Memoir:
I’ve suffered losses of all kinds in my long life. They ranged from insignificant to tragic. One of the worst was when my cocker spaniel Julie died. I was devastated.
We lived in a rural area north of San Diego. I came home late one night and let her out to do her business. She rocketed out the front door, ran around the corner of the house snarling, and was gone. She never came back.
For over an hour, I walked around the dark neighborhood calling her name. All I heard were insects and other nightlife.
Three days later I found Julie’s eviscerated body in a neighbor’s field. She’d lost a fight with a coyote. I cried that day, the next day, and every day thereafter for a long time.
During my lunch hours in downtown San Diego, I always ate outside my office building. I ate my sandwich by myself, facing a wall, and wept.
Then exactly 12 months later – the first anniversary of Julie’s death — I had a dream. In it, I was picking my way through a heavy fog in our backyard, calling Julie’s name.
Suddenly, there she was – just off to my left. She emerged from the mist and looked right at me. I called her name again, but she turned around and walked back into the fog.
I woke up, sat up and realized it was a dream. But that dream proved cathartic. I found I was over the loss of Julie. I never again wept for her – at home or at work.
I’ve read it usually takes a year to recover from the loss of a spouse. In my case it was the loss of a dog.
My mother died a little over 20 years ago. Alzheimer’s had taken five and a half years to erase her. She gradually forgot who I was, who my brother was, and my dad – her husband. The gradual deterioration depressed us all and accelerated our separation from her.
When I learned a heart attack had killed Mom, I called my father and then my brother. We all cried a little and hung up the phone. It was over. That was it. No more tears.
My cat Cracker disappeared recently. She was an eight-year-old bundle of shedding white feline. She was small. Weighed maybe five pounds at the most — fully-grown. She liked to sleep on me at night, adjusting her position as I tossed and turned.
Cracker was my favorite. As a kitten, I had carried her outside every morning when I got the newspaper. She enjoyed that. It was our routine.
In later years, the routine changed. She hung out in the kitchen and whined until I opened a can of food. It didn’t matter if I had opened one the night before; she wanted a fresh one right then.
It was a covenant between man and cat.
One morning I noticed Cracker hadn’t slept on me. The next day, we left town on a short trip. The cat sitter said she saw the other cats, but never Cracker.
After about five days, I began to accept that Cracker would not be coming home. The next evening, I gave up hope and went to bed crying. I’m sure a coyote got her; just as another coyote got Julie over two decades before.
So here I was again, weeping over the loss of someone or something I loved very much.
I’m not sure what it means, but I wept more, harder, and longer for my dog and my cat than I did for my mother.
Some might think that strange, and it may be. But I could take solace in the certainty that my mother hadn’t been eaten by a coyote.
David Dillon has lived in north Tillamook County for 30 years. He was one of the original board members of the Hoffman Center and actually knew its namesakes — Lloyd and Myrtle.
