Ten years

The other night as I drifted to sleep, there was his weight shifting to nestle into the crook of my knees—and that is what 10 years since his death means, it turns out.

Some loves, some bonds, are so deep the two cannot be kept apart,

even by death:

like quicksilver, they will pool back together across any barrier,

no matter the cost to the nature of things.

Gilgamesh Wilderness

Familiar. Beloved.
One being in two bodies.
Two bodies riven to one.
The one forever two.

I am to be eternally The Us, it seems.

Some losses do not recede, they become part of the landscape, the world, the self.

In 10 years, I have begun to learn how to love and exist across worlds, and as ever, it is invisible to most, and incomprehensible—but daily, I practice the deep lessons of a union that powerful.

Often, I fail.

Sometimes I don’t.

I know now how I can love and be loved. Nothing kills that.

~

Nine years.

The hallowed, hollowed spaciousness of absence.

Impossibly, it is nine years since there was the Us.

He is still my mantra. If I could just get this one thing right. If I could love this way once, I can do it again: he taught me how. Oh, infinite well of patient tenderness.

Today a day of ending. Today a day of remembrance.

Gilgamesh.
August 13, 2001—September 9, 2013.

Six Days and Seven Nights:

This is how long Enkidu and Shamhat made love to turn the clay-being, the panther of the wilderness, into a human companion. This is how long Gilgamesh mourned over Enkidu’s body, refusing to let go of his beloved brother-bride’s corpse until a maggot fell out of his nose. This is how long Gilgamesh slept in the house of Utnapishtim, failing in his quest to kill death.

This is how long it takes.

It is eight years today, since Gilgamesh blew his last breath, hot and hard, into the palm of my left hand, where I still carry it; a burning city, a world created.

For six months and seven years, I wrote his death. His life. I wrote and wrote and wrote.

Drafting Gilgamesh Wilderness, I wrote 750 pages. Seven plus half. True.

For seven years and six months, I winnowed, refined, shaped, purified, boiled the language down from the perfume of sandalwood that became the breath of every creature who mourned him and all the air in the world to the essential oil, one drop, carrying the all of it.

None of this timing was intentional. It was archetypal. It timed me, as archetypes do.

Today, literally today, the proof of the book arrives at the publisher.

The last line:

…if I could just get this one thing right

To write the loss of the Beloved, the familiar, the one thing you got right—it’s impossible. It’s Tablet VIII, it’s the epic, it’s the question of that epic: how do we go on, heart open, in the presence of death?

Did I succeed?

Now that is for others to say.

Saddle Road Press, November 2021

Here is what I know:

At eight years, for the first time since I killed him myself—using that language advisedly, unwilling to elide exactly what I had to do to love him, no matter the cost to the nature of things—I woke on this day at peace.

He is still just there, here, now, and so am I: some loves do not end, even across the barrier of death.

But I am no longer in mourning. It has been fully expressed.

Now, I am just better, humbled, bigger, more just, maybe even more wise, for having gotten that one thing right.

Seven years: the return

I’ve never grieved anyone or anything else that way, I said, when challenged again, and again, and again, about the loss.

True.

---

That last night, September 8, 2013, I wrote:

For some terrible minutes, coming down the mountain in falling dark, conviction: we can outrun it. If I just drive, and drive and drive, to Vermont, to Ripton, to Battell, right now, we’ll go back in time. He’ll be so strong again. We’ll have the wolves.

---

Of course we could not outrun it, and by the next night, he was dead. And then I was mad, in the soul-quaking ancient sense of that word, in the desert, for a long time: they are all Enkidu, someone said to me then, and I railed at death, and neither ate nor bled for months, and everything everywhere was ours so I left the country, where finally, unbuffeted by visceral memory, I could simply mourn our cleaving.

So other than dog. So other than soul mate. So other than child-parent-beloved-friend.

Familiar spirit.

One being in two bodies, for twelve years.

---

Yesterday I hiked Wendell State Forest, where hundreds of hours and miles of our laughter is imprinted in bark, water, sky, and springy pine-roots underfoot.

Last week I hiked the Emily Dickinson Trail, seeing the proud and happy flag of his tail just ahead in the purple grass.

