In an instant, the lights went out everywhere. I live in a dusty, quiet existence like an abandoned summer home, with the silence ringing like a siren in my head, and warmth eternally beyond my grasp. I don’t tend to the festering wound inside my chest. I had a heart there, and it ripped itself from me to follow her as if they were one in the same. Edith caught it gently in her mouth before racing off. Whenever I couldn’t find something in my apartment, like my keys, I would look at her and ask, “did you take it? You took it!” and she would follow me around and help me look.

I took eet. And she curls up somewhere bright and warm to take a nap. That cancer would come for a dog, my girl, and riddle her with tumors is beyond me, but I didn’t let it get that far. She would not deteriorate while I attempted to deal with what was happening. I can reconcile all of that…It’s just that I am here now, and she is not. The moments right before and after were so absurdly close, and I am continually dragged away from their intersection in disbelief, by time, that only moves forward.

I am alarming robotic in my response to people who only want to help. It’s as if I learned overnight how to turn off my emotions and replace them with a facade that makes people more comfortable. The robot cries silently on the train because nobody bothers you. Dries up before going in to work. Functions, and does not feel.

Back in my quiet apartment the shell around me falls away in an environment that seems to have less oxygen in it than a coffin underground. My cat waits by the back door for her friend, as if I have forgotten to let Edith back in. As if I would ever leave her outside. As if I would ever leave her at all, and not come back.

Getting back to Edith was my life. She was left at a shelter after having been with the same family for eight years, abandoned because they simply didn’t feel like having a dog anymore. I adopted her three months later, and she looked at me sheepishly before falling asleep in the sun in the back of my car. When it was time for bed she dug her way under my covers and curled up in a ball by my side. And every day since she was by my side. No matter where I went, I always came back. She would never be abandoned again.

I was the last thing she saw and heard and felt, with her velvety little head cupped in my hands telling her she was a good good girl.

I don’t know how to end an ending…other than to repeat what the vet said to me when I had to bring Edith in one last time. “She was an older dog, and this would have happened three years ago in the shelter. She would have gone out of this world alone and scared, and she never would have met you or have had these extra three years with you. But that didn’t happen. You gave her that time, and now she’s loved, and now she knows.”

Luciana, 30