Loss

By David Dillon 2011

I’ve suffered losses in my life. They ranged from insignificant to tragic.

When my cocker spaniel Julie died 21 years ago, I was devastated. We lived in a rural area north of San Diego.

I came home late one night and let her out to do her business. She charged through the doorway, ran around the corner of the house snarling, and was gone.

For an hour, I walked around in the dark calling her name. All I heard was insects and other nightlife.

Three days later I found Julie’s body. She’d lost a fight with a coyote. I cried that day, the next day, and every day thereafter.

During my lunch hours in downtown San Diego, I always ate outside my office building. I stood by myself, facing a wall and wept.

Then exactly 12 months later – the first anniversary of Julie’s death -- I had a dream. In it, I was working my way through a heavy fog near our house. I called her name.

Suddenly, there she was -- to my left. She came out of the mist, looked right at me, turned around and walked back into the fog.

I woke up, sat up and realized it was a dream. But it was cathartic. I was over the loss. I never again wept for Julie.

I’ve read it can take a year to recover from the loss of a spouse. In my case it was a dog.

My mother died nine years ago in a group home. Alzheimer’s took five and a half years to erase her.

She gradually forgot who I was, who my brother was, and my dad – her husband. The gradual deterioration depressed us and accelerated our separation from her.

When I learned a heart attack had killed her, I called my father and then my brother. We all cried a little and hung up the phone. It was over.

My cat Cracker disappeared recently. She was an eight-year-old bundle of shedding white feline. Cracker weighed all of three-and-a-half pounds fully-grown. She was my favorite. She liked to sleep on me at night, adjusting her position as I tossed and turned.

As a kitten, I carried Cracker outside every morning when I got the newspaper. It was our routine.

In later years, the routine changed. She hung out in the kitchen and whined until I opened a can of food. It didn’t matter if I had opened one the night before; she wanted a fresh one right then.

It was a covenant between man and cat.

Two Saturdays ago I noticed Cracker hadn’t slept on me. The next day, we left town on a short trip. The cat sitter said she saw the other cats, but never Cracker.

After about five days, I began to accept that Cracker would not be coming home. The next evening, I went to bed sobbing. I gave up hope.

I’m sure a coyote got her; just as another coyote got Julie two decades ago.

So here I was again, weeping over the loss of someone or something I loved very much.

I’m not sure what it means, but I wept more, harder and longer for my dog and my cat than I did for my mother.

Some might think that strange, and it may be. However, I take solace in the knowledge that my mother wasn’t eaten by a coyote.