The Day Bella Died

I want to get up and go outside, but I can’t move. I want to lay down and sleep, but I don’t. Not because I can’t, but because I picture laying alone in bed and staring at the ceiling like I did for so many days after June died. The feeling is almost the same, and it has flooded my body once again. I’m afraid of feeling this feeling more. I think the feeling I am talking about is grief. I already carry so much grief, it doesn’t feel like I could carry anymore. I try to pack it into a tiny little box and shove it away in hopes it won’t bother me. In the box, I stuff the memory of Bella’s sweet face, her salt and pepper hair, and ears that were just as soft as the day I took her home as a puppy.

After Bella passed peacefully in the grass behind our house, I sat next to her, petting her body, still warm. The vet palpated her stomach searching for an answer to Bella’s suffering. At the risk of sounding completely psychotic, I said to the lovely vet,  “I’d like to just snip one of these ears off and keep it.” The look on his face made me realize I was probably the first bereaved pet mom that has ever said that. Quickly, back-peddling, I assured him I was only joking. And I was, sort of. People keep rabbit feet for good luck, so I was thinking perhaps an ear wouldn’t be too much of a token to keep. The truth was, I just couldn’t imagine never petting Bella’s perfect ear’s again. For the rest of my life. This was it. I was going to have to live without Bella and her utterly perfect, satiny, black ears because they were being taken too. Ears I had examined so many times for ticks or lumps. Ears that reflexively shuddered when I reached out to touch them. Ears that perked up when someone walked through the door.

I’ve spent a lot of time walking through the house muttering “I just can’t believe she’s gone.” Every turn of a corner reminds me of her. When I come home and the house is quiet, I’m reminded she’s not here. To carry on with my life, I have to find some good in Bella being gone. The only good I can actually think of is that she’s no longer in pain. That’s something that is positive and good. It also hurts because it reminds me that before she died, she was in a lot of pain. She was taking medication for it, but nonetheless, she was in pain. It’s a reminder that for many months, Bella lived while actively dying. It reminds me of June. The memories of June dying are now closer to me than they have been in a little over a year. Today time does not exist. It doesn’t seem fair or right or just. June is gone. Now, Bella is gone too. Twelve, almost thirteen, glorious years spent together. The two of us kept one-another company when there was no one else around.

Bella has seen so much. She lived with me through years of milestones. Bella was two when I met my husband, she was five when we got married and bought a house. Bella was seven when our eldest daughter was born. She was almost nine when June was born. She was almost twelve when June died. She was almost twelve when our son was born. Bella was the only constant when we brought each of our children home from the hospital. She was there to greet them first. She met all three of our children before anyone else did. She was gentle, loving, caring and protective of our family. 

Now I am here, on the same stained navy blue couch I sat on for months after June died. I have a cabinet with various medications for Bella. They sit in the same cabinet I kept June’s medications in.  Bella’s food sits in a Chewy box next to the door. It arrived yesterday and I haven’t unpacked it. I’m wondering if they’ll take it back. I don’t even want money, I just want someone to come take it out of my house, like the nurse did with all of June’s medication and tube feeds after she died. These trinkets of memory physically won’t go away until they are removed. I can’t remove them. 

I don’t hear Bella’s nails on the wood floors when I walk to a different room in the house. Bella won’t be laying on the bath mat outside of my shower door anymore. She won’t be the first one I talk to when I wake up in the morning. She won’t be the last face I give a squeeze and a kiss at the end of the night. I no longer need to rush home from whatever I am doing to feed Bella or to let her out. I won’t need to make plans for her when we go on vacation in November. Bella is no longer part of my physical life, but still her bed sits on the floor at my feet. Every so often, I bend down and smell the corner of it. I breathe in her scent, just as I did with June’s clothes after she died. Scent eventually wears off, so I keep the bed close by. 

The finality of death is just that. It’s final. It’s the most final part of life. It’s the only final part of life. Death is something I’ve spent hours and days of my life trying to understand, but death is elusive. I’ve learned some things about death in this last year, but only in relation to death, not really about death itself at all. Is death the culmination of everything we have experienced in life? The grand finale? A final montage presenting to us all the good and the bad we have endured or inflicted upon others? 

I’ve learned that there is a gaping hole left behind when someone in our life dies. The hole is symbolic of a place that someone once inhabited. Sometimes, there is more than one hole. A hole in the brain where continual memories, feelings, and emotions can be drained into. It’s more of a sinkhole. One that constantly begs for more. So you feed it more memories and flashbacks, but it’s never satisfied and keeps you stuck. Death leaves a hole in the heart that will always exist and never be filled by anything else. I imagine my brain and my heart by the time I am old. Holey. The rewiring of veins or neurons has occurred throughout my life, so I could keep on living, very holey, sometimes lonely, grief-filled days. 

I often wonder why my elders don’t talk more about death. Perhaps they do, amongst themselves. Or perhaps they don’t. I don’t know. It’s not that I care to talk about it all the time, but I’d like to hear what others have to say about the loss they have suffered. Perhaps because I would feel less alone in the loss I’ve suffered. When someone shares with me that they have lost someone they love, it brings me a great knowing that I did not have. It creates a warm connection that before did not exist. When someone shares with me they lost something they love, I can see the holes in them and for a moment it feels like they’re shining a light into mine. When someone not only shares that they’ve lost someone they love, but they share how much that person meant to them and they smile as they reflect on that person, I can feel the love they had for that person. It is in that moment that I realize what it means when someone says love is never lost. 

I’ll probably still instinctively call Bella at the end of dinner, when my son’s high chair is surrounded by a million little bits of steak, carrots, and potato. I’ll say “Bella! Come clean up the mess!” and then look over at my daughter sitting at the table eating her dinner, now staring at me wide eyed like she’d seen a ghost. I can imagine her little voice saying, “Mama, are you coo-coo? Bella went to heaven.” I’ll smile too because her smile is infectious. I’ll remember that I can always get away with calling Bella to clean up the mess because I am just a coo-coo Mama. I’ll probably use this one again. I put it in my back pocket. This is the beginning of creating new memories with Bella. Just as we have done with Junie.  

Now that Bella is gone, I have to carry her with me in a way that feels just as physically backbreaking as lifting her seventy-five pound body into my car last night to take her and the kids on one last trip to her favorite place on earth: the beach. I feel the weight of her life on top of me. I know this weight will shift and become more evenly distributed as the time wanes on. I want it to, but I don’t. I was Bella’s chosen mother and forever I will honor her life and her memory. I will carry her with me until the day I die. I’ve said this about June before, but I’ll say it again, when I reach the pearly gates I will call out June’s name and now, I will whistle the biggest, wettest lipped whistle, and say, “Boochi girl! Mama’s home!”.