Red Velvet: An Honest Reflection on the Loss of A Pet

Since your passing, I’ve struggled to know where you’ve went. People would say to heaven. I’ve told my brother that you’re in the sky now, sleeping peacefully, quietly on a cloud. Other people might say you’re in the urn on my bedside table now. They might imagine I look at the engraved heart shaped urn every night and say I love you, say goodnight. Maybe they think I look at your photos and I talk to you, tell you how I’m feeling, confide in you. I hired an artist to draw your photo. You sit in a red velvet baroque chair wearing a crown, looking forward. You’re poised, confident, powerful, framed in gold. But even then, it’s hard for me to feel you looking back. I look to the sky too and I don’t see you up there. Your photos look like moments in time, you aren’t coming to me through them. And talking to an urn is something I’ve seen other people do but it hasn’t worked for me. It doesn’t feel like you. I can’t seem to connect. Mostly, looking at your urn makes me think of dust. I begin to wonder what’s really inside. Are there little pieces of bones? I shook the urn once and it didn’t sound like fine dust. I think of the cremation process. I imagine someone without a face placing your small body onto a metal plate, something like a nonstick baking pan. The door shuts like a kitchen oven and a lever is pulled. Like a light switch, I imagine a burst of aggressive light. I had to research cremation. I needed to know what happened after they took your body from my arms and into a dark back room. To set bodies on fire seemed strange to me. I hadn’t ever lost anyone yet. I didn’t know how it would go.

I think of the person who closes that door and with the power of one hand, sets fire to lifeless bodies. What does that person have for dinner? What does that person do for fun? How much does he or she make an hour?  I hadn’t ever seen a dead body before yours. In just an hour or so, you were cold. Your warmth was now a chill. And though I’ve heard lifeless bodies develop a foul odor, I didn’t expect it from you. I thought for a while that I could keep you, that you wouldn’t rot. So I held you anyway. Your lifeless small body wrapped in your blanket, wrapped again in my arms. I couldn’t imagine letting you go. I thought how impressive bodies are, to power on and power off. I held you close, covered. I didn’t know if my arms would mechanically extend to hand you over to someone else. I wondered, too, what would happen immediately following. I know now they put you in a freezer. Then in the incinerator. Then in the urn. Then in a bag on a shelf waiting to be picked up.

On the one year anniversary of your passing I wrote you a letter. I began to understand our relationship for the first time. We nurtured each other. Before that day I knew I loved you, but I hadn’t understood it the way I do now.

I think of you now as laying comfortably right on my heart. I imagine my heart being the red velvet of that baroque chair from the drawing and you laying right on it, at peace and in comfort, alive. That way I can carry you everywhere I go. That way, you don’t need to look back through photos or talk back through an urn. And I never liked the idea of thinking of you as a charm on my wrist or putting your ashes into a pendant on a necklace. What if I lost that too? Maybe I should let your ashes go. The trouble with that is I wouldn’t know where to release you and the world isn’t peaceful. It wouldn’t suit you. The best place for you, I’ve decided, is with me. When I yell I can imagine the sound is our combined voice, louder than only mine from before. When I cry, I can imagine I’m releasing our shared tears. And every place I go, you go too.

You live inside me, with me. My body houses us both. That works for me to know.