A Disorganized Post

It's a different feeling that I have today
Especially when I know you've gone away
Lou Reed


There is nothing to do but go on. Sometimes I think I am doing that more or less successfully, and other times I think it is quite impossible, that the idea that I am managing is nothing more or less than an illusion. An emotional hallucination.

I get through the days. They have a different shape now. For nine years I woke up every morning and thought: the dog. He has to eat. He has to pee. In North Carolina, the latter meant letting him out on the back yard; here, it more demandingly involved getting dressed, putting on his leash, rumpled and half-awake facing the world outside, however briefly. For most of his life, Garth woke us up insisting on his rights, on a start to the day, jumping onto the bed, pressing a wet nose in our hands, pacing around the bed. Now we wake up to silence; his absence is perhaps most striking at that moment.

In North Carolina we went for walks, but it was generally one longish one per day, in the morning, a ritual more than a necessity. In Brooklyn, Garth went out several times a day on walks of varying duration, from early in the morning until late at night, and I realize now how much my perception of my environment was affected by this. I was always seeing the doormen and the postman and the construction workers in the courtyard, running into dog buddies in the neighborhood, pausing so Garth could be admired by children, viewing the harbor from the Promenade at all hours and observing how the water changed color with the sky, being dragged into the pet stores. It was often an inconvenience: when it was raining, when I was late to leave for work. But it forced us to interact in a way that we no longer have to, to be aware of things that now pass us by.

Everything begins and ends at the exactly right time and place. That rather ominous line of dialogue from "Picnic at Hanging Rock" has occurred to me more than once lately. It's easy, now that Garth has gone, to hop on a train and spend two days in the country -- which is exactly what I ended up doing, just one week after his death, when my father was hospitalized for five days after a heart attack. Much better that these two events occurred in the order they did, rather than the reverse. How fortunate, too, to be in New York, instead of North Carolina, at a time when my parents will obviously need me much more.

And Garth's death has somehow closed a chapter in North Carolina. The stone house that I shed so many tears for no longer seems like home in any way. To imagine being there without him! It's simply impossible.