I remember singing an Amy Winehouse tune in the car with my brother as we drove up Interstate 95 to Maine. This would have been a mundane, throwaway memory were it not for the reaction of my teenage daughter, who openly grimaced.
It wasn’t our bad singing, she just hated the song, always did. I asked her what she so despised about it. She shuddered and said, “Too many A’s. It makes me think something bad is going to happen.” She has perfect pitch, and she was right — something bad did happen.
Like Amy Winehouse, my brother died young and unexpectedly. It wasn’t just bad, it was shattering. Two years later, the pieces are still flying.
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I am not unique in experiencing this kind of grief. I don’t know anyone who has reached middle age without grieving a profound loss — a loved one, an illness, a marriage, a career — there are too many to mention. Loss leaves a terrible hole, and what separates us is how we fill it. I have friends who’ve blown up their lives in this effort — walked out the door with nothing, reinvented themselves, gone from stay-at-home parents to MMA fighters.
My attempt to fill the hole wasn’t as extreme; it involved dogs. Though I’d always been a classic dog avoider, cringing when one came too close, I became obsessed with getting an Irish wolfhound, the tallest breed in the world. Two months after my brother’s burial, my twin teenage daughters stared at me in disbelief as I toggled between pages on my laptop, one showing the meager balance of our savings, the other, Wolfhound puppy adoption fees. The figures were a sliver apart.
“You’re kidding, right?” This was our dancer and dog lover daughter. She stretched her long limbs and studied my face. Always able to read me, she jumped up triumphantly and yelled, “YES! We’re doing this!” I should’ve said, “No, this is madness.” Instead, I emptied our savings account to buy the big, exquisite puppy.
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My husband and our dancer embarked on an epic road trip to collect a lanky wolfhound pup. Arriving at a farm in the Adirondacks, they gulped at the sight of the pup’s father, Sir Brutus, approaching the size of an ox.
I like to imagine my brother being on the puppy-retrieving journey. It’s comforting to picture him, his head thrown back in laughter. He found his nieces so amusing — the way our musician daughter would hide his shoes and scream with relish as he theatrically stomped around the house looking for them; how our dancer would tell him off, snow dripping from her face, when he steered the sled down the hill too fast. My brother made not just car rides, but everything he took part in, so much better. I wish more than anything he’d known that, or that I had told him, before he chose to leave this world.
The intrepid trio of husband, dancer, and hound arrived home with great ceremony. Soon enough, I was waking up to my husband sighing, “Your grief-hound crapped on the carpet again.” Miss Fingal grew at a terrifying speed and trashed our house, which was too small already. We loved her immediately.
Months later, when her silver fur was stuck to everything we owned, and we couldn’t imagine life without her, I squeezed in with my teens on the small couch in the living room, holding their 2-year-old sister on my lap. The dog took up the entirety of the other couch, and was on her back with her legs in the air like a dead bug. We laughed at the ridiculousness, and I shook my head, saying, “I don’t know what came over me.”
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Our dancer looked at me in that way teens do when adults can’t see the obvious. She adjusted her hoodie and shrugged, “Big loss, big dog.”
Ah, the wisdom of teens.
Christine Bouchea is a writer in Newburyport. Send comments to magazine@globe.com. TELL YOUR STORY. Email your 650-word unpublished essay on a relationship to connections@globe.com. Please note: We do not respond to submissions we won’t pursue.