Oscar

And Saying Goodbye

When I was twenty-six, I broke up with my first post-college boyfriend, and I got a dog. It was pointed out to me by a particularly offensive boyfriend of a friend who isn’t my friend anymore that this was cliche and pathetic and he made it clear he was rolling his eyes at the whole enterprise.

I don’t know why I think of that guy when I think about getting Oscar, except that there’s something to getting a dog at 26 that means your whole life will change by the time he is gone. I have had to block that guy’s passive aggressive emails for years. The friend who he dated stopped talking to me for reasons I’ll never actually know. The ex-boyfriend of mine lives in Colorado now and runs a gym or at the very least looks like someone who should run a gym. The pain of that breakup, the confusion of being 26, my acting “career”, the little Upper East Side studio I lived in at the time— all of that is gone.

And now Oscar is gone, too.

When I got Oscar, I did the math. Small dogs live a long time. maybe 12-16 years. Wow, I thought, when Oscar dies, I’ll be like, forty. Maybe I’ll be married. Maybe I’ll have kids. I’ll be a whole adult. It will all be figured out.

At the time, it was a comfort. Some forty year old version of me would go through the grief of losing Oscar. Surely she— this wife and mother and middle aged person I couldn’t really imagine— would know how to do it, would be ready.

I am that forty year old, now (or I will be, in a few months). I am that mom, that wife, that person who has to do the mourning. Oscar held up his promise. He lived until I became those things. He helped me get here. He witnessed it all.

Oscar was a very special dog. Unendingly sweet, friendly, easy. He barely barked. He loved licking. He loved being held. At our annual New Year’s party, he would be passed around, like some sort of New Year’s talisman, everyone getting to take in a bit of his gentle energy, leading us all into a new year. He liked circling our ottoman, evading the leash. He liked saying hi to people in line at the coffee shop. He liked tearing up stuffed toys, spreading the stuffing all over our home. He liked small spaces, he liked something being under his neck, he liked eating dirt, he liked eating things on the street, he liked being held. He liked being on the couch. He liked sitting near me when I was writing. He liked, I hope, his life. Our life.

Usually there isn’t a real symmetry to life, but we lost Oscar on the last day of Frank’s family leave, ten weeks after having our second daughter. We are deep in the season of welcoming a new life to our family. All the wonder and sleeplessness and overwhelm and joy of a brand new baby. And then, more suddenly than we were prepared for, we were also deep in the season of letting go of a life.

There isn’t actually much to say about this terrible sort of mirror we got stuck in. Except that Thisbe’s sweetness helps ease the loss, and that Oscar’s sweetness is a thing I miss every time I peel carrots (he loved to eat the peelings), every time I lie down on the couch (he liked to be lifted up to join me), every time I come home (he was there to greet me).

Fia’s grief is largely around not getting to watch Oscar play with Thisbe, the way he played with her when she was one and two and three. Mine is more sprawling. Oscar got me all the way here, to the things I wanted most, and then he is gone before we’ve fully had a chance to enjoy them together.

I feel a lot of things with the grief— guilt at having put him in boarding and missing much of the last few weeks of his life, worry that we made mistakes, confusion over how quickly things changed, anger at not having been told he had taken a turn for the worse, and mostly sadness that someone so precious is gone.

I am also happy to have the memories. Happy Oscar made it with me through five apartments and a couple of boyfriends and one marriage and two babies. I’m relieved he met Thisbe, however briefly. I’m glad Fia is old enough— I hope— to have long lasting memories of him. I’m proud I took the risk of getting a dog when I knew nothing about dogs. I don’t quite know how to be a family without him.

A lot of my newsletters have conclusions, or some sort of something to hang onto. I like writing essays that make sense, that come full circle, that have a good narrative arc, a wholeness. But loss isn’t like that, so I don’t have anything to say about what it means, that Thisbe was born, and we went on vacation, and then we came back and we had to say goodbye to Oscar. It is a bit of math that doesn’t make sense to me, still. And there isn’t always time, to do the figuring out of that math. Thisbe has to eat and won’t take a bottle and Fia wants someone to do an art project with her and Thisbe is crying because she’s too tired to sleep and Fia is yelling at me because she is too hungry to eat, and the floor is kind of messy because when you have a dog you get used to not having to sweep up after meals and now we don’t have a dog anymore, and Fia is fawning over a new dress and Thisbe is laughing for the first time and there is a pillow on the floor that for a moment I think is Oscar, stretched out in sunlight, but it isn’t. It’s just a pillow and we are now (again) a family of four after briefly having been a family of five, and we don’t have a dog, anymore, except we do, also, because we always will, because I have to believe that Oscar being put to sleep isn’t the same as him leaving our family.

An impossible amount of my life happened in the 13 years of Oscar’s life. Everything happened. And now I don’t even want to stop writing this little newsletter about him, because that, too, is another goodbye.

And I do not want to say goodbye.

Recommendations:

I really enjoyed this novel of friendship and secrets and so much else, and I highly recommend the audio version of it as well. It’s a juicy and interesting and engaging and character-rich read.

They are pricey, but these pajamas are my everything. Anyone who has had a baby knows how important pajamas are— I am trying everything to make sleep actually restful and nice, and these really help.

I have a kid who really really likes to dress up in princess clothes, and if you have a kid like this as well, this website of dress-up clothes that are really lovely is for you. I got Fia’s Halloween costume here and plan to get more dress up clothes here for Christmas as well.