My border collie greets the world each morning like an alien coming down to earth. What is that white stuff on the ground? What of these four-wheeled animals, grunting to life? Joni pauses on the porch, and her whole body stiffens. She’s a marionette. Her snout yanked left, then right. I never find the puppeteer. Who sent her here, who pulls her? I’ve never seen this place before, she tells me, morning after morning. She drinks it in, swallows the day.

*

When my grandmother was dying, she wore a green fleece bathrobe. I will recall its shade in dreams—green like the pines we walked through in rural New England. In how many northern states had we walked together, she and I? My grandmother was hardly walking by the time she wore the bathrobe like a second skin. Chameleon green. Shifting, slowly, out of this life. 

*

Each morning, Joni shaking her toy frog, left then right. Bits of fluff deposited like candy from a piñata. Joni shaking my underwear. My best hiking socks. Leaving rips in the fabric. Joni was here, she writes with her teeth. She’ll grow beyond the stage when she reminds me of her presence like this. She’ll cease marking her existence in merino wool. “An animal’s life is for us a theater,” writes Mark Doty in Dog Years, “In which we may see the forces of time and mortality played out in a form smaller than our own bodies, and more swiftly.” Joni is two years old, give or take. Her frenzied hours are lessening already. Sometimes, she enters my room and steals nothing. Sometimes, she simply lies on my bed. She considers the wall, the throw pillows. Pauses for a moment like this, a pile of breathing fluff. An actor, a puppet; the cruelest theater in my home.

*

On the day my grandmother died, I was at a year-long writing residency in New Hampshire, 270 miles from her. That morning, a missed call from my mother. Soon, a text: Call me. Why is it that, in memory, the seconds before loss always expand? Time slows in the beforehand. The dim, morning glow. The mug, still hot. The coffee pot, dripping on the counter, but slower with each breath, like a fairytale disintegrating into oblivion or reality. I unlocked my phone and pressed call. 

*

“We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away…so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or worse, ourselves,” writes Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir that details the aftermath of her husband John’s death from a heart attack. Before the book’s publication, Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo, would also die. Much like her father’s death, Quintana’s was sudden and unexpected—the result of pancreatitis. When The Year of Magical Thinking reached bookstore shelves, Didion was seventy years old. She was no better at grieving than she ever had been, for who improves at unwinnable games? Instead, she mourned two profound and unexpected losses. She mourned the greatest loves of her life. She mourned, for better or worse, herself.

*

In our furnished apartment in New Hampshire, Joni claimed the loveseat. A rough and tattered perch, the color of rust. She spent countless hours on her throne, overlooking the boarding school campus on which we lived for a year, the first home we ever shared. Wet nose pressed to cold glass, breath prints in the condensation. Black rabbit ears in the window. The loveseat, creaking from her jump-off each time I turned the lock, and returned home again. 

*

On the day we moved, I considered smuggling Joni’s loveseat to our new home in Maine. I envisioned the escape route: a two-person carry down the stairs, a midnight hoist through the window. I wanted to freeze Joni and her rabbit ears. Nose marks on the windows, fur matting the rug. Windows and walls that fused to form a home. 

I resigned myself to the farewell. Took a vacuum to the fabric, pulled out fur, emptied the filter, tried another head. Home hollowed of us, slowly then suddenly, in specks and strands. No more dirt carried from woods to rug. No brown hair, threading the shower drain. We rolled our eyes and shook our tails of our daydreams. I left the loveseat in its rightful corner and locked the door. 

*

In my top dresser drawer, my grandmother’s blue quarter-zip, salvaged from her home among other ruins of her: two wool sweaters, polka-dot slippers too large for my feet. I began to pull the shirt over my head, only to catch a familiar scent. Of her, I’ll forget countless details I meant to remember. My mind will cling to her at eighty-seven. Forget the person she was at seventy or sixty-five. Forget the way she once walked, pre-cane, her arms pumping. Forget her smell: ornate, like a fine and oaky perfume. Forget the file she once kept of everything I wrote. A first-grade haiku, a first publication. Each new article, printed and stapled with sandpaper hands. I placed the quarter-zip back in the drawer, half-folded. Let it be. 

*

During our first month in Maine, bugs dotted the linoleum floor. Bugs, crawling between the cracks in the tile. Bugs, beside the waste basket. Between the legs of the wicker chair, in the sunroom where I sat and wrote. Beetles, moths, cicadas, ants. I watched a spider spin its web around an ant, drawing a willowy artwork of her prey. We swept or mopped most days. The landlord sprayed something. What? I asked him, And how long until I can let my dog back in the room? I am afraid of her mortality. Afraid of the power I don’t have over it. Afraid of the power I do. 

*

Perhaps we need not spray anything, I told my landlord. I watched as Joni leaped into the air and snapped at a hornet. I watched her paw an ant from behind the kitchen chair. Nip at a beetle until it lay writhing, then still. I was jealous of her, I realized. What sanity to not risk chance, to take death in one’s own hands. 

*

The last time I saw my grandmother was a week before she died. She sat at the kitchen table. Her green fleece bathrobe and a line of Ensure bottles before her. A circle of Babybel cheese, its edges half-chewed. Eat, we would plead with her each day. Won’t you eat? But no more, she would beg. Please, no more. She was talking about food, and she wasn’t talking about food. She was talking about everything—this disservice we do to dying and, also, to life. Eventually, she looked up from those ragged edges of cheese. She glanced sideways at the dog I had brought to meet her. Her voice had surfaced then, gravelly and loose, as if leaving this earth already. Nice dog you got there, she had whispered. Nice dog.

*

I often wonder if mourning is only worthy of literature when it defies expectation, bucking against the “correct” order of the universe. The husband’s heart attack, the daughter’s pancreatitis. The child who died in a tragic car accident; the mother of a toddler, diagnosed with cancer of an aggressive form. All of these instances invoke sudden, unspeakable levels of pain. Unspeakable, not in the sense that we never speak of them, but in the sense that words, inevitably, will fail. Though I also wonder if, to overlook more mundane instances of grief—those “correctly” ordered, that is—does a disservice to us all. Does it obscure the unshakable foundation beneath us, the dirt we trudge over and pack down as we move about this world? The fact that every loss—sudden or expected—pushes us face-to-face with that dirty ground? The fact that we have not yet figured out how to live with death, no matter how “correct” in its timing, at all?

*

By the time we reached Maine, the snow had melted. At the dog park, Joni ran around, re-discovering the earth. Your dog is fast!—a woman yelled from the other side of the fence. She is, I said. Indeed, she is. And in more ways than one. Fast at growing. Fast at stealing lacy underwear from the laundry basket. At tearing socks to threads. Fast at learning. At placing her paw upon me each morning, as if to claim me. I don’t dare claim her. She’s too fast. Fast at running. Fast at growing. Recently, I revisited iPhone photos from our first week together. On the day she arrived, the shelter volunteer opened the van. Joni had slipped towards me and out of my grasp, in one motion. A black street dog, all twitch and bones. A black border collie body—here and then gone. Mine, and never mine at all.