a week in.

[for the time being, this is going to be a blog about grief and mourning and losing a dog you love. i know that’s not what everybody signed up for and it’s fine not to read it or to ubsubscribe.]

Today was really hard. It was the sort of Sunday I spend all summer looking forward to. Not quite fall, but a break from the hundred-degree days, with football happening, when I don’t have anything else I have to do, when Kat is doing her own thing in the afternoon and nobody expects anything of me. For the past twelve years, on a day like this, I’ve known exactly what I’ll do: I’ll watch the Bears play the early afternoon game, then take Dio for a long walk, listening to the late afternoon game on my headphones while he leads us on whatever winding path will take us to some place with TVs on a patio, where we’ll sit and I’ll watch the third quarter, before listening to the end of the game on the walk home.

People would come up to him wherever we ended up—usually either Posse East or Little Woodrow’s on Burnet, which is a shorter walk but not somewhere I ever ran into anyone I knew—and want to pet him. If the person who wanted to meet him was a woman, he would let her, sometimes just roll over on his back so they could rub his belly even though he was out in public, exposed to the world, secure in the conviction that everyone around him was his friend. If it was a dude, he had an amazing fake-out move where he’d lift his head and then, when they went to give him a scratch, he’d juke to the right and drop it again, a down-low-too-slow maneuver that demonstrated how, with a handful of exceptions who proved it to him, he had zero use for human men.

It made Kat feel safe, that her dog was so wary around random dudes who decided they should have his attention. It made me feel special, the way it does when anybody says that they don’t like most people, but they do like you.

But today, of course, there was no dog to walk. I didn’t really feel it until around 4 o’clock, and then it was a real ache. It’s just one of those things that I had built my life around, and it made even a self-indulgence like going to a patio bar to watch football feel meaningful; he loved his walks, never got bored, could go the same route every single day and find something new to smell or to eat or to pee on. That kind of repetitiveness isn’t much fun on your own, but it’s fun to see the familiar through someone else’s eyes. He always had open eyes for that.

So, I dunno, I just miss my dog a lot today. And this is a very weird year to be grieving anyone, because grief is all around us. We’re all mourning something, we’re all living through a disruption to our regular patterns, we’re all missing things that we normally look forward to.

So many of the rituals humans have devised to ease the pain of grief are social, and so many of the distractions we’d use to make our sadder hours pass aren’t part of our routines. (It only just occurred to me that, if Dio were here and healthy, we wouldn’t have walked to a patio during a global pandemic to watch football.) All of the grief and loss that comes with being alive in this very strange time—and maybe we’ve gotten used to it because it has been six months of living like this now, but it’s still there—is interacting with the grief I’m feeling because my dog died, and is surely causing immense pain to people whose friends and families have died during the pandemic. We ease the suffering that comes with it by feeling it together, by remembering together, by being alive together, and we have so much less access to those things right now.

This is just a very hard year for so many people. This past week has been the hardest part of it for me, and today was an especially tough one.

But everyone is dealing with some form of grief right now, whether for someone we love or the way we lived before all of this. I don’t even know if you can fully separate those things. It’s the human condition of 2020, an inescapable part of this time. It comes at us at weird angles, because there are ways in which it all feels so normal that it doesn’t make sense. (How is it possible they are playing football during the global pandemic?) But then sometimes, you find yourself feeling it so deeply, because there’s a breeze blowing through the open windows on a day that’s almost perfect, but isn’t. That’s just life right now.