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AbsenceFebruary 29, 2008 Don't have to squeeze between the chairside table and two bags of dog food when I come up the inside stairs: Wednesday I drove the food down to the MSPCA shelter in Edgartown (having called in advance to ascertain that they welcomed donations). I filled out an application while I was there -- asked them to keep their eye out for malamutts, malamutes, and anything in the northern breeds line. The local shelter communicates with other shelters in the region and beyond. Who knows what they'll find? You think I'd welcome the extra space, or the fact that I can't accidentally kick the water dish that isn't there anymore. While we're at it, I haven't accidentally stepped barefoot on a cow toe -- don't ask me about cow toes, I don't want to know either, but Rhodry loved them and they were the only chewable that survived his chewing for more than 15 minutes; suffice it to say that stepped on accidentally they're sharp and hard enough to cause four-letter yelps. I haven't accidentally squeaked a stuffed animal either. They're all piled in their big stainless steel bowl next to a stainless steel food dish that's unnaturally clean, in the corner where Rhodry's bed used to be. Rhodry did most of his sleeping elsewhere, outside preferred. In cool and cold weather he'd start the night on my bed, but at some point after I fell asleep he'd go looking for a cooler place. You'd think I'd be happy to have the whole bed to myself, but no, there are worse fates than having some nights to fall asleep like a backcountry camper in a mummy sleeping bag. Every night for the last several I've woken between 4 and 5 a.m. No furry face gazes back at me, saying, It is too warm! I want to go out! This only started after we moved to this apartment a year ago; before that going out at night involved pulling on a robe and going down the stairs. I thought it was his gaze that was waking me up, but now I wake up and there's no one there. This morning I had breakfast at the airport with my friend Cris. Her dog, Elliot, a black and white border collie, waited in her car. Afterward we drove back to Cris's house so she could lend me a book. Elliot jumped out of his car; first he ran over to the passenger side of my truck, then he came around to the driver's side and tried to look in the window. I opened the door: Rhodry smells but no Rhodry. I keep glancing out windows and over the deck rail. No Rhodry there either. I get out of here quicker because Rhodry doesn't have to take a few sniffs or a pee before he jumps into the truck. The truck cab stays warmer because the passenger-side window isn't cracked open wide enough for a malamutt nose, and there are no new noseprints on the windshield. When I come out of the post office or the grocery store, no one's leaning against the window having a conversation with the dog in the front seat. No one sees the dog who's not in the front seat except me. When I turn the ignition, the dashboard light doesn't come on to warn me that someone's seat belt isn't fastened. At the barn Rhodry frequently disappeared from sight -- off to check out the house, the construction site, the houses of the nearest neighbors. The difference now is that he doesn't appear in the barnyard a second before I begin to think he's gone missing. The absence of the dead is their way of appearing. Almost 25 years ago I reviewed a book with that title; it was a woman's memoir of her daughter's death and its aftermath. I remember almost nothing of the book, only that I was frustrated by the faintness of the daughter's image. The author, I thought, didn't manage to make the absent dead appear for the reader. I've never forgotten the title, though. I just relearned that it's a quote from Simone Weil. The absence of the dead is their way of appearing. It struck me then -- a Google search tells me that the book was published in 1984 -- but it wasn't till I'd lived on Martha's Vineyard long enough to have lost friends and places that I began to understand how true it is. You'd be amazed how many dead appear to me on a drive into town. At the barn I see Peg Lobdell every time she doesn't lean out her window, and the Black Kitty every afternoon when he doesn't show up for his thyroid pill (it wasn't the pill he showed up for, of course; it was the snack we embedded it in). Rhodry appears wherever he isn't, which is to say everywhere I go.
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