Cherished Read Online Free PDF

but couldn’t have: a mother, a death free young adulthood, a safe home, a solid job. She was Hope, and she, too, had been wrested from me the moment she came into view.
    A few days later, Don and I went to a party on a mesa overlooking a crystalline river. It was a New Mexico early fall, the sun pouring so feverishly over rock and shrub that it did away with shadow.
    â€œWhat did you end up doing with that creature ?” my friend asked in his South African accent. He’d been teasing me about my strange bond with what he claimed was the world’s ugliest animal. And there on that wooden bench in a crowd of festively dressed people on that perfect day, I cried.
    I cried chopping carrots, sitting on the sofa, reading, in bed. Don hugged me, gave me tissues. He promised me other dogs. He promised me his undying affection. But nothing soothed me.
    And Mercy. For a while I couldn’t touch her, couldn’t be near her. “Go away,” I commanded this dog I had rescued from the Merced pound, who had stayed loyally by my side through my mother’s death and all the tumult that followed. She’d betrayed me, acted in her own interest.
    I sulked. No one quite believed the depths of my grief. That dog? My friends laughed. The piggy one with the messed up jaw?
    She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t sick. She was happily trotting behind that coonhound in the nice house of another family.
    I remember going to a grief group in Berkeley once, and a woman talked about how she cried when she lost her dog — tears she hadn’t cried when her own mother died. The counselor explained that when a parent dies, the loss is often too large for the mind to comprehend. But when a pet dies, we understand it. We see the finality. We experience the loss in smaller, more accessible ways. We can get in touch with that grief — and it touches the shore of that larger island of loss inside us.
    So, I gave myself over to it. The loss of the puppy and everything else. I stayed in bed. I wore soft clothes. I failed to return phone calls. I stared at photos I’d taken of her. I prayed the family would call and return her to me. I kept vigilant watch over the neighborhood to see if a sibling of Hope would appear. Then finally, one day, Mercy came over to me and stood stubbornly by my leg.
    â€œLook,” she seemed to say. “Look at me.” I did. Her roundforehead and perked ears. Her tilted head. “Please,” said those eyes. “Let’s go outside.” I sat for a while, then put my hand on her head. She sat, closed her eyes, feeling it there.
    It wasn’t a softening I felt. It wasn’t exactly forgiveness. It was something else — a rising above myself. A sort of metaphysical sigh. I took her red leash out and off we went, into the desert sun.
    I got an email just the other day saying that Frida is well. She moved to Washington State after the college in New Mexico closed. I imagine her out there, delirious beneath green trees, as we continue to weather the dust of a new desert city. I imagine her curled at the feet of the child in the family, the way the child gently tugs her ears, the way that translates to Frida as love. It is not the same as death, losing Frida. It bears no relation to the way I will feel the day I lose Mercy (whom I have forgiven, now, completely). It has nothing in common with losing a mother, a grandmother, a grandfather, a friend — all losses I have suffered and some how survived. But I still have days when I long for her tiny white body in my arms, her strange, smashy face that made everything seem less serious. There are still days when I miss her, or at least the idea of her. The idea that, in the darkest moment, you can find Hope there, pawing through the street garbage. That you can pick her up and hold her. That she can, with a wag of a tail, do away with heartache and show you the way.

4.
MR. T.’S HEART

Jane Smiley
    I always suspected