Feast Of My Heart

For years, I had a recurring dream that I was away somewhere bucolic, distracted, enjoying myself, and then suddenly realized I’d left him alone at home, in the city, without care. I’d have to race back in time to feed him, to let him know he wasn’t forgotten, that he was safe. But there were too many obstacles: trains without tickets, missed buses, traffic jams, taxi drivers going insistently in the wrong direction.

I couldn’t get there. Or I‘d get there, and it was too late.

When I started writing this, it was the end of April, and the sky was sending sheets of rain down into the sirens and the emptiness. I started writing while he was still here because that way, I thought I’d have a say in what happens; that way, I thought I’d have some authorship. How stupid of me; I should’ve known better. It wasn’t my first time at the let-go rodeo.

When I started writing this, it was already too late, even though he was right there beside me, even though we were two still-alive bodies breathing next to each other. I was right there. I’d only been right there by his side for almost every hour of that cursed calendar year, entirely focused on his recovery. Months of daily subcutaneous fluids, expensive kidney food, prescription ointments, and trips back and forth to our beloved vet in Chelsea. None of it was enough.

Upon her orders to hospitalize him, I canceled a long-planned trip to Mexico for my best friend’s 50th birthday. I sang him Amazing Grace, however off tune, the one song that reliably lulled him into a contented haze. I whispered I love you more than anyone on this entire stupid planet, and you have to come find me again if we ever get separated—none of it was enough because nothing is ever enough to stop the tide of leaving. I tried to stay present for it, I tried to breathe, I tried to stay open. I tried not resisting the tsunami of grief that began rolling its way through my body the moment I heard the words

Stage four kidney disease.

____

Blue keeps falling asleep headfirst, and I’m worried he will suffocate, so I try gently shifting him to his side, which is impossible. He’s afraid to expose himself because he’s an animal, and he’s sick. When animals are sick or in pain, they are more vulnerable to predators. I mean, sleeping face-first and covering your heart is Animal Wisdom 101. I am vigilant. I protect him. I guard an invisible fire.

Later, I fall asleep to the purveyors of ancient wisdom via podcast who all say different versions of soften into the pain, allow it, let yourself be vulnerable/you are the witness, not the thoughts/you are the ocean, not the waves/feel your feelings so they don’t get stuck.

And silently, I say back to them: which ocean exactly/how much sea can a body ever be? How much vulnerability do you actually want? How much exposure? How much of my heart turned directly toward danger?

Because I, too, am an animal, and these slow-voiced gurus, these solemn-eyed guides, maybe they get things wrong once in a while.

—

There came a day when he began bumping into things. As though it had reached his brain. He was so thirsty that I had to set up bowls of water all through the apartment, and he was tripping out of the litter box when he could make it there. They say you’ll know when it’s time, and I did. I knew. He had crossed a permanent threshold into not-him. I called the vet. Despite the crescendo of human sickness and death that was seeping through our city by then, she told me there was a special room set up for this, and we should come tomorrow.

Blue woke me up every day of our life together. He leaped onto my bed if he wasn’t sleeping with me already, and he’d studiously knock objects one by one off the night table until he was satisfied with my response. The man simply wanted his goddamn breakfast, and he had no opposable thumbs, so like, what the fuck, ma’am?

He used every bit of his strength to reach me in the weeks before the end, hurling himself up onto the bed the same way he did as a kitten when he didn’t have the reach. In those final days, he stopped trying to jump from my arms onto the counter in order to stalk the preparation of his food. Instead, he kept his arms slung around my neck; he wouldn’t stop holding on, he wouldn’t get down, he wouldn’t let go.

So, I would walk in circles with him. I’d stop in front of the windows, and I’d whisper to him about the flowers and the trees and the wet morning grass and the birds he chirped back at, and the bunnies he loved to watch when we lived way out East. He never hunted anything. I’d remind him of all the weather we lived through (days trapped inside during blizzards, a tree falling across the threshold of the house we lived in during Superstorm Sandy, the mad escape we made later that day with the help of a neighbor, the power gone as the temperatures dropped, and all the different versions of the sky he’d watch turning day into night with me.