In the weeks before that, mile upon mile around Quabbin, a thousand hours of his feet thundering, swimming, stalking interesting creatures, once being flattened by a golden eagle, another time finding whale bones in a shed.

Mount Orient. Norwottuck. Lake Pleasant. I’ve moved back home to my valley, where for so long his footprints everywhere glowed with knife-like clarity that sharpened me against my severed self:  now, these places are comforting and joyous. Layered rich with The Us I do not have to explain.

Finally, I don’t miss him: he just is, in me, again. Differently now, and it’s not as good, but he’s there; imprinted in every cell, muscle, timbre, laugh.

I walk both with and without him now. Shugorei, two steps behind and to the left: he’s there.

Herons. Bears. Minks. Otters. Beavers. Frogs. Turtles. Coyotes.

Images of him layered on my retinas, images of me in his tapetum, images of The Us reflected in every forest leaf-shimmer and water drop, in all this September gold.

---

These lands know all his songs. Ella Fitzgerald’s Live in Rome 40th Birthday Concert. “Cheek to Cheek.” Sam Cooke’s greatest hits, of course especially “Cupid,” our running love-game, in which I faked my death from arrows and fell to the ground over and over, to be pounced and giggled. I can hear Us laughing.

These are good ghost walks.

Some loves are all comedy and tenderness. Some are the blood of life and death. Some are adventure. Some are all of those things. A vanishingly rare few are all that and more:

love that erases the boundaries between worlds.

---

Gilgamesh.

August 13, 2001 – September 9, 2013

Forever, and gone.

---

All the bears remember you in ursine story, handed down in hibernatory whispers. The earth still rises to meet your feet.

---

Six years and

his starface still           breaks              me

open        the sky         lowers

 

glowers                        dark wind turning cups

of leaves          inside out

 

be kind                        or be silent       I said

when it was happening                        this

 

whether you                 understand       or not

is          of all of them               the greatest loss

 

I am still    one       missing      something

hurricane-stole                         tornado-flattened

 

it’s storm surge                        and worse        from here

say       it gets better     liar       revealed

 

say       it gets worse     and worse        then maybe

you know        what grief is                 climate

 

we say      amelioration            we say             loss

we say             struggle                        I burned

 

you      so maggots       could not see

the world collapse        when you         went out

 

To ash

It’s weirdly cold at the five year mourning mark. Something should happen. A freak storm, planetary destruction, birth: if I were somewhere else (imagine that place?) I’d at least be donning color for the first time since, uncovering my hair. Here, just cold. Just winter threat, the promise of ice and long dark.

 

We have no communal rituals for witches mourning familiars, and only that inadequately specific language for it; no recognition, even, of the existence of bonds stronger than death. What they create, what they destroy.

 

Loss continues though the shugorei still follows, two steps behind and slightly to the left. Some can sense him, or almost: I catch their double-take, their blurted “I thought I saw—never mind.” I tend to like those people. Their sight. The rest abrade, so I speak less. Their baby talk. Their pathological projections. Their helplessness and overwhelm in a chaos of mutual disrespect. The interchangeable nature of their loves. They think we are talking about the same thing.

 

Even across the chasm of death, there is a solemn and perfect trust. Infinite partnership. Earned. Built. I go through every door first, to protect him. Lead on the trail. Unless there is a bear. Then he goes first, and I know why: he transforms himself to death itself and the bass rumble of it banishes all threat. Then we laugh.

 

The rest of the time, we rest in perfect certainty of each other.

That, or I am looking for him. Two steps behind and slightly to the left.

Fathoms deep. Beyond each next.

 

Some say it is worse, knowing how much is possible in this world.

.

Five Years Dead, The Beloved

lives……….in language now—

……….black sylph of shadow,……….nebula,

mast on night ocean,……….boat.

……….Bruja, someone calls me……….again.

Half of one,……….I do not answer.

……….Where is your familiar?……….I do not laugh.

Lithe, someone calls me.……….Alone,

……….the implicit movement……….of the word……….(two

become one)……….(one become two)……….lingers,

……….shadows.……….There are whole crows,……….absent ravens

now feather. ……….Remembrance.……….Blue-black blown dark.………………..

……….We are become……….a single iridescence……….on the ground.

……….

