I just found some of Autumn’s nail clippers and felt a pang at the thought that these clippers could survive, but my dog didn’t.  It seems unfair somehow, that this meaningless hunk of plastic and metal gets to be here and she does not. It’s such a strange feeling. I wonder if some of humanity’s desire to accumulate things comes from some underlying desire to have something that remains when we are no longer here.

My first inclination upon seeing the clippers was that I wanted to toss them in the trash; they are old and dull. Then I remembered that I had used them on Autumn, that they are one of the few things remaining that touched her, and I left them in the bag in the cupboard. It is the same with the last dish from which she drank water. The dish was a glass bowl from the kitchen where I rented office space. I had to take Autumn with me to work the day she died. An unpleasant consequence of working for oneself is that there is no one to take over when you have people coming in to see you on the day you awaken to your dog lying in a pool of neon-green ooze flowing from her bottom. I took her to work with me and laid her on a blanket beside my desk. I brought her water in that glass dish from the kitchen. She took some small sips from it. The next day when I returned, after Autumn was gone and her body buried in my friend’s yard 80 miles south of me, I saw that bowl and sobbed silently, tears running down my cheeks in rivulets. I brought the bowl home and I’ve kept it ever since, boxed along with other keepsakes, carried from one edge of the continent to the other when I moved to New York and then back to Oregon. Autumn’s tongue caressed that bowl; I can’t let it go even though it isn’t her, doesn’t even represent her. It’s just something else that got to touch her, something that may carry a molecule of her, and if that’s all I get, I’ll take it.