This last year has been understandably tough on the kids. Actually, yes, tough on me, too. The death of their father and my first husband is an event to color the rest of our lives. Every moment I live with my kids that might have also been lived with their father is accompanied by a pang. His absence is palpable, a gaping hole in the room: Robb’s homecoming from war, Bailey’s acceptance to college, Joe’s high school graduation, Jake’s first driving lesson. Every moment that we celebrate is also a moment to mourn.
The kids still struggle with the ugly circumstances of their father’s death. The weird and awkward partitioning of current and ex families. The exclusion from planning his funeral. The eviction from his home. The excommunication from his life and the people he lived it with. They were forced to pick up and move on, in many ways, as if he never existed. Their loss is so expansive that it defies processing. To cope, they hang on to little rituals: grave visits, impromptu story-telling when a memory pops up, good cries over old photos, saying his name when they spot a Jeep on the street that looks like his.
In light of their loss, it seems especially cruel that the dog should die, but she did. I came home for lunch to find Stella in the kitchen floor, still. Clearly, she’d suffered. She was still relatively young, and whatever was wrong with her sneaked up and violently took her before we had a chance to detect it, in much the same way that death had called their dad.
The shock and devastation of her death rippled through the family with horror and profound sadness. Each child gathered around her chunky bulldog body while it was still in the kitchen floor and cried for her as if they were crying for their father. Whatever tears came seemed to serve a dual purpose, because it was oddly impossible to not associate the circumstances of the creature in the floor with the pain of losing the big lovable man who was their father.
When I first came on the site of Stella’s death I panicked and couldn’t think of the next thing to do. By phone, Ted told me to cover her up, that he’d take care of her when he got home. He felt the responsibility was his, but his sense of loss and grief was as acute as ours, and I didn’t think it was fair to dump it all on him.
Then an amazing thing happened. Without any direction or discussion, the kids set to work. Joe lifted Stella from her mess and laid her, as if he were handling a newborn, in the middle of the brightly colored blanket I’d found. He arranged her as if she was sleeping, and then he stroked her coat and patted her back, whispering to her. After he’d set her down, the rest of us looking on, he left to grab a shovel from the garage and set to work digging a hole in our rain-soaked yard.
With Joe working outside, Jacob found a brush and began to comb her coat; it always did shed in the spring. While he stroked her, Bailey wiped her face and floppy jowls. The two of them loved on her and worked in tandem silence.
Then Jacob went outside and found some scrap lumber from the garage that he fashioned into a small, cross-shaped marker. Bailey retrieved her oils and set to work on painting the cross with Stella’s nickname, Fat Baby.
I did not direct one step, but as I watched the activity around me I marveled at what was happening. Death was in our house. It was, on first sight, repulsive and ugly and frightening. But instead of running from it, the kids embraced it. They tended to the body of a creature they loved, and they handled her with respect and dignity, even if she is only a dog.
And I realized that something on a deeper level was also taking place. In many ways they were working to right old wrongs, old hurts. They were living out what they’ve perhaps lived out in their minds a million times. They worked as if they were thinking, “If I’d been there when dad died, this is what I would have done.” Every action seemed dictated by the notion that what they’d been disallowed, denied, and partitioned from in Bill’s death, could on some other level, be righted in Stella’s.
Once the hole was dug and the marker was completed, we met at Stella’s body, and the four of us folded the blanket over her. Joe gathered her up and led the way while the rest of us followed along, a small but earnest funeral train. The boys lowered her into the hole Joe made – a deep hole with straight walls in good black dirt. And then they all looked at me to say something when to this point I’d had a hard time doing anything but cry. Bailey gathered four dandelions and handed them to each of us. Then she said, “We’ll each share our favorite memory, and then Mom can finish.”
What followed was a weird, comical but altogether important ritual. We called up the joy she’d brought our lives and even while we stood over her grave we laughed in celebration of her life, the gift she’d been to our family. When it came my turn to speak I said, “The pain we feel right now is the price we pay for loving something. This is what it costs, and if this is the price then it’s worth it. Given the chance, we’d pay it again.” The kids nodded, choking back tears. It was for Stella, but I knew it was for Bill too.
Then we began shoveling dirt over that sweet Fat Baby body and when the hole was filled the kids set the marker, and we walked away, one by one, to find some solitude. Something was gone, something we loved and lost too soon, but in the process something new had taken its place, something that might have looked like fresh dirt over an old grave.