On the last morning, I stood still, gently rocking him slowly from side to side, and I whispered again into his sweet velvet ear: Please don’t forget to come to find me again.

The static in my head said: Was I not grateful enough? Did I not cast the quality spells? How do you say goodbye in the epicenter of a global pandemic? Will they let you hold him? Will they make you hold him wearing gloves? How will you breathe from the deepest part of your being into a fucking mask?

Yes, is the answer.

Yes, you will hold him. Yes, you will have to wear gloves, a plastic gown, and a mask. Yes, you will hold him until the vet takes him from you because she screwed up the anesthesia and when she brings him back, his enormous eyes will brighten upon seeing you, even then. You will hold him again, the slow drip of eternity now placed correctly inside his long gray arm, draped over yours, one last time.

Later, you’ll tell yourself it doesn’t matter you had to touch him through gloves because what existed between you was beyond anything interruptible by texture, beyond anything at all in this crude physical realm. You will keep your mask on. Because you must. Because the vet’s office is literally doing God’s work. Because your city is at the apex of the worst plague in a century. Because your hometown is Ground Zero again, and while the love of your life slips away, mass graves are being dug for the then-still numberless dead.

You will wear the mask when you stumble outside. You will wear it as you make your way downtown in the soft April afternoon light, fat technicolor tulips everywhere, knock-kneed with grief. It will remain when the shock of 7 p.m. begins.

Rising from the canyons of your neighborhood, you’ll stand for a moment and listen. In a mask on an empty street, all the way at the bottom of this stalwart island, you’ll listen to an urban overture, at once ludicrous and beautiful—and eventually, you’ll think, why the fuck not? Why shouldn’t there be a pot-banging standing ovation from strangers after euthanizing your very best friend?

You decide there ought to be one upon terminating any great, all-consuming love.

—

He started purring at a depth from a different dimension the moment I took him out of the cage on 110th Street in the middle of a frigid January afternoon in 2006, absurdly long arms, even at 8 weeks, draped over my shoulders. He was extremely smart. I easily taught him to sit, shake hands, lie down, and high-five, all on command. He was cartoonishly friendly. To every being of any species, to the point that I became genuinely convinced he was a reincarnated golden retriever.

He loved everyone—if you were a so-called dog person, he loved you that much more, like a missionary for his species intent on conversion. He loved being loved—unabashedly. One of the most profound lessons: His raw, uncomplicated need was my opportunity. To love fully and freely without fear of judgment or restriction.

We moved at least 10 times in the 14 years we had together, and no matter how chaotic the event was, he made himself completely at ease in our new place within minutes. Seeing him sprawled out by a window or on the floor meant we were home again. He relished anything that could conceivably be construed as food, and, I shit you not, he was still licking a tube of yogurt I held up to his face while the vet gave him the propofol.

He was always a brilliant, hilarious, joyful, remarkable creature.

But it wasn’t until right after my father died that he started lying down directly on top of my upper torso. He just knew. A shattered heart should never lie alone, exposed to all the predators waiting to feast on it in an empty room.

—

I have a small wooden box of his ashes. They were waiting for me at the vet’s office in a pretty purple bag, like some demented party favor. Now the box sits on a bookshelf next to an assortment of talismans I’ve collected over the years, among pictures of people I love.

But he isn’t in there, and he never was.

This is what I want to tell you: Every single night since the one after that day in late April, four years and more than a million departed souls ago, I’ve dreamed about him. Sometimes, they’re anxious like before; I’m racing to reach him in time, to feed him, to get home again. But not often.

Usually, he’s just…there.

A rush of grey slips past, yellow eyes glinting in the background of whatever more complicated song is being played on the jukebox of my subconscious.

At some point, after the worst of the grief had moved through my body and found its way into the ultimate ocean, out past the boundaries of our little universe and into the vast continuum of waves that holds my longing and yours, out into the field they talk about in physics which will recycle it all, I realized Blue was listening to what I said.

He heard me. He must have.

Because every single night, he finds me again.