When Peter and I were planning our wedding a year ago, something we took too seriously, but had the most fun with, was planning the night's musical cues. We were tempted to line up a night of inside jokes, like setting our first dance to Stravinsky's 30-minute long Rite of Spring. But we focused ourselves, and settled on coming up instead with the cosmically perfect wedding soundtrack.

One song that came up, because we both love it terribly, was Julee Cruise's Summer Kisses, Winter Tears--a song to which we've driven in sultry, lazy loops through Connecticut backroads, a song to which we've slow-danced clumsily in our living room, a song we made our friend add to his surf-rock playlist of similarly croon-y, wobbly, yearning tunes. But it was a nonstarter--it seemed like bad juju--as if asking for a sad winter following what we were hoping would be a happy wedding summer.

Well it was a truly euphoric summer, chock full of summer kisses, but as cruel fate would have it and despite our best efforts to keep out the bad juju, a summer that was in fact followed by winter tears.

On Halloween morning, our beloved little dog Ziggy passed away of a fatal spinal cord condition that both appeared and killed him swiftly over the course of 5 days.

36 hours before he died, I received the worst news--that someone I love intensely, greedily, needily, would be leaving for good, and that there was nothing to be done about it. I called and pleaded with any veterinarian I could get my hands on for the smallest chance of a different outcome. God bless everyone I reached out to (but especially Jim and Rhuedy). Each and every one spoke gently, patiently, firmly, and held my relatively commonplace sorrow, as if it were truly the world-historic tragedy my breaking heart felt it to be.

When the (cremation? is this in poor taste) dust had settled, I learned from our neighborhood vet that his was the 3rd time they'd seen progressive myelomalacia (PMM) in 20 years. With more research, I learned PMM tends to take dogs below the age of 6; if a dog has PMM, it will manifest; once PMM has manifested, it moves quickly to an irreversible, swift end; an invisible ticking time bomb in his bones. When I shared that I was haunted by the ticking time bomb idea to my friend Isabelle's mother, she responded with the gentle reminder that death is a ticking time bomb in every living thing's bones.

We tried to hold onto Ziggy as long as we could, and thought he'd make it one more day to November 1--but by the end, with his both desperate and labored breathing, his plaintive, hollow howls, we decided to let him go a day early, on Halloween. What a time to go, Halloween--our favorite holiday.

We understood the holiday as a time for make-believe and thrills, a night when nice girls are mean, mean girls are nice, and straight boys in lazy getups are deeply irrelevant. What I didn't think much about was how spooky season plays with slippery identities, fake blood and gore: a working through loss, death, grief. An occasion where our god-fearing, death-avoidant society surfaces grief, transposing it onto a grotesque carnival, a day to laugh and play in the face of death. This takes on deeper meaning for me now, as the day I had to say goodbye to my beloved, deeply silly dog.

In the context of the wobbly winter tears song I started this whole thing with, I learned recently from Katherine May's book Wintering, that Halloween has in some cultures marked the border between Fall and Winter. My grief exploded on October 31; summer kisses, winter tears indeed.

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- Dead dog favors (directly telling people something I wanted or needed, that I wouldn't normally). A way to make people/myself laugh when I was frozen by my visible, uncontrollable grief. But dead dog favors are also pretty much always granted!!
- Constant Smiles (Moonflowers, 2025)
- Calder's circus

- Cyro Baptista
- Two Dogs get Married, British Pathe

- Zohran (!!!): a politics of not just hope, but actual material improvement and action
- Coco Larkin
- Phony Ppl, (Yesterday's Tomorrow, 2015)
- renting dvds from the library
- Spicy City
- Library way on 41st street

- flowers from friends, food from friends, hand-holds from friends, silence from friends, chatter from friends, other peoples' drama from friends, cards from friends, daily single emoji texts from friends, laughs with friends, long walks with friends, tears/many tears with friends 

- My perfect husband. Holding me, weeping with me, passing the grief back and forth, holding the grief: he made the cremation plans when I couldn't, I filed the insurance claims when he couldn't. He pressed ice cubes into my palms and wrapped himself around me in the most extreme moments. I piled dirty dishes in the kitchen then sobbed on the painfully-empty couch, he wordlessly cleaned and then laid his heavy head on mine.
- Shajan (in arabic: sorrow, melancholy, nostalgia)
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I still miss Ziggy nonstop and would do pretty much anything for one more cuddle, but he has visited me in my dreams, with one dream in particular a sweet, unique message that only could have come from him personally, from beyond.
 
I have comforted myself with the idea that he was a supernatural being who came to us, for a very short while, to impart some invaluable lessons that I never would have learned any other way: a) how to respond with care rather than react with control, b) how to put aside my needs for the immediate needs of someone more needing, c) the infinite, restorative loop of giving and receiving reckless, delirious love & the healing in being present in the delirium, d) that I could survive my biggest fear, the fear of losing someone I love, that I could survive the pain of grief, e) that every living thing is an endlessly, outrageously unique miracle.

- Bruno Schulz, Street of Crocodiles (1934), from the chapter Nimrod (partial text available here)

- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)

I’d like to think Ziggy left a tiny lil pawprint on my heart, a heart he taught to grow, and that this paw print might grow and expand as I continue to grow my heart as he taught me. That his touch on my heart will stay and expand with me as long as I live.

My last photo of Ziggy in full health and physical ability, less than a week before he died.

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Peter and I were on a beach vacation last week: working remotely, getting some family time. We fell into a routine of a mid-afternoon ocean float: talking about Big things, small things, things we don't always make space for. One day, while we giggled and held each other, I suddenly felt an intense wish for Ziggy to be there between us: squashed, wet, maybe panting, probably noisy, definitely stinky. Logistically/realistically, Z could have lived to 100 and I would have never brought him into a body of water. But it was the *feeling*--the feeling of contentedness he would so enthusiastically share in with me. "I wish Ziggy were here" has become longhand for "I feel good". But also "I feel lonely", "I feel sad", "I feel tired". He was a miracle of an emotional buffer: no matter if low feelings or high, he would cushion the harshness or extend the sweetness.
A lot has happened in the 3 months since Z left--discovery & doubt, headstands & leaps of faith, stuff spewed both North & South, all the things that make up the limbo of life. I wish Ziggy were here.