Remembering a Dog

By Sabrina Lew Young

When I woke up it was not morning yet. I laid in the darkness behind my thoughts, with the look in your eyes as a cloud on a dreamy place. We still have time, it's not Monday yet, someone will call the shelter and announce that they can take you, and when I arrive there later today they will tell me you have been transferred to a partner shelter or a foster care home where you will live. Yes, you will have one more chance. The sunlight coming through the shatters opened my eyes and I thought... Stop the starlings and their murmurations, stop the oak and the maple from turning red and yellow and brown and letting go of leaves and dreams, and stop the snow from falling over the mountains and the rain if it's warmer, the rainbow should not unfold either, the dandelion must hold on from dispersing into the wind of our dawns and dusks, the smiles of poppies in the alley, the ones nobody sees except the rabbit, the squirrel and the hidden fox of our nights, wakeful, watchful, trotting along between its forest and the trash cans, our garbage, our disposable objects turned into hide outs for the lost dog. You, darling companion, you are not lost. You had been found and then surrendered, who knows, maybe the other way around, I don't want you to know you had been abandoned, most probably. It's so sad, why cannot we love?

What if, what if what if... What if we just love.

Today is what it is, what it is. It's what it is. And we Love. No waste or wasting time, trainings, fostering, going and coming from one place to call home to another place that could not be home. Home. Capitalizing a word that means nothing to you now. Where are you? Where did you go? Where did they take you? Home, I wonder, I pray, I hope. Perhaps. But where are you?

We cannot find you in your kennel-real-life-room. I go outside with another dog, my Angel, she's running around the yard, coming back into this place I created for her, a roundness in my arms, strokes and smiles. When we go back inside, my daughter and my mom tell me a staff member is hosing your kennel, washing with water and soap. (As I remain silent to take Angel back to her kennel, I think about your paw prints being washed off from the walls you had jumped, from the floor you have slept, from the door you have begged to be opened to go out, to go home, to go Love). My daughter thinks she saw the same person taking you out. They must be transferring Spot, my mom wanted to believe. I saw him, I saw him, my daughter bellows, and suddenly asks "Why have they changed his name?" I saw him, Spot, Henry. I repeat the explanation given about reframing your profile for adoption and the change of name. My mom and my daughter are taking Chuck for a walk, a resident husky in another real-life room. I bring Angel back to her kennel and close the door behind me saying I'll be back soon. I walk to the room where a small beautiful brindle 8 year old female dog named Tiger is waiting with the patience and the experience of her years. We are a few rooms away from your room. I want to know, have they made you smaller simplifying your name into some other arrangement of letters and sounds? Will you know you are being called? I walk with Tiger towards an outdoor yard and once there, I let her off leash. She enjoys a good cuddle under the sun.

Monday came too soon, it ended coming that Saturday. But wait, just wait, can we wait a bit longer? I think about all the touches I never touched, all the yards I let pass, all the pigeons I walk by and I wonder, would you have run to them, causing their soar into the bright sky? Are you there? Are you there? Are you there galloping with the clouds of wild horses melted with pigeons? I want to wait for your wounds to heal. Are you healing from what they said you needed to heal? Are you not barking, jumping and running with scary excitement? Are your rhythms mended? The shelter listed you on the hidden list. The one we are not allowed to talk about. I have nightmares about it, with faces of the dogs with "deteriorating conditions". And who says your name? And the other one's names? And those other ones?

They write an email to say you died, you were made dead, you were helped to recover from whatever behaviors did not suit even one human life who could contain and honor yours. They communicate your passing by anthropomorphic wordings that I do not understand. An announcement that irrupts in everyone's day, we are so busy, so busy, so busy, so driving and eating and talking and hairdressing and picking up and dropping off, we are we are we are, doing, doing, doing, succeeding, performing for our successes, talking and counting while humanely fixing with one liquid breath what we decide cannot live anymore. I do not understand. How did it happen? Did a hand threw a leash around your neck and pulled and said stay, closing the gate, locking the door? Just stay.

If there is a hand now, it can only smell like trust and belief. And Love. Is Love ever enough? Now it is.

So yes, they were emptying your real-life-room. Another dog, also black and pittie-looking, is resting there, and he lifts his head up when he sees me, our eyes meet and I really don't want to show tears, and neither do I want to get his hopes up about going out since I'm taking the dog in this room for a walk now. She's a very sweet grey and white pit bull with a scar next to her right eye that makes her face tilt a bit to that side and so one ear also drops sideways and she's always looking in wonderment. I think about where your blanket might be, still with the weigh of your life, your life, your life, and the warmth of your body. They have taken the last stuffed animal you played with while the inanimate object looked at you and knew medication was leaving you like a stuffed bear being ripped inside out. Are those toys being washed and reused? The drug to help, to calm, to force calmness, to change what does not fit, the wildness that does not find the field to lavish. Why couldn't you pretend to be someone else? The golden poodle, the beagle mix, the shepherd, the lap dog whatever color and size of the perfect breed being created in this very moment. Were we all sucking up your soul? I just want to understand. I just want to be sure there's nothing to understand. Lemonade (previously known as Bogard) still looking at me looking at him and looking at Harli wagging her tail, waiting for me to say "Let's go". How rapidly the room passes on to be the refuge for someone else. Another dog who will be waiting for a home. I have to take this dog for a walk, she is sitting, tilting her head towards the door. Let's go, Harli, I say.

My consolation to the pains of barks and cries and callings is naming, naming you and each one of them, by the names given or the names created or by a name in my mind. If I cannot name I'm imprisoned, I also become the number on the kennel door, the lock on the steel bars, the noise, thenoise, the noise. Now that you are no longer here, I ponder over your name: was it large enough to fit all your whole complete total self? Your now infinite self.

I believe I can hear the ones that had said they could not care, they did not care, they are saying I care, I do care, I will care. And I have the impression we are opening the door together, becoming what seemed extinct for a moment or a couple of months, the patience of unfurling trails and tails, and Love, for the sake of you, for the sake of your story, for the Love of all.

Who knows what's inside of a dog? Who knows what's inside of us? And will we all remember a dog?