Starting Over at 76: My New Beginning

Thumper, my 16 year-old Tibeten Terrier. My boy...RIP.

Starting Over at 76: My New Beginning

I’m sitting on my front porch in Louisiana right now, and it’s too quiet. That’s the thing nobody tells you about quiet — it doesn’t feel peaceful when it used to belong to somebody. The boards under my feet still creak the same way they always have, that low groan like an old friend clearing his throat, but there’s no tags jingling next to me, no huffing sigh as a little body settles against my ankle. Just me, a glass of tea sweating rings onto the armrest, and a stillness I never asked for.

Thumper’s gone. Buried him last week.

An owl got him outside our camp in Arizona — came down out of that big empty sky faster than either of us could understand, and by the time I got to him he was already broken in ways the vet couldn’t fix. Paralyzed. Crippled. I sat with him on that cold clinic floor and held his face in my hands while he looked at me like he still trusted me to make it right. I couldn’t. I had to let him go instead, and I don’t think there’s a lonelier sound in this world than a room going still after that.

So here I am. Seventy-six years old, taking a short break from the road, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I’m navigating this life without him. No small shadow trotting ahead of me on the trail. No wet nose against my elbow to wake me up out of a bad dream. Just the porch, and the Volvo sitting quiet in the drive, and the gray camper van out back that still smells a little like him if I get close enough to the passenger seat, which I haven’t been able to do yet.

Grief has a texture out here. It’s the cicadas winding up at dusk, loud enough to fill a silence I can’t fill myself. It’s the smell of rain coming in off the bayou, thick and green, the kind of smell Thumper used to lift his nose into like it was the finest thing God ever made. It’s my own hands, empty in my lap, that used to always have a leash in them or a scrap of kibble or fur to smooth down. I keep reaching for him without meaning to.

I won’t pretend this new beginning is one I wanted. I’d have kept the old one, owl or no owl, if anybody had asked me. But nobody asks. You just wake up one morning on a porch in Louisiana and realize the road ahead of you doesn’t have a co-pilot anymore, and you have to decide whether you’re going to sit here and rot in that fact or get back up.

I’m going to get back up. Not today, maybe. Today I’m allowed to just sit here and feel the ache of him in every board of this porch. But someday — I believe this the way I believe in sunrise — some other four-legged soul is going to find me. Wandering up a gravel road, or waiting in a shelter cage with eyes that know grief when they see it. And I’ll bend down, creaky knees and all, and start learning how to navigate this life all over again.

Until then, it’s just me. Starting over. Missing my buddy something fierce.

Thanks for reading.

Kindly, Carol