Four years on, and still incomprehensible:

the difference is that there is joy
in remembrance now, sometimes

the light itself belongs to him, to Us–
the micro-snapper, mid-road, newborn

and needing relocation: the single eft
mid-path (fear not, wee basilisk,

we mean you no harm). First mile
an open flood; thereafter, rivulets

and a single raven among the crows.
A vibrant black shadow, iridescent,

at the heart.

 

Observation: 1,095 days.

Three years since Gilgamesh’s last breath hit the palm of my left hand, and I caught it there, held it.

It’s part of me now, that breath of his I took into me and died with, as surely as he did.

 

Since he died, I have left not only New England, but the country, in largest part to escape the buffeting memory of The Us, the pack of two, the outside-of-human-love tracks everywhere I went: just recently, I’ve returned to the States, and am back in his home ground, our home ground.

 

I wonder if some of you who loved him virtually, but never knew him, still get email notifications from this mostly-quiet blog where for so long he brought strangers all over the world joy.

 

The Inugami Mochi was published in February of this year by Saddle Road Press. While it’s shelved as fiction, it is in fact an intentional amalgam of fiction, creative nonfiction, and magic realism of a vaguely animist sort, in which the character of Dog is the dog-god, the character of Cecily is the human claimed by him (and is no longer exactly of her own species as a result), and the ancient honor paid to this kind of archetypal relationship is brought back to the front.

In a few places, though, it’s just simply and entirely Gilgamesh, and all he gave: he is the truest thing I have known.

He and his life, our life together, doesn’t need a lot of dressing to summon something far larger and wilder than the domesticated nonsense where most people stop.

Right now, I’m working on a second that is also about the rare but once-familiar archetype of the familiar spirit and the consequences of its loss, called Gilgamesh/Wilderness. This will also come out from Saddle Road Press (next year).

If you miss him, you can read these. You will find him there, and hopefully something much larger than him, or me, or The Us we were: something that is about you. If you loved him because you recognized something of your own extra-human experience with a familiar—not a pet, an inugami who is your soul’s beloved more fully and well than any human could ever be—I hope this work feeds you.

 

I needed to read these books when he was so suddenly gone, but couldn’t find them.

So I wrote them.

 

After two years in Canada, where grief could happen without interference, without all the places he was so present creating a constant tearing at the wound of his absence, and where my deadened spirit and being came to new life, I find that on my return, these New England places we loved are now places of peace. I feel close to him, to who we were, and also in another life now, an entirely different skin than the one I occupied when he and I were The Us. This skin remembers the wholeness we had, from the vantage point of having shrunk back down to the singular. This skin remembers being riven. This skin remembers joy.

 

Today I went to Wendell State Forest for the first time since he died, and hiked our favorite six mile loop. Slowly, breathing it in and remembering the hundreds of times both of us were gently bounced by this springing ground amongst the mountain laurels, the bear who came out onto the Lookout and what Gilgamesh did, the cannonballs into Ruggles Pond, the discovery of otter scat composed entirely of fish scales (and the obtaining of permission – the rolling in it with passionate glee – the coming up covered in glitter, and laughing).

 

The miles and miles.

 

One being in two bodies: autonomous, but one.

 

Today, I found him a deer foreleg, marrow-sucked by coyotes. I found him a tree bole that looked exactly like a knee joint. I stopped and scented the air for him, accosted suddenly by some flowering thing at distance, the exact scent of happiness. I wondered, for a moment, if I smell like that, now, from taking in his last breath: that faint gardenia scent he had, under whatever he’d rolled in, the essential him underneath taken into my own skin, my own blood and bone. Here, the cool copper scent of water. Here, intoxicating loam. Here, the brave scent of a stone.

He wasn’t there, of course. He did not find things for me. Or maybe he was, and did. Both things can be a little bit true: he is of me now.

 

Lookout Trail, then a hook along Jerusalem Road and a drop down into Hidden Valley. Connecting with the Metacomet-Monadnock Trail and taking a winding route back toward the beginning.

 

Drought, so the water was lower than I’ve ever seen it: the convergence of the waterfalls and the torrential brook a tepid pool, barely moving. Still, the forest was cooler than the rest of the world, and noisy with life but none of it human. It fed me. Lifted my spirit to where it belongs more wholly than anywhere else—and in a way (though not a platitudinous way, not a way without loss of the entire world and having to make a new one), with him.

