The Big Thing
I’m resuscitating the dead art form of the blog. Or at least this blog for this post. If you don’t know what a blog is, it’s like a Substack but I’m not going to email you telling you I wrote something and then make you pay me $5 a month just for the honor of bothering you with my thoughts. Read it or don’t. TW: Death of a pet.
As an elder millennial, I feel my body aging while it’s still trying to heal from coming of age during the great recession, caught in a break-down build-up loop. I've spent a lot of time walking around my bougie neighborhood this week, trying to move the pain, the grief, the anger out of my body while I passed the $800,000 two bed ranch houses on an eighth of an acre that we’ll never afford, nestled neatly between the charter school and pricey coffee shop while I try to make sense of this new chapter in my life.
I had an idea of the landmarks I’d hit as an adult. I’d get a degree. Buy a house. Get married. Have kids. Have a career. Those things were mirages on the horizon for my generation, I just didn’t know it at the time.
So in 2011, when my degrees were getting me nowhere during the recession, and recruiters and HR mangers kindly told me to leave my degree off my resume and my husband -then-fiancee and I could barely make ends meet living in a badly insulated cabin in the merciless Adirondack winter, we got a puppy. Because we could. Because life is short. Be cause dogs are awesome.
People referred to Shakespeare as our “practice baby” which I found kind of insulting because I liked him a whole lot more than I liked the idea of having a baby. He was healthy for an English Bulldog. Hell, he was healthier than our neighbor’s golden lab. We drove from the Adirondacks to Saratoga the weekend of Sean’s 23rd birthday to pick him up. He lived twelve amazing years.
We drove home in the stark winter night, this small being that looked like Falcor from The Never Ending Story fast asleep in my lap, trusting us immediately and entirely. We almost ran out of gas 45 minutes from home. It was late at night in rural upstate New York and not even Stewart’s was open. We had to call the county Sheriff, who called one of the gas station managers to open the small one-pump station we’d pulled into so we could get enough gas to get home. Shakespeare slept in the crook of my arm the whole time. He didn’t realize his humans were idiots. Or maybe he knew and accepted it.
For Sean and I, our story as a couple, as adults, as individuals is punctuated with stories of our pets. Of Jack, the cat I got in graduate school because I was lonely in the apartment by myself and how he hated Sean and became his best enemy when Sean finally moved in. Of picking up Shakespeare one blustery cold day in early spring when the world hadn’t yet realized it was supposed to be warm. Of rescuing Lulu, our misunderstood and beautiful pit bull a sunny day in July and how she and Shakespeare immediately curled up together that night despite the heat and spent the next nine years inseparable.
Those years were years of recovery for both of us, of finding our way when the other Big Things our peers were doing weren’t available to us and support and kindness was scarce. We couldn’t afford a huge wedding like our friends. We couldn’t put a downpayment on a house. We couldn’t bring a baby home to the one bedroom apartment with a leaking roof. We couldn’t save money on my salary while Sean went to school full time, even with the GI Bill and his full-time job. We didn’t have the rituals and the roadsigns that told us we were adults. That we are on the right path. That we had gone through the correct capitalist American rite of passage at the right age.
But we had something most of them didn’t. We had dogs.
And Shakespeare didn’t nag me about why I wasn’t using my expensive education when I made $1,400 a month, rent was $750 and my student loan payments were $700. Lulu didn’t need an explanation for why, when my chronic pain stopped me from doing things, I just stopped reaching out and participating. They just curled up next to me, their reassuring breaths telling me I was alive and I was loved and that was enough.
They came with us when we traveled. They were welcome almost everywhere. We glued flowers to Lulu’s collar and got Shakey a bowtie and that solved the need for attendants at our outdoor, deep-in-the-woods wedding.
We got better jobs and we moved, three times in three years, crossing the country each time. We slept on floors, lived with no furniture for three months in a house we loved, regrettably hauled furniture up a hill in the rain to a shitty house we hated. But if they were there with us, it was home. Five beating hearts against the world.
Still, I stupidly mourned that I didn’t have a Big Thing to tell me life was changing, that I was on the right path. That I was here.
On Friday I experienced that The Big Thing. The Big Thing, the rite of passage, the marked change of season in my life from then to now. The underrated, unspoken Big Thing: Losing the soul dog that got you through your 20s.
We lost Jack in 2019 only a month after we moved to Boise. We lost Lulu in 2021, during a tumultuous and frightening time made worse by the pandemic. We lost Shakespeare on Friday, the last beating heart of who I had been to who I would have to be without him sleeping on my feet while I work, without our morning rituals of me pretending I don’t see him trying to open the treat drawer in the kitchen and then caving and giving him one. Of feeling his heavy warm weight on me when everything else feels hard and strange and stacked against me, or coming around the corner and looking at the empty space on the couch where he usually curled up.
I don’t know who I’m supposed to be next. Selfishly, I don’t want to find out without the power of that unconditional (okay, conditional if I moved him from his spot on the couch) acceptance and love that helped me survive the years from 25 to 38. But I got my road sign. I got my Big Thing. Change is here.
There is a line, a finite crack between then and now that will color all my memories. A time of when we had you and once you were gone.
Is this too much grief for a pet? Am I going to invite eye rolls because it’s just a dog? Or my favorite “that’s not real love because you don’t have kids.”
It’s never too much to honor the things that move you forward, or grieve the loss of the relationships that made you feel safe.
Shakespeare trying to push me off the thrifted piano bench I used as a desk chair on my 27th birthday.
