~ For Mo
Last fall, my mom and little sister made plans to visit my middle sister in Southern California, and over Christmas break, I rashly invited myself to join them on their trip. This was a decision that I had some small regrets about. I have other travel planned this year and toiled over the money spent and the time taken off work. But ultimately, I decided it was right to capitalize on one of the few weekends out of the year when my sisters and I could all be in the same place at the same time. I swallowed the costs and lost sleep and found myself blissfully basking in California’s winter sunshine, a much-desired relief from months on the East Coast.
As we drove miles of freeway between tourist spots and beaches, we all joked that our trip was an unofficial tour of La La Land (2017) filming locations. I mean, any trip to LA inevitably feels La La Land-esque, but this one was especially so. We ventured up to the Griffith Observatory, gaping at the mountain and skyline views unveiled after a week of straight rain. In Hermosa Beach, we were charmed to discover that our hotel was near The Lighthouse Cafe, an important fixture in the film, as well as for West Coast jazz history at large. Across from The Lighthouse is the unmistakable pier that Ryan Gosling’s character peruses down while singing “City of Stars.”
One afternoon, towards the end of our short trip, my sisters and I walked across the sunny pier, leaning over the edge to get a better view of the surfers and dolphins dotted across the Pacific coast. We watched a young surfer attempt to catch a wave again and again, paddling energetically and ultimately failing as the wave passed over him. He slapped the ocean’s surface out of frustration and we silently cheered him on. It was then that our mom ended her phone call with her partner and tearfully delivered the news that our beloved family dog had passed away at home in Washington State. Everything shifted. Quickly taken out of our beachy daze, we all hugged on the pier’s edge and retired to our hotel room.
I experienced other losses in the past, but they all happened when I was preschool-aged. I didn’t yet understand what it meant for something or someone to be physically and irrevocably gone. And I feel privileged to not have experienced a personal loss as devastating as this one until adulthood. Our dog was aging and his health was declining - one might say that we had seen this coming, to an extent. But no amount of emotional preparation can equip one fully for the tragedy itself.
Experiencing grief can feel incredibly isolating, which is ironic in the sense that all people will experience it. Grief is commonplace in the human experience, but we often endure it under disparate circumstances and at different periods in life. A death, a heartbreak - it interrupts you dead in your tracks, forcing you to undergo a painful transition that you didn’t ask for. Given its detached nature, I felt grateful to be carrying the weight of the loss with my family - to rub each other’s shoulders and cry without restraint. I felt like I was holding back a good deal of emotion as I grieved alongside my mom and sisters in our hotel room. It’s much easier to hold yourself upright to support those you love. To sit up straight so they have a shoulder to slump onto. It wasn’t until I boarded a red-eye flight home that the dam broke loose.
As the sadness settled, one of the biggest feelings that struck me was a perturbed sense of injustice. The whole situation just seemed so unfair at every angle I viewed it from. Our dog wasn’t just a pet, he was a part of our family. He came into our lives during a period of familial transition and uncertainty. But notably, the dog wasn’t even my family’s, to begin with. He initially belonged to my mom’s partner, and as he became further enmeshed in our lives, the dog became so as well. As such, feeling as devastated as I am about the loss feels almost unfair. I wasn’t the one there to clean up his waste and give him baths from the beginning - I wasn’t even physically there to experience the hardship of his passing in person. My grief, at times, can feel selfish, like I should have better earned the right to feel so distraught. I try to remind myself that these realities can all be true at once - families shift and change, as do the people and animals that become meaningful to us. That’s a way of life.
As I looked up from our family embrace on the Hermosa Beach pier and sunk into my seat on the flight back home, I found myself looking at the faces of people around me and feeling upset - angry even. They all seemed so stupid as they laughed and smiled and complained about seemingly menial plights. On the flight, a man behind me complained on the phone with a Delta representative and several flight attendants about how utterly horrendous his seat was. He was seated in an exit row so he had a decent amount of leg room - it was the seat’s lack of “cushioning” that was bothering him. He explained to the attendants that he flies all the time and had a very important meeting tomorrow and that he would never be traveling with the airline again. The flight attendants pacified him to the best of their abilities but were rightfully annoyed.