 

Even so resurrected to some new skin, or series of them, even in the quiet joy in the places where he had joy, the slow pulse of memory beats the anniversary drum.

 

Two days ago, I watched a video of one of our deepwades at a writer’s colony where we lived for six intensely beautiful months in New Hampshire. It’s a peaceful video, navigating the relentless dumps of a series of storms, helping each other break trail in January depths.

 

So much peace, so much love that winter.

 

Still, when I fell asleep that night, I dreamt that Gilly and I were out in the forest, in deep cold and incoming Nor’easter, and night was falling: we dug a snow cave, to shelter from the storm, and crawled into it together. I made us the best igloo I could, but he froze, in my arms: I felt it happening, and I could not stop it, I could only whisper love to him while he shivered in my arms. When he stopped shivering, his body gone soft, then stiff, I said, my own face, throat, arms cracking like ice with the movement of my lips and falling in shards around us: you’re safe now, love. Nothing bad can ever happen to you now.

And woke in the abyss of his absence.

 

This is the way of loss.

 

When it is deep, when the love was total, it never ends.

 

The image of a meteor strike always resonates as true for me, about real grief. The crater never goes away. It fills with water, stuff grows there, the sharp edges erode and soften, it may even become a cauldron of new life, generating like mad and full of joy—but the landscape has been altered, and shall ever remain so.

 

This is as it should be.

 

*  *  *

 

God/Dog, you know, for all that this familiar stuff, this inugami stuff, this one being in two bodies stuff, The Us, is profound and serious and very, very real – the thing is: we spent most of our time, when we weren’t saving each other, or exploring, or worldbuilding, telling each other goofy jokes until we collapsed into giggles.

 

So much laughter.

So much love.

 

*  *  *

Some of his joy:

 

Hitting it off with a pretty girl—

 

Vermonting in storm and ice, laughing to keep warm—

 

And ocean. Oh, ocean.

 

Two years on,

I’m sitting in my office three and a half thousand miles from where Gilgamesh and I lived in perfect harmony for twelve years. I’m weeping a bit, because I’m eating angel food cake a student baked for me without measuring cups. It’s perfect. I’m taking care of this student’s dog for a bit, but really, the cake is because he knows today is the two year anniversary of Gilgamesh’s death. An anniversary should have a cake, he says.

Angel food was Gilly’s favorite.
 

---

 

Gabriel García Márquez gave you away. I can tell you are an angel by the way you smell of flowers.

Love you, my Angel.

 

---

 

Even this week, dreams of the moment of his death.

More, now, his life; his presence right here in the present.

 

---

 

In this place with no memory, I can bear his absence, and remember.

I have been able to grieve here.

And unexpectedly, I have been resurrected here, after dying when Gilgamesh did.

 

---

 

Today I will hit “send” on the final manuscript of The Inugami Mochi, a collection of short stories, and sign the publication contract. These stories are hybrids of fiction and non, about the animal familiar, about Gilgamesh, about what happens when a love between a human and an animal has primacy in this world. Pieces of it were written and published when Gilly was still a youth: some I wrote in the last two years.

I’ll sign the contract with Saddle Road Press, and with enormous gratitude for the fact of it, put these stories in the hands of an editor, poet, and publisher who recognizes Gilgamesh, and me, and the larger-than-nonfiction nature of our relationship, as well as the value of the stories to speak beyond me and Gilgamesh—to speak to the larger Us that is made of those weird, bi-pedal creatures who have had the good fortune to be truly claimed by an animal.

 

Today I will perhaps go up the Stawamus Chief and look down into Howe Sound, where there are orcas who show up in my dreams, carrying Gilgamesh back to shore from Sedna’s abode and giving him back to me, alive and laughing.

 

Or I may just put on my wetsuit and swim the cold lake he would have loved, where the sky is a raven-filled bowl, their corvid iridescence his fur.

 

---

 

The last lines of The Inugami Mochi:

 

At world’s end, the stars have shaped themselves into a new constellation.

In the land of no-memory, when she looks up, it’s Dog’s face she sees.