25. naming her
written 7 months and 11 days after
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In August of 2019, I came home from a writing residency in Guadalajara, Mexico.
My sweet man picked me up from the airport and marvelled at my tan. I told him about the food that I had eaten, rhapsodizing about these scallops in a vanilla bean sauce that I had eaten at Alcalde.
“It sounds so good!” he exclaimed.
I told him about the pale, perfectly clear jade green of the water that was so warm, sometimes it felt like a bath. I told him about the hermit crabs that paused their traffic when you set your foot onto the sand. I told him about the way, up in the mountains at the residency, every afternoon around one or two p.m. it rained so heavily that it sounded like anger.
“We have to visit,” I said. “You’re going to love it.”
“Definitely baber,” he said. “We’ll go.”
The next morning, when I woke up, we were puttering around the apartment and he told me that he had been approached about an interesting job opportunity at work. I remember I was standing in the archway of our kitchen and he was sitting on our couch.
When he told me that there was the chance for him to be the lead in opening up a branch of his firm in Vancouver, I was surprised. I had brought up moving to Vancouver a couple of years prior and he had presented me with a series of reasons why it might not be the best thing for us. I had, at the time, called him a “killjoy,” but I had also conceded that he was probably right.
“What about all your no-Vancouver reasons?” I said, leaning against the wall, as I so often did when we talked. He grinned.
“I knew you’d say that,” he said. “You don’t forget anything.”
“Well?” I said.
He told me that his reasons had all been based on him being unsure if he could get a job.
“That’s not an issue, now,” he said.
I told him to tell me everything.
“Start at the beginning,” I said. “Leave nothing out.”
By October 2019, it was official. We were moving to Vancouver. He had accepted the offer and was negotiating terms. The first night after he formally took the offer, he handed me tissues while I sobbed.
“I support you entirely,” I said making that gaspy, choking sound that people who are trying to talk while crying hard make. “I just got so freaked out when it became real.”
“I know babe,” he said. “It’s a big change.”
“I’m excited,” I said, but I couldn’t get through the words without wailing.
He nodded.
“I know you are,” he said and I knew that he believed me.
I miss this more than I can say.
It wasn’t always the way, especially in the earlier years, but in the later years, I felt so keenly that he knew what I really meant when I said things. This was important to me because sometimes my exterior emotion does not always reflect what I’m feeling internally (this shows up particularly in grief).
Yet, with him, I felt the freedom to be myself, unfettered, because, somehow, all of my inconsistencies and foibles and complexities not only seemed to make sense to him but always, bafflingly, seemed to delight him.
For one, as an aside, he loved when I gave him style direction. I used to hesitate, when I first knew him, to give him advice on what to wear but he encouraged it so much that I gradually came to realize he didn’t see it as criticism, he saw it as, to use his words, “us, collaborating.”
His easy confidence and total lack of ego both made him completely open. He had such a sincere and whole-hearted desire to hear and consider my opinion on absolutely everything.
This was a remarkable and incredible part of his love that I treasured beyond measure: he unfurled me.
I would have followed him anywhere.
Indeed, that he has gone (unwillingly, if I were to wager) without me into the beyond is a pain I am not sure I will ever be able to reconcile with my living.
But, in October 2019, I didn’t yet know the depths of fear and separation that were to come. I thought moving to a city where I didn’t know anyone, away from my family and friends, was frightening (and it was, at the time).
Over the months to come, he and I began imagining what our life would be like in Vancouver. It took me about six months before I hit upon the idea of us getting a puppy.
“I don’t know,” he said, when I first brought it up sometime in the spring of 2020.
He had never been a dog person, or any kind of pet person, to be honest. He thought dogs were stinky (his words), and expensive, and frustratingly restrictive in terms of their impact on free time and travel. I acknowledged that all of this was true.
“But,” I said. But, but, but, but.
Eventually, he came around.
