Moving on, sort of

It's not easy, moving on.

I worry that moving on means leaving behind, that just the act of not thinking about something five thousand times a day will somehow lessen its importance in my life, no matter how indelible the mark it made.

Jack is still with us, one week and four days and three hours after we let him go. He's in the big space Charlie leaves on the doggie bed in the corner, the empty food bowl that Alex still doesn't want us to put away, the space next to the air vent in our bedroom where he always slept (effectively leaving anyone else in the room to sweat or shiver it out on their own).

He's even—and I thought this might seem weird until it didn't—in a prettily carved wooden box on our mantel. Alex propped a picture of him up next to the box, and I look at it several (thousand?) times a day and wish, wish, wish I could touch him. Just reach my hand down where he used to lie while I worked and feel him slowly lift his head and give me an obligatory lick or a lazy tail thump.

It surprised me that I didn't, I don't know, crumble. I struggle with big emotions, and everything surrounding Jack's illness and death was big. I don't know if the two months of "preparation" we were afforded did anything to take the edge off the grief when the time came, but I am glad we had it. I was able to evaluate potential regrets, and even to course-correct so that when he did leave us, those regrets were weaker, or not there at all.

And helping a child grieve is its own kind of therapy. Every night when I tucked Alex in for the first week we had an exchange, the same every time.

"It's not any better," he would say, a note of accusation in his trembling voice.

"It's not supposed to be, yet," I would say, gripping his hand or brushing his damp hair back off his forehead and fixating on those enormous eyes of his. "It takes time. But every day will get a tiny bit easier. I promise."

I promise. 

I didn't believe it, not one little bit. Not for me. I believed it for him, and hoped like hell it would be true, that I wasn't just feeding him a line because of my desperation to eradicate some of that deep sorrow from his eyes. But as far as I was concerned, it was just something a mother says to her child, like your cut won't hurt anymore once we put a Band-Aid on it (knowing that it will), or there's no such thing as monsters (knowing that there is).

I fully expected to be sitting here, eleven days after my Jack took his last breath, weeping onto my keyboard and spilling out the awful truth of unshakable grief, unhealable wounds, unutterable sadness. 

...I'm not.

I'm here, typing about him, thinking about him, dry-eyed and, more or less, whole.

Don't get me wrong; I miss him beyond all reason, sometimes so much that I can actually feel him, hear him, smell him. Some nights I hug Charlie, my ever-faithful sunny golden girl, as she sleeps at the foot of my bed and say "I love you. You're not him, but I love you."

But the hurt is less raw, and, like I told Alex, it's getting a tiny bit better every day. Thank God it wasn't just an empty promise I was giving him on those dark nights.

I'm not leaving Jack behind, I don't worry (much) anymore that "moving on" means that. I know what he meant to me. Anyone who knows me knows what he meant to me. I have to believe that he knew what he meant to me. And that will always be, will never be depleted no matter how many nights pass when I don't have to maneuver past him in the dark, no matter how many times I walk in the door and catch my breath because there is only one wagging tail to greet me, no matter how many years pass or dogs come into our lives.

He mattered.

He matters.

He is Jack.