More Good Dogs: More Stories About Good Dogs and the People Who Love Them by Rabbit Redbone

Author:Rabbit Redbone [Redbone, Rabbit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Redbone Media
Published: 2014-03-10T04:00:00+00:00

My life after that became more normal but also, much less colorful. Beth grew, and we had Caroline. Then we had Jake and Peter (named for Paul’s brother who had died the year before and way too young). Then Meghan. She was to be my last baby.

Mum died of another stroke soon after Meghan was born. She went in the blink of an eye, and I was glad for that part of it, at least. She wouldn’t have been a good sufferer, although I was sad that my children wouldn’t get to know her as I had known her.

In the intervening years, I grew to almost forget Sarie…as though she had, indeed, just been an imaginary playmate as my parents had for so long assumed. It seems hard to believe, I know, but I was only twenty-one when Sarie disappeared for me. And I’ve lived a lot more than twenty-one years since then. If you are in your late nineties like me, tell me–do you remember your teens? Your early twenties?

Well, sometimes, yes.

Sometimes a snippet of that time would come back to me, usually in a dream, and when I woke, I’d mourn the loss of Sarie all over again.

My Beth died when she was sixty-seven. Brain cancer. I sat with her throughout her last six, difficult months. A mum should never have to see her daughter into her grave, but I felt lucky, at least, that I was there to be with her. She was not capable of communication at the end; the surgeries, the pain and medications for pain had taken too much of her away by then.

But as she lay in that rented hospital bed in her daughter’s (my granddaughter’s) rec room, her fingers curled and uncurled, over and over, and I knew that she was able to feel the silk of Sarie’s ears.

That must have been a comfort to her and, so, was a comfort to me, also.

The day Beth died, her children had gathered. I moved back from Beth’s bed to give them room and sat by myself near a sliding glass door that gave onto the backyard. I stared out over a beautiful winter landscape and only listened with half an ear as my grandchildren murmured and cried, each saying their piece.

Then there came a hushed silence, one of my granddaughters gave a short wail of pain, and then the sobs started, although muffled and well reigned in; while Beth’s diagnoses two years ago had been shocking, her death had certainly not come as a surprise. Especially to me, who’d walked hand in hand with her down the long road of the last six months. I’d felt her fingers wither, seen her eyes glaze as her essence, her Beth-ness drained away.

I was also not surprised when a small weight dented the space of my skinny lap. Without turning my gaze from the yard, I reached out…

…and put my hand on Sarie’s head. I could feel her, but not see her; it didn’t matter–my fingers, my whole body, recognized her at once.

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