After a few weeks of searching different dog breeds, we settled on a Havanese, which is the national dog of Cuba.
“Are they cute?” he said. “I’m not sure.” He was on his phone, zooming in and out on a photo of a Havanese puppy online.
“Definitely cute,” I said. “So fluffy!”
We were in bed and in his lap, playing while he looked at his phone, was a dog training video he had cued up on his iPad. I was on my own phone reading a forum dedicated solely to the Havanese breed as part of my exhaustive search for a list of reputable breeders to contact.
“What will we name the puppy?” he said.
I pointed out that we hadn’t even found a breeder yet.
“But when we do,” he said. “What will we name it?”
I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought that far. I was reading horror-story posts about puppies that chewed through dry wall and never stopped barking. I told him that he and I would have to be extremely consistent with dog training.
“Of course babe,” he said. “You’re so good at stuff like that. I know you will show me how to do all of it.”
That was something else. He always made me feel like my inherent intensity and focus was something admirable, instead of something to be measured and restrained.
Over the next week, I emailed, direct messaged, and spoke with several breeders, but two quickly emerged as frontrunners. I showed my beloved what I called “our top choices,” and he ohh-ed and ahh’ed at the right times.
“Are you excited?” I said.
His eyes had this deep smile creases when he smiled. I loved them—his eyes and their creases.
“Yeah,” he said. “A bit nervous, but yes excited.”
A few days later, I spoke to one of the “top choice” breeders on the phone. She asked me a lot of questions, and in turn, I had a lot of questions for her. At the end of the call, I felt so good about her that I immediately called him at work and told him I wanted to put down a deposit.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s talk about it when I get home.”
“Work voice strong,” I said, because I always gave him a hard time about the fact that whenever I called him at the office he used a weird, formal tone.
“You know it,” he said.
By that evening, we had sent the breeder the money and she had told us we were slated to receive a puppy at the end of April 2021. Once the transfer was complete, he told me that he had thought of a possible name for the puppy.
“Wait,” I said. “Let’s make a Note for dog name ideas.”
I started one and added him to it.
“Okay,” I said, my fingertips poised over the keyboard. “What’s your name idea? It’s going to be the first one we add.”
When he told me the dog’s name, I think I surprised him with my reaction.
“Babe,” I said. “That’s such a good one!”
“Really?” he said. “Oh, thanks baber! That’s soooo nice of you to say.”
He had the light, iridescent quality to his voice that he got when he was especially pleased.
“I think that’s my number one right now,” I said, because that’s how it felt to me, even though, at that time, it was the only name we had on the table.
Over the next months, all the way up to even the week of his death, we proposed names in the Note. Some names, he struck down (“too fufu,” he said) and others I vetoed (“we know someone named that,” I said), but gradually, we built up a list of about ten options.
Still, when we talked about it, the very first name he proposed was always in our top three choices. I didn’t tell him at the time, because I thought we had more of it, but I already knew that the first name he suggested was the right name for the puppy. I imagined what it would be like when I told him that he was the one who had named our puppy. I basked in the future glory of his joy.
Then, I fell out of time.
Then, a few weeks ago, I received an email from the breeder we had a deposit in with telling me that a female, red sable puppy was delivered on March 1, 2021, and she was mine if I wanted her.
Then, I said, yes, I did want her.
As soon as I sent the email formally accepting the puppy which is in the litter the breeder originally told my sweet man and I that we would get a puppy from, I felt a rending sensation in my body.
The choice to take the puppy, I realized, was the first of our thwarted plans that I had chosen to set into motion without him. Largely, all of our other plans, I have avoided doing alone, or have been rendered impossible to do without him. I turned from my laptop where the email Sent notification faded and looked at his urn which was sitting behind me on the side table. I was alone in the house. His urn, as always, was silent. There was the absolute faintest scrim of dust on the surface that I wiped away gently with my hand.
It was all so different to how we had thought, how I had thought, it would be.
