“Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” —Philip Larkin
We lost Aela on a Saturday, mid-morning, four weeks ago. One minute she was running along the path we have walked a thousand times and the next she was gone.
She was a puppy, four years old, and her last minutes on this planet—at least the ones before drowning—were spent leaping for a grouse she would never catch. Or not. Because we will never really know. She just vanished.
When the clouds come down to touch the earth, like they did this morning on the first of November, I run with ghosts. Their not-bodies thread the canyons, hover feet above the earth, cast the light from my headlamp back into my eyes. I recite the names of the dead.
This fall, my children, Aidan and Kellen, both left for college. By definition I am still a mother, but I mother absence, empty bedrooms, closets without clothes, or maybe I am mother to memory of how they reached for my hand when out walking, sang nonsense from their car seats, how it felt to take a warm washcloth to their cheeks to remove pear, or potato, or snot, or syrup, more caress than cleaning, cupping jawline, tracing lips.
We never found her body, have nothing to bury. We assume the river chose to keep her, continues to hold her body under a shelf in the bank; a cottonwood’s roots dig deep into the soil there. Those are the arms that claim her now.
When Aidan was three and just starting preschool, we visited Tucson for the holidays. He received a scooter for Christmas. Underneath a still-warm desert sun, we took Aidan to the neighborhood park. He immediately hopped aboard the scooter and zipped back and forth on the asphalt, his left foot speeding him on his way. I didn’t know he knew how to ride. It was the first time my child had mastered a skill that I had not been the one to teach.
A friend gave me a Brazilian seer stone two days after we lost Aela. At that point, we still had hope she might be alive. For hours we had called her name in the canyon. She never came. Standing at the river, on a bridge far below where she vanished, I looked into the stone, purple and opaque except for a flat window faceted into one side, but saw nothing.
On the fourth day of her disappearance, we stood at the edge where she was last seen. Sending logs down the river had told us what we wanted to know—anything heavy, like a body, was not returned from beneath the shelf. Aidan and my husband Michael began digging, hoping to make a window into what we could not see. Above a crow would not stop calling to us. Her caws sounded like barks, a dog above our heads.
Last night was Samhain, one of the eight pagan sabbats, the tip toward the winter solstice. In the north, we make our way toward the dark now, the leaves gone from the trees, soon earth shrouded in snow. I have to remind myself that emptiness is the place of pure potential; the inchoate holds all possibilities because nothing has yet taken shape.
The house is so quiet now. I no longer know how my children spend their days. Entire days pass when I don’t hear from Aidan and Kellen. For years, my life was shaped to their needs. What is the form I assume for the formless? How do I hold my arms?
Samhain is the night when the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest. Aela does not greet me at the door. I will not touch her fur again, have no body to ash. We do not elect the void; the void arrives. Maybe that is why I saw nothing in the seer stone. I was being offered emptiness.
The morning fog has lifted, though the few golden leaves on the maples are glossed with the remnants of the night. They shine in the sun, not unlike a host of daffodils, but even now, through the window, I watch them fall to the earth. The tree distills; I close my eyes.
___
Jennifer Sinor is the author of several books, including, most recently, The Yogic Writer: Uniting Breath, Body, and Page. Her essay collections include Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World and Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe. She has also written the memoir Ordinary Trauma. The recipient of the Stipend in American Modernism, her work has appeared in Best American Essays and The Norton Reader. Jennifer teaches creative writing at Utah State University where she is a professor of English.