Mourning Butterfly
Under the cover of darkness:
“It feels like he left me. We had a deal him and I, and he just got up and left me.”
“It wasn’t really his choice.’
“But I’d prefer if it had been.”
Those words touch my heart and haunt me more than anything else he’s said in the last 24 hours. Our dog died yesterday. Hit by a train. Still alive, until the vet rang us up and got permission to put him down. There was nothing else we could’ve done. He’d been hit in the head, and I think there was some mention of his spine being broken. When I saw him, I was gently reminded that his head had been hit pretty badly.
We drove to work today.
And as I got in the car, I saw all the dog hair spread across the back seat of the car from Sunday when we went on a nice long walk along the beach. There’s still sand everywhere, and just behind the driver’s seat, two perfect imprints of dog paw prints.
He can’t make those anymore. He’s buried in the backyard. A poor heavy body, stiff from death, bloody from his wounds, and his tail down. It’ll never wag again. It always waved side to side so furiously whenever he saw either of us. My partner in particular. It always wagged the hardest when he saw him.
It’s cut him pretty deep. And I don’t blame him. Our dog was the sweetest most innocent dog you’d ever met. And to meet such a violent death. To have to suffer so long. He came into this world discarded by his mother. My partner found him mewling in the streets. I hope this life was worth it. That the in-between times of birth and death made up for the anguish he had to suffer to arrive and depart from this earth.
I can’t even bear to clean up the living room. He was a reknown hair shedder. Everywhere he went, he shed hair. There’s going to be no more of that. I’m tempted to sweep it all up and put it in a jar. How morbid, I know.
The house seems so empty without him. Even when he’s not home it felt empty. But we always knew he’d come back. He won’t be coming back anymore. Sometimes I almost imagine seeing him there wagging his tail. Telling me that that dog I saw wasn’t him. It was some other dog. And here I am. Come scratch me!
But then I stand beside his grave and see his body there and I know it’s him. So hard to believe, but it’s him. His red collar. His cauliflower ear, with the velveteen fur on his head. It’s him. Without a doubt.
We saw him at the vet last night, an epic train journey home to see him one more time and assess the damage. When I was led in, I stood at the table and found myself petting his head, all the time whispering in my mind, "Silly puppy. Silly puppy." Too busy sniffing the rails to see the train. Silly puppy.
There’ll be no more laughter at his guilt-inducing looks. The wide eyes, the patented ‘I can’t believe you’re leaving the house without me’, the ‘if I don’t look at him, I’ll be able to get away with sitting on this rug.’
And in the back of my mind I always knew there was a chance he’d get hit. I’d lock the doors in the mornings, because I didn’t want him crossing that road, or finding the trains. I still remember the morning I discovered him sniffing the middle of the road and after I screamed at him to get off the road, he followed me down the hill prancing around thinking I would take him for a walk. And forcing me to walk all the way up that steep hill so that I could tie him up for 12 hours. He stayed around the house for a week after that. Poor thing.
It's been close to 24 hours since he died. They rang us at 3.30 yesterday. But he could've been hit earlier than that. That was just when they found him.
There’s so many things I wish I could’ve done more of. But I know we tried our best. We were hardly home. It wouldn’t have been fair to tie him up for 12 hours a day, five days a week. But as my partner says, “We fed him. We tickled him. That’s all he ever really wanted.”
I hope he knows how much he was loved, and how much he is already being missed.
posted by Enigmatic Butterfly @ 3:12 pm
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