My Girl Stella

Last week I was sitting in the corner of a muddled dorm room, waiting for the conversation to fall in my lap enough so that it wouldn’t be scary to join. While searching for words, a skyscraper of a bong fell into my lap instead. It was girthy, much like the one I’d use with my friends back home. I missed my friends back home. So why the hell not?

I was then high as hell; turning the laces of my shoes into crochet. It was about twenty minutes later, when someone in the room let out a piece of gossip about “Stella,” that I felt my internal world congeal.

My dog, Stella, passed two days before. But her death was too sudden and far away to be real.

It might have been the weed or the name or just the moment that brought me from that dorm room to the windy, weird parking lot where I first met Stella. By that time it had been over a year since I, or more so my parents, suffered the loss of our first dog Marley. I was barely 7 though, so when reflecting back Marley’s death seems like more of a time marker than a memory.

I know I was sad, but sadness at that age is so flexible. The thought of a puppy perished mine into thin air. And it just happened to be that my math teacher worked with rescue dogs. So I thought 2+2=4 and she could fill the whole that was left in my family. My parents weren’t ready to get a dog though, they were grieving. They did, however, allow me to foster with my teacher’s rescue.

There were three weeks with a balding chihuahua and one with a rottweiler-like mut, weeks with dogs with terrible names like Princess Honey and could have guessed it names like Oreo (oreo was black and white) No matter the name, it always ended the same way. With me latching on to the dog, crying, as it got pried for my arms, declaring unequivocally this was the one for us. Then my Dad, wiping those tears, and saying “someone else needs this one sweetie,” somehow without reminding me how he had warned fostering would be hard.

As much as I pleaded my case for each stray, my parents said that it didn’t “feel right,” which didn’t “feel right” to me, because it had been a year, and I was 8 now, and surely mature enough to understand grief!

My persistence succeeded their hesitation though, and that is how we got to the weird, windy parking lot. My teacher, who had become quite close to the family after all the fostering, called us out there. She had just gotten Stella from a couple who didn’t realize the time it took to take care of a dog (classic) and had a hunch we might be the family for her.

Stella came rearing out of this small car like a tranquilized buck, and even though she was a little puppy, her jump engulfed me entirely; clawing her big paws at my freckles like she could take just a few. It was an energy and a happiness that everyone could feel. It felt “right.”

We took her home, my brother and I passing her between laps the whole ride. She got pampered and spoiled, teethed and groomed, and more than anything, loved. Every person in my family loved her in their own way, and she reciprocated that love on an individualized basis. Meaning, for my annoying self, she let me hang around her like a tie, without as much as a single snarle.

And then, when I was old enough to be less annoying, she didn’t hold my youth against me. Fast forwarding through the years, she watched me grow into the woman I am today. All the while she outgrew me herself (the tag breed Golden Retriever couldn’t have been the only one because Stella was built like a skinny horse and her fur was red in the sun, not gold).

Simply put, she was one of a kind.

Stella liked to smile her way through each day; from perching her chin on our dining room table while we ate, just because she was tall enough, to insisting on playing fetch, only to watch the ball fly over her head. These antics kept the whole family afloat, as she somehow could console us all simultaneously; saying “I’m on your side” to four different sides.

We liked to joke about who her favorite was. My brother said it was him, cause he slept with her. Mom said it was her, cause she feed her. Dad said it was him, cause he walked her. I didn’t really have a good reason but I thought it was me anyway.

Maybe because every time I started to sink, Stella was there. Not to lift me up (I know she is a dog, not a saint) but to keep me from being submerged by life. She kept me steady when I cried over not making the 7th-grade volleyball team. When the first boy I ever loved (or thought I did at the time) wasn’t interested. When I didn’t get into the high school all of my friends were going to.

The biggest stint of stability she ever offered me was junior year. When my anorexia got “discovered” and my whole world changed, she stayed by my side, she stayed the same while I watched everyone else forget how. Because a dog couldn’t see, or care, about thick or thin or crazy. When I had to force down food for dinner and sat balling over the cheese on my plate, Stella plopped her head on the table, begging at my poison so I wasn’t begging alone.

Dogs have this incomprehensible sense of human emotion, of human need. Stella had, and still has, an incomprehensible sense of me. Despite the dichotomy of man and dog, she always knew what I needed, even as that changed with age.

And yet, with all the changing, I’d say she was the most consistent part of my adolescence. Maybe that is why I had become indifferent to her age. To me, she was still the puppy from the humane society parking lot. Leaving her for college was hard, but not that hard because I naively thought that when I returned for break her love would meet me with the same jump it always had. I didn’t worry, because I knew she still lived an amazing life in my absence; with a Tempurpedic bed, morning egg scraps, grass to roll in, and my dad telling her goodnight.

So when I got the call on my way to give my speech in COMS 101, in the busiest part of campus, telling me Stella had to be put down, I was absolutely aloof. I clenched my Starbucks feta wrap so tightly the egg grease dripped onto my shoe. I asked how and why and what and when. I sucked tears back into my eyes and gave my speech (with great prosody according to my professor) I went to the gym, got my usual salad from campus dining, and ate it in my dorm, all without shedding a tear.

My parents FaceTimed me to say goodbye later that day. Stella didn’t look like a puppy on that call. It was as if her life’s blood had drained from her face, leaving only the skeleton of her breed behind. Everyone could see that I think, so we knew it was her time to go.

She went up to doggy heaven the following day while I was following handout 12 in Statistics.

As much as I thought I understood grief at 8 with Marley, how much I didn’t know clicked with Stella’s passing. And I can’t fill that knowledge gap because grief isn’t categorical or binary. It can’t be dissected into its parts, then used to build the same structure again. That’s what I had wrong at 8. That something could replace what had been lost. Grief operates as an unreasonable and irreplicable force.

Mine is in a “hold” as of now, simply waiting for me at home. Because Stella, although a dog, was also a figure of my youth. And my youth wasn’t in San Luis Obispo, it was in Denver. It was on Krameria Street.

I still feel aloof through the days, as I did when I found out she was dying. To my own sense of delusion, my puppy is still at home frolicking in the snow while my Dad is jealous of the sun I have in Slo. Going home for Spring break is going to fuck that sense of delusion. Not because I’ll miss the sun here, but because my sun won’t greet me at the door this time.

There is not one instance of walking into my house that I can recall where Stella, who looked just like a ball of fiery sun, did not trample me. It was her way of saying hello, I missed you, and I want to go outside. Knowing that won’t happen ruins the preservation I wanted my home to always hold.

I guess the world I grew up in still moves, even though I’m no longer in it. I liked picturing my youth as a still image better. Maybe it is in some ways. Or maybe I am just stretching this too far because I was high as hell and someone said the name of my dog who just died. Stella is smiling down either way.