Clementine. 2008-2020.

I tried to write an article about losing my 12-and-a-half-year-old dog and subsequently having to go to the gynecologist.  Two months later (today) I went back to read the piece.

The most I could comprehend was, “blue hands, plastic faces, tears, and vaginas.” A heap of words thrown together in the hope that the throwing would turn it’s shit brown color into shiny bright and expensive gold. It did not. My words were cluttered. They made no sense.

Because that’s what grief does. She was trying to say something, without knowing how. Because that’s what she does.

I never understood that word, Grief, before losing my dog, my Clementine. To be quite honest, I never even considered the word. I have lost grandparents, family pets, watched my friends mourn their own families and fur families, and I still didn’t understand. And that, my friends, is grief.

Unknowable. Incomparable. Until it is your turn to lose.

I hope I don’t sound indifferent. Or like a know it all. I don’t feel those ways. I feel soft around the edges. I feel cold, especially at night, when I wake up alone, without my 4 and a half pound chihuahua under the covers, feet touching mine. Body warming mine.

I miss her so often that I feel as though my heart will literally burst. At any given time. Two months ago, I was wishing it would.

I spent the last month taking a course on the end of life of our companion animals. I learned so much.

A woman shared her story with the group. It was about losing her first pet, 20 years prior, when her now adult daughter was only 5 years old. In that moment, I realized, that 20 years from now, while my sadness might take a new shape, the memories will remain. All of the good ones, and even the ones I wish I didn’t feel.

I will still hear the sound of her bark. Remember her first days on the beach. Driving her to and from Gainesville. Moving to Portland. Flying her to and from LA. Settling in in Los Angeles. Sharing a balcony with my sister, she would beg to go out my sliding glass door and cry at hers to get back inside, playing with the both of us.

Finding our HOME in Burbank. Bath time. The smell of her neck. The way it felt to collapse from a tough workout and have her jump all over my body. Play biting her ears. Calmly rushing her to the ER on her last night. The way she used all her strength to leap into my arms, the red foam coming out of her nose as she collapsed back onto the table. Holding her little body and singing, “I’ve got the whole world in my hands” as she took her last breath.

There might be a day when I can look back and rewrite my hysterical story of a girl losing her best friend in the middle of a pandemic. Marching into the gynecologist’s office wearing gloves and a face shield, failing the mandatory depression test and breaking down into a waterfall of tears while the doctor was opening her legs wide for the examination. Until then, I’d like to leave you with a thought from a book that I have read 3 times over the last 3 months.

The book, The Pet Loss Companion, states that we inevitably pay for our love with grief. “Inevitably, because all relationships end…but that love proves to be worth it’s cost, every time.”

All my love, now and forever, my sweet, my love, my wild and free, my Angel Clem.