Orginally Submitted to HerPress “Dog Years”.
Well I no longer hear the music when the lights go out,
Love goes cold in the shades of doubt.
The strange fate in my mind is all too clear.
Music when the lights come on,
The girl I thought I knew has gone
And with her my heart had disappeared.
– Coeur de Pirate
We walked around the building in a long loop, and I held her like a baby. She never wanted to be held like that until she was dying. She had her eyes shut, the breeze licking her face. She was soaking up the sunset and the sway of our walk, occasionally peeping an eye open to see where we were and to sniff the air. I had built a tiny hospice for her in our home, keeping her comfortable and deeply sedated; preparing myself to walk her Home soon. My insides couldn’t bear the thought of loving her so much and never being in the same room as her again.
Bailey was a sunbeam. She wasn’t just a service dog. As if a service dog could ever be “just” the lifesaving love they encompass. She had a snaggletooth, no top teeth, and a grin to end all grins. She expressed her happiness with twirling and the occasional whine, especially as we pulled into her favorite place to work (Target). She loved chicken, burrowing in blankets, sleeping spine-to-spine with her human, and getting acquainted with elderly people. NASA was her nirvana, where old folks abounded. She had to say hi to each one, even though it wasn’t “professional”. When she witnessed an older woman take a fall, she was the first to abandon her perch and kiss the injured hand of the person she wanted to help. She’d snack with you, snuggle in tight spaces, and hide in your laundry basket. Can’t find Bailey? Call her name and she’d wiggle out from a piece of furniture, or jingle her way toward you, belly wet from sleeping in the shower.
Now she was gone in an instant.
It was the long, dark night of my soul.
It didn’t matter that I helped people die for a living as a chaplain, I was afraid that I wouldn’t know how to help my best friend die. I watched my patients sundowning, bearing the burden of dementia and anxiety and recognized it when Bai started to do the same. I carried her her whole life, and I would carry her as she drifted out of this one into the next. She saved me more than once, and I saved her more than once.
Bailey was released into the night sky on a Saturday Summer night when she told me it was time to let her go. I still find bits of her foxtail collection around the house like glints from the afterlife. I’ve cried in the car most days going to work thinking about her and all the goodbyes we have to say and shouldn’t.
As I told my patient this morning, “I know.” It’s not my first loss, but it’s certainly my most incandescent.
I loved her enough to let her go. But my life was bereft without her. I lost part of my heart that night when Bailey died. My best friend helped me usher my other best friend into the afterlife. I wrapped her in the fleece after her spirit left her tiny body and as I held that bundle I cried sobs that were the ugliest, gut-wrenching cries of why. I was not crying alone. She wasn’t loved by only me.
A year on, she is markedly absent from the spaces she filled. Sometimes I swear I can hear the jingle of her collar, or a little sigh or huff. I walk around corners expecting to see her, my bed lies empty, and her flower blanket remains, but she is gone. There is so much permanency in gone.
I wrote about her regularly in a journal for a year. Trying to preserve her essence; her very being. I didn’t want to forget a single thing about her, or go a day without thinking of her. I bandaged up my heart and still carried it around. There was great injustice in heartache when the underlying reality is I have to do all this without my service dog.
But with grief can come gratitude. I would not change her love for anything, never trade the trials we bore together. I will regard her everyday for the rest of my life until I get to run to her again and scoop her up. It is not well with my soul, but it is mending. And that’s all I can ask for really. The only words I have for her are these:
Thank you, Bai.
Moxie 