"The Door of That Feeling" by Kyle McCarthy
Last month our dog Zoe died. (The three family dogs live with my parents in Baltimore, and I live in New York, but these dogs are so beloved, their lives running like currents through our deeper family life, that the plural possessive feels right.) At the end she couldn’t stand or eat. Her liver had shut down.
The last evening of her life, my parents found her on the front stoop, her favorite spot to smell the air. She had been there all afternoon. In the morning she had even gone for a walk; the night before she had eaten some turkey breast. But now she couldn’t get up. Her breaths came in little panicked huffs.
In the photograph that my brother sent me of that Thursday evening, Zoe rests her head on my mom’s lap, and my mom strokes her back. My dad crouches nearby. The photograph is “live,” which means that when I hover the mouse over the sprayed icon, the pictures moves, just for a half-second: Zoe blinks, and my mom lets out a long sigh, shaky with tears.
After Zoe died, I could not stop looking at this photograph. I could not stop looking at all my photographs of her. Though whatever tumor or cancer killed her was probably growing for a long time, though she was nearly fourteen, old for a dog, it seemed as if she went from healthy to dead in less than ten days. Compulsively I clicked through the photographs, trying to understand.
I always look at the photographs in the same order. First I click through earlier snapshots, going back five, six, seven years—Zoe at Christmas, Zoe with prickly seed pods stuck to her muzzle, Zoe trotting through the dog park, three tennis balls in her mouth. Then Zoe in the yard the week before she died, looking wistful and regal in the golden light; then Zoe collapsed on the stoop.
“Photographs furnish evidence,” Susan Sontag writes in Regarding the Pain of Others, and as I look I cannot help but feel that I am trying to furnish my mind with understanding, as if death’s progression were a piece of furniture that completes the room.
But I keep resisting that furniture. Since her passing I have dreamt about her three times, and each time she has been slowly sinking in water. Sometimes I’m grabbing her, sometimes a vet or dog trainer is explaining that she is okay, she is learning to swim. The dreams are usually peaceful, but I wake unsettled. The dreams linger. Not their particulars, but the feeling of slow submersion, of her white fur gradually fading into darkness as she sinks down.
The strength of my grief for Zoe unnerves me. Its duration and intensity feels inappropriate. I badger myself with the phrase just a dog, even though I have always thought it was dumb to accuse someone of caring too much about an animal, that it implied that love was like money in a bank account, fixed and finite: spend too much on a creature, and you won’t have enough left over for people.
But why do I feel so absolutely gutted? I don’t think she was “just a dog,” but I am also surprised to find myself months later still dreaming about her, still clicking through old photos, still writing sentimental lines in my journal.
Of her father who, as a child, mourned the death of his dog more extravagantly than the death of his parents, Mary Gaitskill in her memoir Lost Cat writes, “His parents meant so much to him he could not afford to feel their loss. The dog he could feel, and through the door of that feeling came everything else.”
This feels exactly right to me. Love is not a bank account. Love is a door, and everything that comes through that door, too.
Our dogs are the door through which my family says so many painfully sincere things to each other, things like I love you and I’m happy to be here with you right now. We say these things when we talk about how proud Zoe is, trotting up the driveway with her tail high; when we laugh over Marlo’s self-important inspection of every sign post (like a minor bureaucrat, we say, processing paperwork); when we say, as Abby pushes against our legs in a doodle hug, This one, she is pure love.
The intensity and sweetness and fragility of life between humans, it’s too much to bear. Our tender hearts would fall out of our chests if we spoke of it too often. So rather than moon and sap at each other, we moon and sap at the dogs. And when we lose a beloved pet, we grieve fully, in a way that we can’t with a beloved person.
But, as Gaitskill says, “through the door of that feeling [comes] everything else.”
I was sitting in a Szechuan restaurant on the Upper West Side when Dennis, arriving, leaned close and said gently, Did you hear about Texas?
I wept when he told me. I wept almost immediately, and in that immediacy was relief. Before then, reading the news, I felt as dry as a winter leaf, curled and desiccated, attached to the branch through a dead connection. But my grief over Uvalde felt disordered, wild, anguished. Losing Zoe had primed me. The grief of the parents was right there in the restaurant.
As the photos of the victims began to emerge, I found my grief stayed close. I didn’t look at pictures of Zoe anymore. Instead, I studied children laughing, hugging friends or fathers, proudly holding up certificates of accomplishment. Banal snapshots transformed into talismans of the unbelievable.
Do the mourners in Uvalde look at the photographs of their dead? It seems inappropriate to speculate, but I’m a fiction writer, I speculate. I decide that some must look incessantly, and some not at all; there is probably no middle ground. Looking, or not, they are held—we are all held—by what Roland Barthes calls “….that terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.”
When I learned that Zoe was dying, I went to Baltimore to say goodbye. On my final morning there, I was half-crying and filling my water bottle and scratching Zoe’s head, looking her in the eye to try to communicate I love you, to which she could only gaze back with the same baffled, hurting eyes that had haunted me all weekend, when my mom asked, Do you want some pictures with the dogs?
I said yes. Not because I wanted to interrupt this goodbye with posing, but because I knew later the photograph would matter to me. I was anticipating all those mornings when, tired of pushing words around, I’d flip over to this snapshot of me smile-crying, my arm awkwardly around Zoe.
Yet I don’t like looking at this picture. I cannot stand that what was once a pesky interruption of the moment is now all that remains of the moment. What feels cruel about this photograph—and every photograph of the dead—is how far they are from the pleasure of the animated, living self.
Mute, incomplete, frozen, the photograph always fails us. It promises to return the dead, but cannot; it promises to provide evidence, but that evidence is always incomplete. Yet it is exactly this partial, incomplete nature of photographs—their tantalizing failure to fulfill the promises they make—that keeps us looking.
I still look at photos of Zoe. But I’ve become less interested in the feelings they evoke, and more curious about the door those feelings opened in me. Less invested in ogling the past, and more focused on stepping through that door. Out to dinner with my mom, I find myself letting go of my usual neurotic worries, and instead simply basking in her presence. Here we are, together, alive, on a warm summer night in Brooklyn—what could be better?
If, when we view photographs, we are ultimately disappointed, then perhaps when we find ourselves the subject of a photograph, smiling fixedly, we should remember that the photo doesn’t matter at all. It doesn’t “capture the moment.” The moment is flowing all around us—there, and gone.
Kyle McCarthy is the author of the novel Everyone Knows How Much I Love You. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Selected Shorts, American Short Fiction, the Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
