The Other Side

When I take the dog for a walk, she stops to sniff at everything, sometimes yanking me backwards to follow a scent we’ve already passed. Leave it, I say. She can’t hear me anymore so I am basically talking to myself. Today I give up and let her smell to her heart’s content. While she’s smelling, I’m thinking about the book I just read, Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley. It’s a memoir about loss and how to get past it. 

It comes to the conclusion that you can’t get past it. 

But eventually, you learn to live with it. In the book the author’s good friend commits suicide. A few weeks before her apartment had been broken into. The two things have nothing to do with each other, but in her grieving state, they muddle up in her head. She becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of the burglary, and she’s torn up about her missing jewelry, gifts from her grandmother. She looks for a grief support group for victims of stolen jewelry, but there are no support groups for that. 

Grief isn’t for things, she writes. Grief is for people.

Of course, what she is really struggling with is why her friend killed himself. You are never going to know, I want to tell her. Fifty years ago, my father killed himself. Why? I don’t know. The dog is yanking my arm again, pulling me around a lamp post, halfway into someone’s front yard and back out again, rounding a corner toward the house with the backyard chickens. How extensive is this scent trail? 

Okay, he was suffering from depression. He had a drinking problem and a gambling addiction. He’d recently filed for bankruptcy. His marriage was falling apart. Are these valid reasons? If they are, factor in this: he was thirty-four years old. He was the father of three children under the age of seven. 

I was the seven-year-old. Don’t write about this, says a voice in my head. But I have stopped listening to the voices in my head. 

Here is how you live with it: You just do. 

And after a while you find yourself somewhere on the other side. I wish I could’ve said this to my father. That, and the other side isn’t perfect, but it has its good points. Flowers, for example, and a comical number of cucumbers in the garden. Good books and good friends. People who love you despite all of your weirdness. Dogs. You knew I was coming back to the dog. 

I love how she leads me along, doubles me back, finds an interesting trail for us to follow whenever I let her go.