I did not think I would be driving to collect dog crates from sellers on Facebook Marketplace without him insisting that I share my location with him first. I did not think I would be researching pet insurance policies at 2 a.m. without him stretched out beside me in bed. I did not think I would be purchasing fancy dog toys without him insisting on seeing all the options first. I did not think the puppy’s first home would be far from the ocean. I did not think I would be sending pictures of the puppy to my family chat without first sending the photos to him.
Of course, what’s so obvious I don’t have to say it, but I’m going to anyway: I didn’t think I would be doing anything without him.
This all said, please don’t misunderstand me, I know this puppy is a good thing.
I know that I already, in an ineffable way, fully love this puppy in the earth of my body. It’s just that, as with everything right now and for a good long while ahead, threading through the good is a deep, aching sorrow.
Especially the past few weeks, too, this sorrow has been intensifying. I’ve had more wavering four days than not. The crying comes with a heavy rawness that often leaves me physically ill. I’m not sleeping. I often feel light-headed before I realize I’m breathing so shallowly that it’s almost hyper-ventilation.
“What if I’m wrong?” I asked my therapist. “What if I can’t do this without him?”
I worry that the juxtaposition is too sharp — maybe I can’t face doing this alone. Maybe the grief and the loss and the pain is too much. Maybe, continuing is too hard, too relentless, too empty without him.
My therapist shook his head.
“You can,” he said. “You are.”
He is so resolute in his belief in me, my therapist.
“Show your work,” I said, and this made my therapist laugh — something that always makes me feel as though I am getting a good grade in therapy.
“Do you know what you’re going to name the puppy?” my therapist asked.
I nodded.
“Really?” my therapist seemed surprised. “Dog names can be difficult.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “But I’m going to use the first name we thought of — or actually, that Kurtis thought of.”
“That’s good,” my therapist said and I asked him what he meant by that.
“It’s a way of bringing him forward, with you,” my therapist said.
There was a moment of quiet as I was taken along by a swell of tears, a sharp sting in my face, a cramp in my chest.
“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” I say.
Something about the way my therapist framed my naming of the puppy as a way of honoring him, of bringing him forward, or perhaps back, into the living, deeply moved me. Still deeply moves me. In that moment, it felt like my therapist gave me something that I didn’t know I was missing until I was looking right at it, closing my fingers over it.
“So?” he says. “What is it? What is the puppy’s name?”
“MoMa,” I said. “Her name is MoMa.”
I explained that he picked the name because he wanted the puppy to have a name that no other dog would have and he thought it would be fitting to name the puppy after one of our favourite shared interests—art museums.
My therapist nodded along and then I stopped talking. In the quiet, I realized that was the first time I had told anyone what the puppy’s name would be. I began to cry silently and then my therapist cried too. Neither of us said anything for several minutes. I was crying, but I was thinking about laughing.
Shortly after we sent the deposit, in the spring of 2020, my beloved and I were out for one of our pandemic walks. We passed by a soft, fluffy dog that was excitedly humping its owner’s leg. As my beloved and I drew a wide berth around the dog, both of us saw, unmistakably, the pink flesh of the dog’s penis.
“Did you see that?” I said leaning over.
“Oh my god,” he said, “Couldn’t miss it.”
We were always making juvenile sexual innuendos with each other because they made us both laugh so hard.
We looked again and the dog was still flying his flag, as it were.
I grinned at my beloved, but he was already in it. His head was back in the way it would go when he was really entertained. His mouth was open, his face impish and gleaming.
What a filthy, wicked laugh he had. What a gleam in his eye.
PS. I spoke to The New York Times about friendship during the pandemic and part of what I shared went to print. You can read the article, by Alex Williams, here.
Brava! Another step in moving forward. Caring for a sweet little creature will take you further along your journey. ♥️
Her name is perfect! And I concur— laughing at the most inappropriate things is totally awesome. Hugs 💗