Day 171

Maybe I’m adjusting, I said to the husband. We were up early. K called, her dog died just one day ago, and we cried together as she told me of his last painful hours. At least he didn’t go in his sleep, we agree. As hard as it was to hold him while the vet administered a shot, it would have been so much worse if he’d slipped away all alone in the night while we slept, K. sobbed.

For two weeks now, ever since the dog was found to have cancer, I have been waking every morning, checking my cell phone for the message from K. that it was over. Of course it made me think of the three months preceding D.’s message, sent from LinkedIn because he didn’t have my email. With what fear and trepidation I checked my email each morning.

I was looking at the journal I started the day I called you, the day I learned about your diagnosis. It’s too painful to read all the way through but my one sentence entry just 12 hours before you died leaps out: I fear it won’t be long now.

About a week before you passed I walked the dog over to a dog park. It was early, mostly just us dog owners about. As he ran around with the other dogs I saw a man about 50 yards away that looked so much like you in face and hat and posture that I caught my breath. I tried to surreptitiously take his picture but they came out blurry, and I couldn’t see in the picture what I saw in the moment - you, just standing there in your customary baseball hat.

Remember when I called you all the way from Germany to say Did you know that you look *German*? Out walking the streets of Munich, I had just passed your doppelganger, my heart lurching with the unexpectedness of your blue eyes meeting mine. I’m sure he wondered why I stared at him so.

In the park, I sat on the ground with my back to you and then using my phone reversed the lens so I was taking a ‘selfie’ of you over my shoulder, my hands shaking. I zoomed in but my eyes were too blurry with tears to get a really good look, then my dog came over and clowned around to try and get me to stop crying, and knocked the phone from my hand. By the time I picked it up, stood and turned around you were gone - not on the dog path, not at a picnic table, not even on the long trail leading out of the park.

I had written you an email not long before you died. R. wrote me to tell me that she had read it to you, and then you asked to be alone afterward for a long time. I know he was remembering your time together, R. wrote, so generous to me even in her own sorrow. Maybe, I tell myself, maybe that was when I saw you in the park. I like to think that while you were thinking of us, maybe, I was seeing you.

What’s the matter, my husband calls from the other room. I go find him and he holds his arms out and I go into them, the dog bumping against our legs clowning frantically. I’m not over it, I tell him, still crying. I’m not over it at all.