from the blanco.

[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.]

We had planned a vacation months ago. It had been years since we’d taken one, and our plans earlier this year—to celebrate Kat’s birthday in New York in April—went the way of everyone else’s plans. But we enjoy do-nothing vacations too, so started looking around. The beach was out; it would be too crowded to relax. What about one of the lakes outside of Austin? But they were expensive—everyone wanted to get away—and most of the rentals we found didn’t allow dogs anyway. So we started looking for places a few months further out past the summer, and found a rental that was on the upper edge of our budget if we waited until October, at the start of the off-season. We’d still be tired and stressed and would want to get away in October too, we reckoned, and the place had everything: private access to the Blanco River, set away from any neighbors, a full kitchen so we didn’t have to worry about how we would eat, and a fenced yard for the dog. There were stairs, which Dio loved when his joints were feeling spry, but which he could safely ignore if he wasn’t up for climbing them.

It’s been nice, this past week. I’m sitting on the porch of the cabin looking out at the river, and we’ve swum and walked and watched TV and done some writing and spent like 70% less time looking at the Internet (still a lot, but less). But also, it’s hard sometimes, thinking about the version of this trip we’d planned to take, when we expected to have our dog with us. When you’re a family of two people and one dog, and you have been for twelve years, you plan your life around the needs of all three of you. We were excited to be on this part of the river because the listing said that the water started shallow, and Dio loved wading but hated swimming. We’ve walked the river road and the neighborhood behind it a bit, but that’s less purposeful without him here. Being out of our own house is nice—there are no rooms I expect to see him in, or moments where it hits that he won’t be there when I turn around because that’s where he always was—but also, there is still a feeling of his absence, even here, because he went everywhere with me until he was gone.

Shortly after Dio died, a friend sent me a Twitter thread explaining the ball and box theory of grief, which I found helpful. The idea, basically, is that when the loss is fresh, the grief is like a large ball in a small box, and whenever it touches the side, the feeling of loss is activated. Because the ball is big and the box is small, it doesn’t take much to bump the ball into motion to hit the “grief” button. Over time, the ball shrinks, so that the button gets hit less often. It’s only been a month, but that’s consistent with my experience. I don’t feel overwhelmed often, and sometimes things that a few weeks ago would have triggered a feeling of loss work a little differently—I feel him like a little blue Star Wars ghost trotting happily in front of me when I take a walk, or a little dog curled up in the corner of a memory that never actually happened. Those moments are sad, but they don’t hurt in the same way. Being on the river, I feel it sometimes, but sometimes, I remember where he would be if we had come here in any of the prior twelve years, and I feel a sense of his presence more than I do his absence.

All of that is not usually how I think about things. But I have been thinking about love, and how grief and love are mostly the same thing. We are all in bodies that will fail eventually, so grief is just what those of us who are alive feel on the other side of love, like how going to sleep and waking up are the same. None of this is terribly deep, I’m sure, to anyone who has studied grief or, I dunno, is religious or whatever—but this is new to me, and so it is just striking to realize that the grief you feel when your dog dies after twelve years is just a different form of the love you felt when he was alive. So sometimes this week, looking out at a spot on the Blanco we picked because we thought all three of us would be happy on the river, I’ve felt more than I expected to. When people told me it would get easier over time, I don’t think I understood that what they meant was that the loss I felt would just feel more like love.