Rest in peace

For anyone who has me on RSS, I apologize for the double post. I needed to change the title of this post to something less upsetting.

Greg and I met at the New Haven dog park. I had just moved from Arizona with my pound puppy, a Finnish Lapphund, a food-hound but a sweetheart: Tori. She's the black and white muppet on the left. Greg had been living in New Haven for a while with his own pup, a beautiful, charismatic Siberian Husky named Zane. He's the pure white charmer on the right. Our relationship began over our dogs. We actually named our son after the street that the dog park was on: Jack Ronan, for St. Ronan Street.

I'm trying to write now about Zane, about what an amazing, wonderful dog he was. About how he was Greg's companion during such an important time in Greg's life. About the naps we took together on lazy days and his course fur that comforted me on so many occasions and the games that he Greg play and how Jack was going to hold onto him when he took his first step... about...

Oh my god, I can't. I just can't. This hurts more than I have words to describe.

See, while I was writing my last post about being sick, I was actually home sick, and Zane was barking at me to go outside. So I hit "post", got up, opened the door and let him and Tori into the snow. By the time I got my jacket on and discovered that the two of them had hopped the fence, it was all over.

I may not have been driving the car that severed Zane's spine, but it sure as hell happened on my watch.

I cannot bear this degree of grief, and my distress is second only to Greg's. I would give anything -- anything -- to take away Greg's pain. I wish it had been Tori. At least, if my behavior was to have resulted in one dog's death, let it have reached the depths of my own despair than my husband's. Tori has spent hours staring at the back door, waiting for her best friend to come home. Our family is broken. We are heartbroken.

This is has been one terrible, awful, horrendous day, a day to cap off one terrible, awful, horrendous winter. I realize, as I hack my way through this evening, feel my temperature rise, the sharp pain of my sore throat slicing through a haze of unhappiness, as I am nursing Jack and thinking about how many ways this moment is wrong, so terribly wrong, so wrong like a nightmare that you just can't wake up from... I realize that the sensation of having my milk let down is the same feeling as having tears reach my eyes, except that nursing serves to release tension and crying merely magnifies the hopelessness. How many times have I cried since Jack's birth?

Tonight more than ever.