When I sit at the computer, there should be Luna laying here beside me. And when I come home from work, there should be Luna first and longest to greet me back.
And she's not here anymore and it feels like somebody's cut off a limb and I just have to cry like I haven't cried since I was a little boy.
And I miss her so much.
24 hours a day we were together for the first 6 or 7 years. When I worked, she was there with me. When I went out, she came with me. When I slept, she slept on the bed curled beside me. She was the smartest dog I ever knew - in fact, she didn't truly consider herself a dog at all. She even attempted to talk - a chuntering, dolphin-like noise she developed in imitation of speech. But I understood what she meant. Not word for word, of course, but the meanings, the sentences, the grammar - I understood. It surprised people sometimes how much verbal communication we shared. And she knew enough human speech to ignore me in two languages.
Like me, she also became domesticated by circumstance, half her lifetime ago. Instead of our wild days surviving and partying, suddenly we were living quietly, children appeared, and Luna developed a domestic routine with Esther.
But we had a deep, deep bond by then. Since the first time I met her in fact, when she was somebody else's hairball puppy. She was given to me because the bond between us was so apparent and immediate.
And now there is a huge hole, a hole much bigger than a simple small sort of dog would create. The hole takes up half this room, and takes up half my life. She was my partner, my friend, a being I loved so much. She was smart and beautiful and she loved me deeply too. And I held her last night and stroked her as her breathing shallowed and stopped, and I put her in the hole I dug and covered her up with dirt.
I'm going to keep on missing her, I know that. I suspect it will be many weeks before the sudden hurts of loss and absence begin to fade. I can hide the tears until I'm alone - for the sake of the children, and some faking of normality, some semblance of coping, I keep it together. I'd rather the howling grief comes only when I'm alone - I'm not really a sharer like that. And I hope that with the weekend coming I have time to let the grief rise and abate perhaps a little.
Until then.
Over here for the family picture blog.
