“Grief does not change you, it reveals you.” – John Green.

Echoes of Red. I tend to think of Red more on Fridays than other days, perhaps that is because he was put down on a Friday three weeks ago. The search for a puppy to train as a therapy dog has preoccupied me, as has my work with the refugees and the Mansion, my blog, my pictures, Maria.

I believe grief reveals me. I always learn a lot about myself.

I am addicted to life, I respect it and cherish it every day, it may often make me sad, but it will never be a sorrow to me. I am broken in some ways, but strong in other ways.

A friend wrote to me to say his new titanium Apple Card reminded him of me – you can bend us but not break us.

I’ve never been likened to a credit card before, but I just got my own new Apple Card, and I was pleased by the comparison. I love my Apple Card.

I suppose it would have been harder – grieving for Red –  if I didn’t have all those things to work on and pull me up. When I met the schoolteacher Kevin Reiss, who had to raise $8,000 to bury his dead son, last week, this put my own loss of a beloved dog into a continuous perspective.

In a sense, that’s unfair, since grief is not relative, one death has nothing to do with another, whether it’s a human being or a dog. I was able to do for Red what Kevin could not do for his own son – help him leave the world in peace and comfort.

Loss is a loss, as my friend Eve Marko wrote to me after Red died, and the phrase has stuck in my mind. Loss is  loss, that says just about everything that needs to be said.

Nobody has a lock on grieving, nobody does it wrong, we all deal with it in the best possible way for each of us. We do the best we can for as long as we can.

Mostly now, I feel echoes of Red.

I still expect him to be at the door when I am going out, I expect him to come out of the car when I pull up to the Mansion or almost anywhere – he was always there.

I have always liked Rumi’s observation about grief: “Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.” This is especially true about dogs.

I have lived with many wonderful dogs, and I used to believe in the Once-In-A-Lifetime Dog, until I discovered that I had more than one: Julius, Stanley, Orson, Rose, Lenore, Izzy, Frieda, Red.

Dogs do come around and around if we let them. I’ve had one Lifetime Dog after another, this always tamps my grieving. I think I was missing the point.  I tend to look forward, not backward.

Nobody really wants to hear too much about my dead dogs, and I don’t really want to hear too much about theirs. I’d rather talk about the ones who are alive.

I refuse to grieve for Red so much that I will never get another dog, what an insult to him and his memory that would be for me.

I think about it in just the opposite way. I loved Red so much that of course, I’ll get another one.

I have written that the most remarkable dogs mark the passages in our lives, they come when they are needed, they find a way to leave when they are done. I am struck by how much grief feels like fear, the same rising in the chest, the same sense of sorrow and emptiness.

Red came into my life as I began my recovery from perhaps the darkest time in my life. I don’t want to put too much on him, but my passage was struggling to recover and regain the life I had lost. He guided me into hospice and therapy work, into the Mansion, he was a steady and even presence around me, he was my shadow, he was everywhere I was a grounding element, a calm and focused presence.

He was what I needed, and when I really began to recover and heal, he left, just like my dog myth always said.  That’s my rainbow bridge, the spirit dog, the dog who comes and then goes, and who is much too important to wait for me to play with him through all eternity.

Red is all about work, I haven’t the slightest doubt that he is already marking the passage of some other lucky person’s life.

Tolstoy’s writing about grief has also comforted me. Only people who are capable of loving strongly can suffer great sorrow, he wrote. But their ability to love also balances the grief and helps them to heal.

I was up late one night scouring my library and the Internet for passages about grief that might guide me and even comfort me. Most of the day, I don’t think of Red, but late at night, when I was most often in my study with my feet on his body when it was cold, I miss him.

My soul seems empty and lonely, incomplete. There is often the sense of something missing.

I found a passage from John Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany that spoke to me, even though it was written about the loss of a human, not a dog. It does reflect what I feel sometimes when I think of Red, who was so much a part of me, day and night.

“When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”

And then another day, and another, and with the passing of each one, the echoes of Red become weaker, less frequent, less powerful. His body left us a few weeks ago, his spirit is getting fainter. I think he’s long gone. I’m right behind him. I want to tell him I’m okay, still crazy, but happy and strong. But I suspect he already knew that.

My life is full, and I am doing the work I should be doing, and loving the person I should be loving, and those things were until so recently unimaginable to me, I can still hardly believe they are real and true. That’s the now for me, I don’t really need to soak on that empty straw, nostalgia.

I miss Red, and I still look for him everywhere The echoes of Red are my transition, I think,  from one state of grief to another. Red lived every day of his life fully,  always ready to love and give.

I am much more volatile than he was, yet at the core, he felt almost like a brother.

I think we got along so well because, on many surprising levels, we were very much the same. The best dogs will do that for us, they will become what we need them to be, and then leave.