The Old Blog in the Desert

I’ve sat down at the computer today for the first time since Monday. The chair feels as if it’s forgotten the shape of me. The screen blinks patiently, waiting for me to remember why I ever sat down in the first place.

Over the years, I’ve written several unpublished columns with Honey walking through, her pit bull smile, tail wagging, ears perked, always present. I thought about changing them, and have decided no, that it would be like editing out the warmth of a good memory.

Honey was part of the rhythm, part of the pauses and glances that made those tales come alive. Letting her stay just as she was, alive on the page, is a quiet kind of grace, my way of saying, you mattered here.

And she did. She still does.

Aside from that, it’s been a strange stretch of days, the kind where time doesn’t quite hold still, but it also doesn’t move forward like it ought to. If I’m honest, I feel like I’ve been walking through wet cement in bedroom slippers—still trying to get from here to there, but dragging a weight behind me that I didn’t know I’d picked up.

Honey, our blue-nose, gray Pit Bull left us on Wednesday morning. She was the size of a small bale of hay and heavier than a cement block, but somehow, her absence has left the house feeling like an empty barn after all the horses have gone.

It’s quiet now—too quiet–not just in sound, but in feeling.

I catch myself pausing at the refrigerator door, waiting to hear that telltale “ticka-tacka-tick” of her tappy-toes on the hardwood. It was automatic—open the fridge, and she’d come trotting in like she owned the joint, ready to collect her payment in the form of an ice cube.

And don’t think for a moment she didn’t train me on that trick. That was her thing, the ice cubes. It didn’t matter how small or how hot the day was, she’d gallop in with all the seriousness of a dog on a mission.

She passed on during what was already a tender time. My 65th birthday landed on Sunday. Sixty-five, which ought to feel like something grand, but instead arrived like a letter addressed to “Resident”—a little impersonal, maybe even unwelcome.

Before I could make peace with that number, I found out late the following morning that my stepsister, Amanda’s, husband had passed suddenly, a heart attack stealing him away in the dark. We were still stunned come Tuesday, and then the vet confirmed what we were afraid of—Honey’s heart was failing.

Right-sided congestive heart failure. That was the name for it. And yet, all I could think was, how could a heart so big ever fail?

Wednesday morning, 11:05, the vet administered the final kindness. A minute later, she was gone, and I found myself holding more tears than a dog.

You’d be amazed at how quiet that moment can be when a life slips out of a room. You’d think there’d be a noise, something sharp or soft—but no, just stillness.

Since then, Buddy—our other pup—has been looking for her. He checks the corners of rooms like a guard on patrol, stopping just long enough to listen.

But the ice cube brigade is down a soldier, and he knows it. He’s gone off his food and curled into himself on the couch, or stretched out on my bed like maybe that’s where her scent still lingers.

He’s grieving in his way, and I let him.

The heart has a way of holding sounds and smells in it, keeping them even after they’re gone. So now and then, I think I hear her coming. I don’t—at least not in the way I’d like—but some things echo longer than logic allows.

Grief, I’m learning yet again, is not always loud. Sometimes, it’s the silence that hurts the most.