Ara is a Constellation in the Southern Hemisphere

My dog, Ara, died in January and one of the many indignities of pet grief that I was not prepared for is how it ruined my relationship with small, random noises. The little sounds in my apartment that I would have attributed to her had no known cause after she died.

I’d be sitting and hear a paper bag shift or a click somewhere near the oven that normally would be my dog walking around or laying and stretching her foot into my recycling. She was not there with me, and suddenly every sound was a pop quiz I had to answer alone, because for the first time I was truly, completely alone. My options were: MOUSE or GHOST. As much as I prefer the latter, my apartment is not haunted (my last one was, though) so I had to just believe the sounds were auditory hallucinations or, like, I don’t know, air?

A few weeks after she died I dreamt I was in my childhood home, which is always my setup for a nightmare, and I found a little white field mouse in my dad’s office. I trapped her in a mouse-sized tunnel with some peanut butter and put her in my purse and took her to an emergency vet.

This was the same emergency vet I once visited with Ara after she ate an entire box of chocolate laxatives that my mom gave me for a trip to Peru because she was worried the elevation would constipate me (it did) and I kept thinking, I’ve only had this dog for a few months, and I’ve killed her. She was fine, the vet gave her hydrogen peroxide to induce vomiting and she puked out the entire bar and some of the wrapper. I would administer hydrogen peroxide to her in place of an emergency vet in the years following that incident as she managed on several more occasions to get into chocolate, which she loved. She loved it so much and it was poison to her.

When the vet in my dream pulled the mouse out of the trap the mouse had grown to the size of or had become a guinea pig, which in the dream realm meant that the mouse was pregnant.

You saved her life!

I preemptively treat my home with exterminating pesticides to deter any visitors. The older I get the harder it becomes for me to stomach killing anything, because what right do I have to decide when even a fly’s life ends?

Ara was rescued from a kill shelter in Kentucky where she was going to be euthanized because she was pregnant. She had a litter of the weirdest looking puppies I’ve ever seen and then came to my mom and I when I was a senior in high school. The day she was dropped off to us by her foster mom my face was painted like the monkey from The Lion King for a Spanish project. We were told that she had bandages on from a surgery that she’d gotten to have her extra toes removed and I was immediately obsessed with her.

She understood full sentences. I think she actually preferred to be spoken to in full, proper English. I never trained her. She was such a stray dog when she was young, and because she was so small she was able to wriggle under our fence and run away, which she did often while I was at school and I came home to her missing many times. One awful day she ran away in a huge thunderstorm, and my mom and I drove around looking for her for hours. When we got home she was waiting for us by our front door. I remember taking her face in my hands and saying, directly, like I was reasoning with both God and the person trapped in her body, that her running away was really scary to me and that I needed her to stop. She never ran away ever again after that. In fact, she had perfect recall. She was the weirdest dog I have ever met and I’m still coming to terms with the fact that I’ll never know a weirder dog.

I named her Ara, short for Arabella, which is an Arctic Monkeys song that I chose because I was, again, seventeen when I named her. A few years ago I was at a coffee shop and there was a small card laying haphazardly on a shelf next to the line that was part of a larger deck of cards on constellations. The card that was out was for the constellation “Ara”, a constellation in the southern hemisphere that represents the altar where the Greek gods first made offerings and formed an alliance to defeat the Titans. Late last year, my friend and I were talking about reincarnation, and she said that she’d read a theory that members of our “soul family” can join us on earth in the form of a pet to help us through a particularly difficult period of our lives.

During the last year of her life, there were days I thought she was inches from death and some where she seemed fine; she got second, third, fourth winds and she’d run up a hill or actually eat her food or get zoomies when I got home from work. Those days I thought: maybe I am wrong. Maybe she is fine and I am paranoid and lazy, even! Maybe she hears me thinking about The End and is going to write me out of her will.

Caring for a sick senior pet is really hard and I don’t wish it on anyone, because in a lot of ways the responsibility is a burden. My days revolved around her and each day we seemed to have less fun than the last.

In July of last year, her fur stopped shedding properly, so I had to start shaving her down into a little velveteen version of herself. She kind of looked like a taxidermied dog that got magicked back to life. She stopped playing, she stopped caring about food, she shrank and atrophied until one morning in January she couldn’t hold herself up without shaking.

She died while her head rested in my hands on January 2nd. The tears I cried were despondent tears of an unfamiliar emptiness that I knew was coming and had been dreading for years. What I did not anticipate is the guilt I felt. I couldn’t help but feel like I killed her, even though I knew I didn’t and everyone said I didn’t.

Today is my first birthday since my seventeenth that I’m spending without Ara. For the first time I am looking at the rest of my life, knowing it may be very long and that she won’t be here for any of it. I stopped feeling like I killed her a month or so after she died – after she came through in a psychic reading and told me to, in so many words, get a grip – and now when I cry I cry from a place I’ve never cried before.

Tears, to me, used to mean something was wrong, and that I was crying because there was no way to make it right. Tears can actually be neutral. I lost my dog, but I didn’t really, because she’s just not concentrated into a little body anymore. She’s everywhere now. I didn’t do anything wrong or bad or cruel, I didn’t have a dog that loved me endlessly who got nothing in return. I was actually a really good dog parent, and I’m proud of how good of a dog parent I was. I had a dog who came to me earth-side to teach me about a familial, unconditional love which I had not yet experienced at seventeen. Now that I know it I can recognize it when it shows up again. She was the closest I have ever been to another being. When I cry as of late, they’re just tears. They’re not pouring out from a well of despair, or filled with remorse or regret. My tears for her are from an endless source, they’re a body of water that holds our big love for each other.

I’ve recently decided to just keep assuming any unidentifiable sounds are her, as if they are little stretches she’s doing posthumously. I’m certain she’s just messing with me from the other side.