OCTOBER 3, 2023 • [REDACTED LOCATION]

The closest companion I ever had died four years, two months, and thirteen days ago. I think about him at least thirteen times a day. He won’t ever leave me, not totally. Over the last four years, two months, and thirteen days, I slowly came to understand what a ghost really is. By the time I die, I will have spent more time alive living with ghosts than not.

Inside the spaces and line breaks of everything I have written are specks of his soul that he entrusted to me. His love, his loyalty, his innocence are reflected in my quest to return to sincerity. In quiet hours of the night I pain to recall every fleeting moment I shared with him.

Aside from one passage, I haven’t dared to speak openly and tactlessly about how his passing makes me feel.

I don’t how to even go about starting this. I don’t know if I will ever be able to really broach the totality of what he means to me – or anyone I love, really.

When he passed through that vale of tears, parts of me were too passed on and I am sorry. I am sorry to anyone else that they can’t have all of me because of this. That I couldn’t hold him, comfort him, and give him easement has soured not just a single day of my life, but every year as some dark holiday, and in perverse timing that day lands adjacent to my own birthday. When he went away any hope I had for being the man I try to be went with him, without him I am trapped on a slower path to that goal.

When I shared a passage to a much larger essay about him, one of the few friends who read it remarked “I don’t quite see what the fuss is about, it’s just a dog.” I saw their comment and cried. Maybe writing in labyrinthine prose invited this person to leave clinical feedback.

This labyrinthine prose is a new problem since his passing. As I crumbled into my knees learning I missed his passing, I became two. One person lives, sings, laughs, and dances. The other chronicles and documents those moments. One of the two holds loved ones tenderly. The other writes monuments to remember them.

I mourned him for seven days. By the fourth day it was my birthday, I sang hoarse karaoke as I hadn’t slept or eaten. I threw up on the streets of Montreal and sobbed under the neon of rue Sainte-Catherine. A passerby patted my back, lifted me up, and took me to get ramen. I was told, regarding losing loved ones, that they never leave you. That, in death at least, parts of their soul are left with you to cherish and honor. They punctuated their observation with “maybe it is different for someone like you.”

I didn’t consider what it would mean to feel anything other than remorse. My companion stayed in my thoughts for a week, then a month, then a year. With time I convinced myself that the grief ball was getting smaller, that whether I could ever heal was as impossible to fathom as picturing a million-million of something – it was simply too big to theorize in my frail heart. I found myself in North Carolina superficially an adult.

On the anniversary of his birth and his death, as well as my own birthday, a retching fear finds me: that I never deserved his affection and nothing I can ever do will merit that degree of love. I tread water, alone at sea, unsure how I can ever care for myself or someone else. This tiny creature in his time on earth changed me irreparably.

When that fear releases me, when I find shore, I am reminded for another time that when our loves die, they yet live. Inside of me is his entire life and a million-million moments never lived. I bear his tiny infinity inside of me, I bear the weight of his finality, and I bear the responsibility to cherish every detail. I don’t know any more if this is grief, or guilt, or acceptance.

I bear the solace that my absence, in his passing, isn’t my fault. Though this is heavier to bear than you’d think.

I bear the shame that in every person I meet, I harbor a loud sadness that can be heard in the silence between my words.

When terminal frailty took him from us, he made one of me better. I care and tend to those I love as he would have. I attempt to bring joy as he did to those I can. I ask for as little as I can, so whatever is provided is a greater gift.

Hidden within all of my writing is the same wish. That some moments, some memories, some lives can be stretched into their own tiny infinities. Whether a mathematical concept like infinity can even apply to something like time isn’t for me to answer. What I can answer is if we can have infinite moments, or infinite memories, or an infinite life, then even a small one still will have the same amount as a large one. Some infinities look bigger than other infinities and some infinities that look very small are just as much as infinities ten times their size.

In those anniversaries spread out over nearly half a decade I bore the infinite size and weight of this moment in my life. In carrying it for this long, I’ve found this whisper-light thought that the moment may never end.

The moment may never end.

Picking him up from a dog-sitter, after a vacation, their note about him was that he “can be an absolute angel, and a lovable rascal.” Aside from being a remark so non-specific about behavior that it is almost useless, I didn’t quite parse out what they meant until I lived without him.

Today as I write this there are two me inside of me. One of them is still with him, and the other is me now, and inside of the me-now is the one who dances, and the other who writes.

A ghost isn’t an apparition in your attic. It is a memory that sickens you even as it makes you better. In a season of my life where I knew exactly NOTHING about myself, he met me with loving eyes after every brain-busting day. He met me with the same enthusiasm and excitement, every waking moment was a gift, every restful one a blessing. I trusted to him more tears, pain, shame, and sin than anyone could ever give to another, and in return he licked my forehead and curled into my lap. He accepted it all from me and asked for nothing so that even my gratitude would be a gift. And when he left, he proved that that pain disappears when we die. He taught me that time is always-always running out and I owe it to him and everyone I love to give everything I have all of the time or I will have squandered the miracle of being.

But I can’t. I don’t know how and I keep trying. I am doing the best I can.

Certain songs, a shade of color, a ray of sunshine, brings him back to me somedays. And minutes pass where I can’t breathe or stop crying in the way I had to learn after seeing his depression on a pillow on the living room floor. I miss him. I miss him so much I can barely LOOK at a dog without crying behind closed doors. I miss him with such violent force on my body that I wonder sometimes if I can bear feeling this much love and gratitude to another living being ever again.

I wish I never felt this because now I can’t un-feel it. I wish this experience hadn’t found me, or anyone else. I wish I never had to learn these things in his absence.

Somedays my feet find soft grass and beautiful parks and I wish you were here to share them with me. I wish you never got sick. I wish I could have been there when you left. I love you.

Goodbye. I will say goodbye again, another day, in another place.