different levels of alone

I posted about Bear's death while I still had the final chapter of the flotation story to tell, and you know how I am about completion. So I ended up rushing to finish the flotation story while we were all just taking in the loss of Bear. You were, too, right?

Now I've been holding my Bear story and feel unfinished about that. Maybe it's just unfolding as the days go by. Whatever: I am missing Bear. I am a little bit haunted by the whole process of putting him down, which was just such an unpleasant thing and does leave one with a feeling of playing god when you have no desire for that role or responsibility.

I do not want to want to get another dog. I am hoping this is just grief and that it will pass, and that soon I will be driving to Las Vegas because I can, goll dang it.

Okay, so I don't have any interest in Las Vegas. But I have interest in the fantasy of a road trip without a screaming dog, which was Bear in a car. Laura thinks his problem began when she and Bear went through a drive-in carwash when he was a puppy; ever since then, he thought he was about to bite the big one whenever he was in a car, and he would scream as if he were in a cold bath without a vehicle surrounding him. Any number of witnesses, still wide-eyed and working their fingers around in their ears to stop the shrill echo of Bear's wails, will vouch for this classical conditioning experiment gone bad. People would volunteer once to take Bear in a car; never twice. Trips to New Hampshire required two tranquilizers and two Benadryl -- enough to make an actual bear sleepy -- but even this failed to touch his anxiety until right about the time we pulled in at Laura's mom's house, whereupon he and we would stagger from the car -- he exhausted from the screaming and we near tears from the stress of the trip.

I have interest, too, in taking a walk without carrying a pouch of poop for three miles, to tell the truth. And in sleeping past dawn if I feel like it. And going to see Laura when she can't come home from New York.

But the house without Bear is showing me that there are different levels of alone, and that I hadn't really been alone until he was gone.

It's not all bad, the aloneness. But missing someone? Missing someone, even a dog that screamed in the car, feels all bad.