merle (sympathy, grief)

timelines (both kinds)

Saturday afternoon, three months after it happened, the issue of Texas Monthly that contains my essay about Augie arrived at Marshall’s old address, where I’d had my mail forwarded after leaving the old house on West San Antonio Street. Two copies were there—one for Marshall, one for me—waiting. There on the page was a smiling me holding a floppy Augie, staring with his black eyes right at Marshall’s camera. There on the page were a collection of words I’d written about what happened, which still don’t quite get at what it felt like, not really, and maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life scratching the surface of the feeling. I brought the magazine home and put it on the rack and had some friends over and woke up Sunday morning with a hangover. I scrolled through Facebook in bed with my headache and paused on a picture of a dog named Merle. By the end of the day, I’d adopted him.

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When I first shared what happened to Augie online (a desire to rip off the bandaid; a desire to explain an inability to function), I was met with countless messages, all of which I’m sure were very kind, but many of which I didn’t read. It was too much. Besides, it wasn’t about mainlining sympathy. It was about answering the question in one fell swoop: Augie was dead; the death was violent; the death was witnessed; there would be no more pictures of him poised next to my cowboy boots. Some people sent emails instead of replying to the tweet or Instagram post. Most of the people who sent emails wanted me to know their dogs had also been attacked. Most of the people who sent emails also mentioned that their dogs, while suffering expensive surgeries or losing that certain flop in their left ear, had survived.

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On a recent trip out to Marfa, I told my friend Rose that I think I went back to class too soon after the Augie thing (“The Augie Thing”: a stand-in phrase, a compartmentalization, a piece of slang for the time my puppy bled out in my arms). I remember sitting in workshop that first Tuesday back, I told her, looking around at a room of what felt like strangers. Or what felt like simulations of strangers. Grief is isolating, they say, but what that actually means is feeling, at all times, like you’re walking around in an astronaut’s helmet, breathing some other air supply. What I mean is I remember looking around and feeling like nothing I said could possibly be understood. And how could it? Every trauma draws a line. I was on the other side of it.

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If it sounds like I don’t understand the desire to reach out toward pain and say, “Me, too,” then I’m getting it wrong. I do get it. When confronted with discomfort, there’s a not-unkind impulse to assure the speaker you’ve felt it, too. Having been on the receiving end of the practice, though, I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure that hearing about the other dogs who’d been mauled made the Augie thing any less painful. If anything, it made it feel all the more random. Some survive, some don’t. Mine didn’t.

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More than one person referred to the Augie essay as “quick.” This is what I was the most worried about. Quick according to who? Was I doing grieving wrong? It has been a lifetime since October 30 and today. I do not recognize the smiling girl holding the puppy in the photo. That is a trite and cliché thing to say, but it is also very true. She, too, is on the other side of the astronaut helmet.

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It’s not like I spend time on Facebook. In the days after the Augie essay published, a woman who works for a rescue in Austin reached out to express her sympathy, and let me know that she’d help me find another dog, if I ever wanted one. So I liked her rescue organization’s page on Facebook. And then Merle showed up on my feed. Now strangers online are telling me that it’s good to see that I’ve decided to get another dog. I agree. It’s good to see me getting another dog.

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Maybe the actual problem is that I’m online too much.

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Or maybe it’s that I don’t understand the timeline for grieving. Maybe it’s that I think there is one. Maybe it’s that the trauma of it all is still worming its way through my brain, and I’m still trying to correct a narrative, to prove myself wrong, to make the happy ending at the close of my own essay come true. Maybe it’s that I loved having, for 36 hours, a dog, and I get jealous every time I see someone else adopt one, and I think about how that should’ve been me, how that should’ve been my joy. Briefly, it was.

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In my living room is a stack of Merle’s things, in a little anticipatory pile. I’d thrown out what belonged to Augie the morning it happened. Now there are new things. There is a small part of this that feels like a betrayal. But one of the strangers online tells me that this is a nice way to honor Augie’s memory. And I didn't say, but I wanted to say, I’m sorry but you didn’t even know him, or what he would’ve wanted!

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I bring Merle home on Wednesday. Of course, I am already in love with him. With his round belly, his fragile chest, his soft pads, all his soft parts, all still growing, at a rate of nearly a pound a week the internet says, all still hardening. I like that he will be big. I am not projecting a future onto him but I am actively not doing that. We have tried that once before. Maybe that is the shape the fear is taking.

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I have been careful not to say, not even once, that “we are moving on.” There is no doing that. What we are doing is living one day at a time. What we are doing is bringing home a new dog, who we already love, even though we know that loving is dangerous. Maybe that is the shape that healing is taking.