Month Four: Is My Dog Grieving Too? – how a Sudden Death Radiates.

By month four, I knew I was grieving.

I didn't always understand what grief was doing to me, but at least I knew what it was.

There were words for what I was experiencing. Shock. Trauma. Brain fog. Anxiety. Anger. Loneliness. There were articles telling me that forgetting why I had walked into a room was normal. There were people telling me there was no timeline for grief. There were books explaining why I could be relatively okay one minute and completely fall apart the next.

But nobody had given Arrow a pamphlet.

And somewhere along the way, I started wondering:

Is my dog grieving too?

Because James didn't just disappear from my life.

He disappeared from Arrow's.

James had been part of Arrow's entire world. He walked him. He talked to him. He was part of the normal rhythm of our house. There were things James did with Arrow that I didn't do, just as there were things Arrow did with me that belonged to the two of us.

James died, and I lost my partner. But Arrow lost his person, too. The cats experienced a home that suddenly sounded, smelled and operated differently. Not to mention the entire trauma we’d all be through the night he died, with the first responder, coroner, and funeral home staff being in our normally very quiet and unactive home. 

Family members lost James in their own relationship to him. Friends lost their friend. Coworkers lost someone they knew. Even routines disappeared. The person who walked the dog, sat in a particular chair, came through the door at a certain time, made certain noises in the kitchen — suddenly didn't. – This was one of the hardest things, because I worked from home, Arrow and I would go out into the back yard every night as James came up the drive way and we’d welcome daddy home, and when this just stopped, it broke my heart of my gorgeous boy, who didn’t know why.

Dogs know our routines better than we do.

They know what time somebody gets up. They know the sound of a particular car. They know which person fills the water bowl, and which one takes them for a walk. They know where everyone sits. They know the sounds of the house when everyone who belongs there is home.

And then, suddenly, one of Arrow's people wasn't there anymore.

There was no explanation I could give him.

I couldn’t say James's name. I was worried that saying it would upset him.  I could cry into his fur, and believe me I did a lot of that. I could tell him a hundred times that James had died.

But Arrow didn't know what a heart attack was.

He didn't understand that James had died in his sleep.

He couldn't understand why the man who had been there yesterday wasn't coming through the door again.

And when I really started thinking about that, I realized something else.

Arrow hadn't only lost James.

He had lost the life he had before James died.

So had I.

The house changed.

The routines changed.

The sounds changed.

Things James normally did simply stopped happening.

And I changed.

Arrow was living with a person who cried more, slept differently, forgot things, moved differently through the house and sometimes probably wasn't very present at all.  Someone who was scared to death (for lack of a better phrase) of EVERYTHING. 

I knew why.

Arrow didn't.

All he knew was that something had happened to our family.

The Ripple Effect of Sudden Death

When someone dies suddenly, there is a tendency to focus on the person closest to them.

James died, so I became the widow. 

People asked how I was doing. People worried about me. People checked on me.

And of course they did. I had lost my partner of sixteen years.

But as those first months passed, I began to understand that a death doesn't belong to just one person.

It moves outward.

James was my partner, but he was also somebody's family member. Somebody's friend. Somebody's coworker. Somebody's neighbour.

And somebody's dog person.

Every one of those relationships was different, which meant every one of those losses was different.

There isn't one version of James that everyone lost.

I lost my James.

Someone else lost their friend James.

Someone else lost the person they worked beside.

And Arrow lost the man who walked him.

That sounds like such a small thing when you write it down.

It wasn't.

Because a walk isn't just a walk to a dog.

It's routine. It's expectation. It's relationship. It's time spent together.

And suddenly it was gone.

Does a Dog Understand Death?

I don't know exactly what Arrow understood.

I still don't.  All I know is that he was my reason to keep going, he held me together, and I only felt safe when I was with him but… was I doing the same for him. 

I don't know whether dogs understand death in anything resembling the way we do. I don't know whether Arrow knew James was dead or whether he simply knew James was missing.

Maybe that distinction only matters to humans.

What I do know is that Arrow knew absence.

He knew James wasn't there.

He knew our home was different.

And he certainly knew that I was different.

That made me think about grief differently.

We often talk about grief as though it begins and ends with understanding that someone has died.