Holding back tears, I felt the urge to spin around and tell this man to shut up. To my surprise, a chuckle fell out of me instead. The man’s inconvenience would seem irrational even to someone in their right mind. So at that moment, it contained astronomical levels of unreason to me - I had no choice but to laugh. At that moment as well, I took comfort in thinking about this man suffering. I felt assuaged by images of him crying in his hands. Not because I think he deserves to suffer tremendous pain, but because I know that he eventually will. It likely wasn’t that day on the plane (he ended up sleeping most of the flight) but it will happen at some point if it hasn’t happened already. And it will happen again and again.
In California, we rode bikes across the boardwalk, tasted salty air, and allowed the sun to singe our complexions. We took comfort and humility in the expansiveness of nature - as much nature as you can experience in the metropolitan sprawl that is Los Angeles. It only felt fitting that we viewed La La Land (2017) before we ventured back home, given all the sites we visited. The hotel concierge had a DVD of the film for rental. After wrestling with the DVD player for far too long, my mom, sisters, and I viewed the film with puffy, tired eyes, squeezed into the queen-sized hotel bed like sardines.
It’s funny how you can still hope for alternate endings when watching movies you’ve viewed a million times. In the film’s final scene, as Mia looks back at Sebastian seated at the piano, I can’t help but always want her to run to him, abandon her current path, and be with him. But, of course, that would defeat the purpose. The two came into each other’s life at a serendipitous time. Each artist encouraged the others to be steadfast with their dreams, to never give up, and to be earnest in their pursuits. They had a chance encounter that helped spur their respective successes. They came into one another’s lives, imparted goodness, and then left, forever marked by the other.
Our dog was a rescue dog, scooped off the streets and placed into a warm home, and in turn, we were blessed with his gentleness and quiet sense of knowing. Everything about his presence felt fortuitous - written in the stars. When the dust settles, it’s moments like these where I feel as though I’m walking across a tightrope of thread connecting me close to myself, my immediate loved ones, and the world around me.
Our dog was a gentle giant who seldom barked and sat on your feet when he could tell you were feeling nervous. He was always unaware of how ginormous he was, dumbly stumbling between conversationalists and knocking glasses off tables with his giant tail wags. The only time he got riled up was when he spotted this particular black squirrel in our backyard - the sight of the squirrel made him leap to his feet and bound across the yard, barking at him with fervor. My family and I always laughed about this, wondering what the source of their beef was. He whimpered when he was left alone for as long as five minutes and let out small yelps in his sleep - we always wondered what he dreamed about if he had dreams. What would he sound like if he had a voice? we asked each other as we tried on a range of silly, masculine-sounding tones. He blinked up at us with big brown eyes that looked alarmingly like human eyes. I would relish in the comfort of his weight as he leaned against me and the silent assurance of his breathing as he snoozed on his bed while we watched television or retold jokes and stories of past friends.
Even in the most ideal of simple lives, suffering is inevitable - I will always miss this dog so much. To bring beings close to you is to eventually feel the weight of their loss. And it’s to forever keep the memory of their existence alive through the telling and retelling of stories, fossilizing their personality and tendencies with words, laughs, and tears. Memories live on in the stories my family tells each other, and in their physical reminders. The hands of so many people I love graced him. I loved this dog and was lucky to have felt his quiet love back. And I’m lucky to know that my heart will ache as I walk through the basement stairwell he lingered in, across the scratches on the hardwood floors, and, of course, when I see a black squirrel in a park. All reminders of good fortune, and fortunate accidents.
This was so beautiful and came at a perfect time too! My family is thinking it’s time to help my dog Riley cross the rainbow bridge. Everyone’s been asking me how I am and I can honestly say I’m fine but I know that I’m anticipating the grief and loss I’ll feel once he’s actually gone. Pets bring us so much joy and love, it’s understandable that their loss brings us so much pain. Rest in peace Mo! 💕
MO’s life was written in the stars ! I really love the connection ! Great article !