One of the things we often say to each other in my family, whenever we discuss my father, is that we are glad that his body was found. My father, who passed away in May of 1999, was a diabetic, and apparently suffered a heart attack while tying his boat to the dock, sometime very early in the morning. He spent the day on his boat fishing with my uncle and some other fishing buddies, and when he brought them back to the marina that night, he decided to go back out on his own. This was on a Friday.
We didn’t see him that weekend, but that wasn’t unusual when the weather was getting warm. He never lived with us that I can remember, although he slept in the living room on our couch throughout the winter, when he couldn’t fish. My mother had a bad premonition on Monday morning, and when he couldn’t be reached at his home, she called my uncle. My uncle went to the marina and found my father’s car still in the parking lot. As he walked along the dock, approaching the boat, my father’s body floated to the surface.
The medical examiner said that they did not find a drop of water in his lungs, meaning that he likely died before hitting the water. We allowed that to comfort us, in that he didn’t drown. All of the other questions, like ‘was there any foul play?’, or ‘what exactly happened?’, faded in the upheaval of funeral planning, estate issues, and dealing with being fatherless. A favorite refrain for us became ‘he died doing what he loved’, but that was our way of fishing.
Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if he wasn’t found, if his body had floated out with the tide into the Long Island Sound. The finality of death, as opposed to the uncertainty of a missing person, appear to be completely different forms of suffering. The difference, as far as I could tell, was the hope of return, no matter how false or unlikely.
A few weeks ago we had a puppy run away from home. We haven’t had a dog in our family since our oldest child was very little. The kids pleaded with us to get a dog, and the pandemic seemed like the appropriate time for us to relent. A family friend had a relative with a farm in West Virginia, and their dog had a litter. We chose the runt, given our penchant for underdog stories, and adopted Kiki, a large Chihuahua mix (with what we don’t know), who proceeded to terrorize us in ways that were endearing, once the anger subsided. This was September.
It was the last Friday in March, and we were home all day. The children had the day off from school, and my wife and I were working from our home office. In the early afternoon, we took our daughter to our local pub to grab a bite, and something was off the entire time. Perhaps spending two straight weeks together, cooped up in the house, for Spring Break was starting to grate on us, and soon my wife and I were having an elevated discussion about a family matter with no easy resolution, in front of our nine-year-old daughter.
I was supposed to go back to work when we got back home, but my head wasn’t into it and my desk is positioned such that the sun is in my eyes in the evenings. Our daughter wanted to ride her bike in front of the house (our house is along a service road). Without telling my wife, I decided to take her out front and watch her ride. A few minutes into riding, she got thirsty, and she went back into the house to get a can of seltzer. Our kitchen, like most homes, faces out onto the backyard, and my daughter decided to walk back out of the house through the back door and come to the front along the driveway. When she got to me, it occurred to her that the back door wasn’t locked, but I, perhaps in a moment of laziness, or perhaps just not being present, told her if she closed it that it shouldn’t be an issue.
We could hear the puppy barking at us from outside. We figured she was disturbed by us being on the other side of the door, where she couldn’t see us. At the same time, my son was upstairs playing video games with his headset on, and my wife was upstairs doing her nails. This was after she came out to chastise me, rightly so, for failing to mention to her that we were outside. Just as my daughter and I were going back into the house, I see Kiki sprinting down our driveway. Instinct kicks in, I yell her name, potentially scaring her further, and begin, in flip flops, to chase her down the street, but she is far too fast and darts out of sight.
The rest is more trauma, including spotting her as we circled around the nearby campus of Johns Hopkins, before losing her again and although she was sighted the next day, we haven’t heard a word since. We have done everything the experts suggest and some things of our own in an effort to locate Kiki, and our hope is beginning to fade. Statistics for the return of lost dogs are promising, but I wonder if continuing to hope at this point prolongs the grief. The grief is compounded by feelings of guilt, concern for our children, anger (sometimes at the puppy, sometimes at each other), and helplessness.
I think about the narratives we would have had to create if my father’s body wasn’t found. I appreciate being spared that feeling, but wonder if it was naïve of me to think that I would not know that feeling eventually. Losing a pet is different than losing a parent, but the distinction may not be so obvious to my children. I worry that they are lost in that feeling now, peering out the window, where we’ve left the dog bowls with food and water in the off chance that Kiki finds her way home. I try not to punish myself for failing to lock the backdoor. I try to explain to my daughter that there were mistakes by all of us, that we were all distracted, and that self-blame and guilt will only hurt us now.
We found out later on, from my father-in-law’s oncologist, who happened to be my father’s physician, that my father was sicker than he appeared. He refused treatment, shunned dietary adjustments and all other lifestyle changes that are proven to manage diabetes. He often expressed that he did not want to be sickly and die in a hospital bed, but we never filed it in our brains as a serious statement. I can rationalize my father’s choice to die his own way, and yet I am having difficulty with a mostly wild animal wanting to live in the wild, and perhaps choosing to live her own way. All I can think about is our loss, and I guess, when pushed, all I can think about my father is our loss as well.
