“Are you gonna leave me soon?”

A few weeks back, Sid is in my dream, standing in a galley kitchen that isn’t mine. She’s looking up at me in her wide-leg stance and doe eyes with the smoky liner. 

“Are you gonna leave me soon?” I ask her in my dog voice: high pitched and uncomfortably sweet or goofy or cringey. She continues looking up, and her tail starts to wag. 

I wake up from the dream and go to Sid to check on her. It’s in a way that takes me back to the years I lived with my grandma, shoving my finger under her nose to see if she was breathing. 

Grandma was 83 when I moved in as a teenager and while she regularly got clean bills of health, drove, lived independently, the terror of another abandonment drove me to regularly confirm she still had a pulse. Nothing scared me more as a teenager than the thought of losing her. 

These room checks usually occurred not because she’d shown signs of illness or slowing down, but strictly driven by my debilitating anxiety. She often slept in later than me, so it wasn’t unusual for it to be 10am on a Saturday morning and grandma to still be in bed. Nonetheless, I’d open the door to her room, creep up beside her and place my finger just under her nose so it wasn’t touching her lip, until I felt warm, moist air. She always woke up, startled, turning over with two barely open eyes (like two piss holes in a snowbank as she would say), staring at me with the fear of someone who just woke up to someone touching their face. (I know this feeling well now as an adult, when my niece wakes me by prying open an eyelid.)

“What’s going on?” she’d groggily ask.

“Nothing,” I’d begin sheepishly, “I just got worried and wanted to make sure you were breathing.”

“Well, I’ll let you know when I’m not,” she’d say, rolling back over. 

I’d crawl into the twin bed beside her, pull the quilt or afghan up to my chin, and wait for her to flip over again. She would almost immediately turn to me and we’d lay parallel to one another talking and giggling.

The morning after the dream, I find Sid on the couch tucked in the corner like a giant croissant. Her eyes are pressed shut, two lids that open and close like elevator doors. I never even have the opportunity to stick my finger under her snout, she senses I’m there and one eye pops open just as I’m crouching down beside her. A similar look of alertness, who’s there, about to touch me?

We make our way through this routine, and end as we usually do, with me curling beside her, and her burying her head into my neck. 

Sid was sick last week, though. Nothing serious but because she is rarely if ever unwell, it was enough to ring an alarm in me and bring back the dream of her in the galley kitchen from a few weeks back. I’ve been thinking about her death for years, bracing myself for impact. I know she’s prepared for it; it’s me who has to come to terms. I’m back in high school, wringing my hands in worry and fear of abandonment all over again.

Sid is thirteen and healthy, aside from some expected arthritis in her back hips. No one suspects her age, and she still greets us with a tail chase and yard zoomies. 

We met ten years ago on a Wednesday morning. It was two months after the due date of my first pregnancy. She was one of three dogs I wanted to meet at the humane society, a Goldilocks situation: one little one had way more energy than my small house could handle, one sweetie needed way more TLC than I had time to offer, and then there was Sid. She was sweet but not overbearing. She showed little interest in the squeaky toys and at one point simply came and sat right beside me, facing the same direction. When I inquired with staff about her full teats, they mentioned she had just given birth a few days ago in Indianapolis and was separated from her litter and sent here. I bought a leash, signed the paperwork, and brought her home.

Just weeks later, I noticed the top of her nose peeling leaving a large swath of raw, exposed skin. I took her to multiple vets to try to figure out what was going on. Various meds, steroids, topicals later and at last she was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition, like lupus for dogs. The vet suggested a lot of rest, grain-free food, and exercise when she wasn’t in a flare — sounded like my own autoimmune condition regiment. After her diagnosis, she started sleeping in bed with me, on the couch, armchairs. Wherever she wanted to lay was hers.

I know because of the dog lupus she’s likely often in pain and yet, she has always been a caretaker. The first months in our house she slept at the feet of my dying mother-in-law. For innumerable nights during my marriage, she jumped between the laps of my ex and me, leaning her body against our mouths to try to quiet and calm us as we argued. In the times I’ve found darkness, Sid has stretched her body beside me, giving me every inch of warmth she has to offer. And while my partners’ kids describe her as grumpy (she wasn’t used to living with a cat before, ok?), it’s their rooms she hurries to right away, urging them to follow her to the basement, at the first sound of thunder.

I think often of the things that orient us in life. Our compass points. I’m not alone in the absences that have been carved out. In the dizzying eraser that’s been taken to the people and places and objects that made up my life — even in just the last ten years — that are now largely gone. 

Sid has been one of those elongated marks on the compass, a cardinal direction. Through divorce, losing friendships, through deaths, community grief, a pandemic, moves, illness. I think of all the pieces of me she’s known — she is a lifeline to another version(s) of me. I know once she’s not here, I’ll have little that’s tangible left of that time.

I think of that galley kitchen. A galley as in two parallel walls making the most of the space it’s got. It’s my grandma and me in the twin beds, maximizing the twenty-six years we had. It’s Sid and I meeting just as we both lost our babies, working our way through chronic illness. We’re in this short space and time together, curled up on the couch, snout to snout, before one of us has to leave.