On grief, guilt and the need to nurture

Little biscuity thing. As big as a warm teacup when we picked her up, with saucer eyes that reflected you back whole. She was a nuisance, pure spite and affection, all needle teeth and insistent claw, demanding walks, food, love, and leaving malicious puddles on the floor. She flew at me like a tiny missile, while I, still groggy from sleep, gave gloved, impatient fingers on which to chew. I didn’t realise she had swallowed my heart down in her breakfast bowl until her tongue, till then so moist and insistent, had gone still. Still the saucer eyes looked at me as if to say, you are my everything.

I tried to kiss life back past needle teeth, that had been my constant battle, on chair legs, hairbrushes and hand, but as her tail relaxed for the first time – now as big and as startled as a hare caught in headlights – I didn’t mind that she left me damp, and I would have done anything to clean up after her again.

   
Our puppy was run down this weekend, and the grief I’m feeling has been completely overwhelming. Trying to isolate the reasons why I am so devastated – more, immediately, completely done for than when my grandparents died, or when my sister lost a baby, is because she needed me, everyday for small, practical things.

Mixed up with grief is a kind of guilt I’ve never felt before. I’ve always had a philosophy of giving freedom to the things I love, but this time I was neglectful, and so, there is no question here that I was wrong. I was too careless. The park may only be at the end of the street, and the road is not busy, but I should have had her on a lead, although she had a bike light on, the car didn’t see her, though it seemed to stop as she had crossed over to the other side. I called to her but the car accelerated and that was that. 

 I am completely to blame, as Tom told me shortly afterwards, after we had gone, hopeless but frantic to the vet, our Friday night in pieces, howling, and returned home empty handed and hearted to a mess of muddy footprints and leaves on our normally pristine floor, and the feeling that we would never quite be alright again. It happened so quick. Her short life had been a blur of early mornings, and constant demands to play, but as she curled in my arms, all pretty and warm and trustful of an evening, it was all worth it. I let her down, and I don’t know how to forgive myself, although the kids and Tom have found it within themselves, now, to forgive me.

They helped bury her, in the garden, all still, but as perfect as she had been in life, while I wept and rocked: I’m so sorry, so so sorry. It was instant, with no blood, at least. At least I can give myself that comfort. But while I am grateful my life is otherwise intact, with children, husband, my other dog Johnny, who returned from his pug share, sniffing and wagging for her, but who seemed to understand the scent of death when we brought her home, licking my tears without knowing what else to do; and for all many many messages of love from friends and family delivered online and over the phone; still I am in pieces.

It’s made me realise there is something in that need to nurture that materialistic modern life fails to account for. There is no thing that can replace the need to be needed by something other than yourself, no achievement more satisfying than the small, regularly performed, unnoticed, unthanked for tasks which you do for love, and to sustain life alone. I did not sustain her, in the end and it has taken a big stretch in my belief that there was nothing that I could have done differently that could have changed it. Space time dictates that, depending on where you are looking at the universe, everything that has happened has already, or is still yet to come. Time has no line, except for the progression of the players through it. It’s science, not religion that can absolve me in some small, unarguable way. It could never not have happened.  And I hope time works its healing magic soon, because right now, I could manage sorrow, but guilt is chewing me raw. And in the meantime I’m struggling to feel deserved of the others in my life who need me to be calm, and carry on.