our beautiful girls."

Caroline's boat has rowed some two thousand miles since I moved it upriver on that calm day in 2002. I am fifteen years older now than Caroline would ever be; the rows are slower, but when I falter at the beginning of each season I close my eyes and visualize the precision of her stroke and straighten out my own. She is still my coach. One afternoon when I had come in from a five-mile row, as I was putting the boat into its bay, I said out loud to her, "You would be so proud of me." I meant because I had kept on rowing: Endurance was one of the traits we each admired in the other. But I know now that I meant something larger than the rowing, something that parallels the miles logged through fatigue and discouragement and inclement weather. Caroline would be so proud of me-proud of us-because I kept her, too.

13.

CLEMENTINE WAS WITH ME FOR FOUR MORE YEARS. I used to lie next to her on the Persian rug in the dining room and wrap my arms around her and say, "Let's see if you can make it to thirteen. Can we do that?" And she would sigh her deep-chested sigh and roll over on her back. I had brought her home in 1995, when she was eight weeks old, on June 3, which was my father's eighty-first birthday. I thought at the time that after he died, I would have this dual anniversary to soften the sadness of the loss of him. Then Caroline died at midnight on the third of June, seven years later, and so the date had a wrenching significance.

That first year of raising a puppy, just before Caroline and I became friends, I had taken Clementine to Castle Island, a beach walk on Boston Harbor, on a windy day in March. We were walking across a long causeway when the wind picked up, and I saw her hesitate; she looked up at me for a directional cue, then plowed ahead. The first year or so with any dog is a steep relational curve-you are each finding out who the other is, and who you will be together. I knew at that moment, when we locked eyes and she started taking me forward, that we had become a team and that she knew it, too, and would go anywhere I asked.

In the ensuing decade, she had been integral to the most soul-stretching, joyful years of my life, and witness to some of the saddest. She led me into the woods with the closest woman friend I would ever have, and she was there waiting each night when I came home from the hospital where Caroline was dying. She was the sentry at the end of every trip I made back to Texas to care for my aging mother and father. After they were both gone, buried next to each other in the Texas sun, I flew back to Cambridge and Clementine nipped my nose when I walked in the front door, a gentle, herding nip, and then leaned against me and hardly left my side for days.

Old dogs can be a regal sight. Their exuberance settles over the years into a seasoned n.o.bility, their routines become as locked into yours as the quietest and kindest of marriages. By the time she turned eleven, Clementine had started to lose her coat, a condition that can happen in older female Samoyeds, and so she was a far cry from the majestic white image of her earlier years. Once a model for the breed, now she looked like the velveteen rabbit, disheveled and patchy and loved into raggedness. Sometimes thoughtless people on the street would say, "Ooh, what happened to your dog?" with more rubbernecking curiosity than genuine concern, and I would say, just to annoy them, "I think she looks a little like Katharine Hepburn; don't you?" She always looked the same to me. The last few years, our daily walks got slower and shorter. Sometimes we would make it only as far as the Virginia Woolf bench, a granite seat in the woods of Fresh Pond that overlooks the pond's edge and has on it an Orlando Orlando quote, and Clementine would lie under the bench while I lay upon it, watching the towering pine trees and the sky overhead. Or she would lie in the front yard next to me while I planted flowers, seeming content to survey the world rather than try to run it. quote, and Clementine would lie under the bench while I lay upon it, watching the towering pine trees and the sky overhead. Or she would lie in the front yard next to me while I planted flowers, seeming content to survey the world rather than try to run it.

In spring of 2008, she started coughing with a bronchitis that wouldn't get better, and I knew we were in that pa.s.sage of aged dogs where a constellation of symptoms presages the final outcome. I couldn't bear the idea that she might leave me on June 3, and that night I got down next to her on the floor and wrapped my arms around her and said, "Well, we made it, honey, didn't we?" Two nights later, she started going downhill fast. I got enough Valium in her to ease her distress, and when I walked into Angell Memorial Hospital at one-thirty in the morning, it was with the dry-mouthed certainty that I would be going home with her leash and collar but not with her. I had a close friend who was a veterinarian, who had known Clementine since she was a puppy, and she had insisted that I call her in the middle of the night when the time came. So Amy was there waiting for me in the hospital parking lot, ready to navigate the stark terrain of euthanasia and anonymous clinicians, and she was there on the floor beside us when we let her go. I was crying more than I wanted, afraid of upsetting Clementine, but she stayed calm, with her paw on my arm. "Go find Caroline," I said to her, and when she died she reached her front legs up toward me and rolled over into my arms, where I feel quite sure she will stay forever.

I DIDN'T WANT to leave her there. They tagged the body and we loaded her into Amy's van so that she could take her to be cremated in a couple of hours when the veterinary practice opened that morning. We sat in the van outside the hospital's bright, welcoming lights for a long time, talking and sometimes crying, Clementine's body in the back an odd comfort. I was staring into that too-familiar s.p.a.ce of a world fresh with the initial disbelief of grief. It was nearly five a.m. when I walked back into my infernally quiet house, sadder than tears can ever tell, knowing that I was in the corridor of something far larger than I and that I just had to stand it and stay where I was. I went into the bedroom and saw the photograph of Caroline on my dresser, and I looked at her across that great divide and said, "Catch." to leave her there. They tagged the body and we loaded her into Amy's van so that she could take her to be cremated in a couple of hours when the veterinary practice opened that morning. We sat in the van outside the hospital's bright, welcoming lights for a long time, talking and sometimes crying, Clementine's body in the back an odd comfort. I was staring into that too-familiar s.p.a.ce of a world fresh with the initial disbelief of grief. It was nearly five a.m. when I walked back into my infernally quiet house, sadder than tears can ever tell, knowing that I was in the corridor of something far larger than I and that I just had to stand it and stay where I was. I went into the bedroom and saw the photograph of Caroline on my dresser, and I looked at her across that great divide and said, "Catch."

"CARLO DIED," EMILY d.i.c.kINSON WROTE HER FRIEND and mentor about the death of her beloved Newfoundland. "Would you instruct me now?" To say I could not bear this final depar