But maybe grief doesn't require an understanding of death.

Maybe sometimes grief is simply recognizing that someone who belonged in your world isn't there anymore.

There is an empty space where there wasn't one before.

And you notice.

We Were Both Waiting for Someone Who Wasn't Coming Home

There were moments during those months when I would look at Arrow and wonder what was going through his head.  I wish I knew, because physically he was not the same dog. 

Was he waiting for James?

Did he expect him to walk through the door?

Did he wonder why I was the one doing something James normally did?

Did he notice when enough time had passed that James's absence stopped being unusual and became our new normal?

I'll never know.

That's one of the difficult things about grieving with an animal. You can't ask.

But perhaps there was something comforting about that too.

Arrow didn't ask me to explain how I was feeling.

He didn't tell me I needed to move forward.

He didn't worry about whether four months was too long to still be struggling.

He didn't need me to make sense of something that didn't make sense.

He was just there.  Always there, strong, faithful and my beautiful saviour.

And I was there.

Some days, that was enough.

Death Changes More Than We Realize

I think this was one of the things I was beginning to understand by month four.

When a person dies, particularly when they die suddenly, an entire system changes around their absence.

It's the obvious things.

There is one less person sitting at the table.

One less coat hanging by the door.

One less voice in the house.

But it's also a thousand tiny things you would never have thought mattered.

Who walks the dog.

Who takes out the garbage.

Who watches a certain television show with you.

Who complains about something.

Who buys a particular thing at the grocery store.

Who occupies that spot on the couch.

Who makes a noise in another room that you don't even consciously hear until it isn't there anymore.

A person occupies an enormous amount of invisible space in a life.

You don't fully see it until they're gone.

And the empty space they leave doesn't belong exclusively to their spouse or their children or their parents.

Everybody who had a relationship with that person has to reorganize some part of their world around the fact that they're no longer in it.

Apparently, even the dog.

Arrow and Me

At the time, I thought I was taking care of Arrow.

I didn't know it then, but Arrow and I were going to carry each other through a life neither of us had chosen. We had both lost someone. We were both learning the new shape of our home. And maybe neither one of us needed the other to understand exactly what had happened. Maybe, for a while, we just needed to know that the other one was still there.

I had to feed him. Walk him. Let him outside. Make sure he was okay.

Those responsibilities were still there regardless of whether I felt capable of doing them.

Looking back now, I can see that Arrow was also taking care of me.

He gave structure to days that had lost their structure.

He gave me a reason to get up.

He needed things from me at a time when it would have been very easy to disappear completely into my own grief.

And there was something profoundly comforting about having another living being in the house who had known James.

Arrow belonged to the before.

He had been there when James was alive.

He knew the house when it contained the three of us.

He was part of that life.

When so much of my world suddenly felt unfamiliar, Arrow was familiar.

Neither one of us had chosen this new version of our family.

But there we were.

Together.

I couldn't explain to Arrow what had happened.

He couldn't tell me whether he missed James.

Maybe we didn't need to.

We had both lost someone.

We were both learning the new sounds of our house.

We were both adjusting to routines we hadn't chosen.

And somehow, day after day, we kept going.

At four months, I still had absolutely no idea what my life without James was going to look like.

I didn't know then just how important Arrow would become in helping me find my way through it.

I only knew that when I looked around at everything James's death had changed, I was beginning to understand something I hadn't considered in those first terrible days.

Death has a reach far beyond the person who dies.

It travels through families, friendships, workplaces, homes and routines.

It changes relationships.

It changes roles.

It changes the sound of a house.

And sometimes, while we're trying to understand our own grief, there's a dog lying beside us quietly trying to understand where his person went too.

Maybe Arrow was grieving.

Maybe he was simply responding to a world that had suddenly changed.

I suspect it was probably a little bit of both.

Either way, four months after James died, Arrow and I were learning the same lesson:

Someone can be gone and still be everywhere.

And then three years later, when Arrow died, I held him under the lilac on our deck, the place we spent so much time together in those first years after our shared loss. There's an extraordinary circle here — the dog who lived through the loss of James became one of my constants in the life that came afterward, now was gone.  But that story, my friends, is for another day.

Join me for our next installment -- Month 5 — Kids and Grief

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