More of my story

There were maggots on the dog. He was old, but he was not dead, and so the maggots were wrong. Yet, there they were, eating.

The dog had belonged to Dan.

Dan was dead.

Long since, in fact.

Like Marley and the Ghost of Christmas Past, all of yesterday was wrapped up in today. Dan had loved this dog. My sisters were still quite young, and their rememberance of Dan, their daddy, was fond. His dog was a link to him, the dog's death was a new grief.

Chloroform over his nose took the horror of the maggot's dinner into a new kind of pain. The girls were in tears.

We got shovels from the garage.

For my part, I had gone to Mother's that day for a distraction. It was sunny that day; was it Spring? Things were bad for me, and worse by the moment. Like that dog, I was being eaten alive.

The question of the dog was easily resolved. Unplesant, of course, but not hard to discern. So we began to dig.

My situation was less clear.

Fresh in my mind was the phone conversation, in which I had discovered yet one more detail in a string of unimaginable revelations. Today I had learned that my husband was living with a woman and her four children between his stints in jail. His own wife and two children had lost their appeal.

And so I dug.
The death of the dog had unlocked a fountain of tears that I did not need to hide. It felt good to apply my physical strength and aggression. We attacked the hole in silence, pausing from time to time, to wipe away the sweat or the tears.