Love and Horror in Grief: An Autopsychography on the Loss of a Beloved Animal Companion

Abstract

Using an autopsychographic approach as advocated by Yuan and Hickman, this article demonstrates the ways in which love and horror are implicated in one another during the experience of grief at the loss of a companion animal. The relationship between the human and the companion animal is explored through Lacan’s understanding of love premised on lack and an ethical relationship to the lack in the other. When that other dies, horror may be an intrusive emotion premised on a feeling of the uncanny with the familiar becoming unfamiliar. These experiences are then rearticulated in the context of the human–animal relationship through psychoanalytic and existential themes, arguing that the loss of such a relationship needs to be appreciated in theorizations about grief and meaning within the humanistic tradition.

The relationship between humans and companion animals has long been documented. Memes and viral videos of animals with human voice overs flood the internet. People with pets frequently refer to themselves as “mom” or “dad” and their pets as their “sons” or “daughters.” While this may seem excessive or inappropriate, those of us who bring animals into our home share as many, if not more, hours with these creatures than some of our own (human) family and friends. They become interpolated into the fabric of the family and are imbued with the characteristics of being son-like or daughter-like. Blouin (2013) emphasizes a humanistic orientation to the notion of pet-parents, explaining that pets in these situations tend to be elevated to the status of a child, with a great deal of concern and care for the animal’s well-being. It is inarguable that pets are a tremendous source of love, companionship, and, unfortunately when they pass, grief. The death of a loved dog, cat, or other companion animal brings with it many of the touchstones of grief. However, accompanying the grief can also be feelings of embarrassment or shame at mourning deeply an animal, with the assumption that such emotions and experiences should be relegated to the loss of a human companion, privileging the human–human relationship over the human–animal one.

Using an autopsychographic method, as demonstrated by Yuan and Hickman (2016), I will demonstrate how a psychoanalytic understanding of love can help appreciate more fully the human–animal relationship and the grief that accompanies its loss. Furthermore, I would like to suggest that often eluded in the literature on grief is the experience of horror, which is more fully realized when the mourner is at a loss of culturally sanctioned means of mourning, thus, complicating the meaning making needed following the loss of a loved one. In reflecting on the recent experience of losing my dog Heathcliff, I will elaborate on Lacan’s understanding of love to demonstrate the capacity for love within the human–animal relationship. Following his death, I was confronted with aspects of the grieving process that encompassed what I have come to understand as horror. In doing so, I suggest that through love we encounter the otherness of ourselves, and in grief we encounter the loss of a guidepost for our own subjectivity, resulting in moments of, or akin to, horror.

Autoethnography and Autopsychography

Autoethnography as a methodology has been used for some time to analyze, interpret, and critique cultural practices and discourses. Traditionally, it has been used as a way to understand one’s lived experience as implicated in a cultural milieu, meaning that one’s own investigations into the practices or deliberations around a certain event or encounter may serve as a greater cultural elaboration (Jones et al., 2013). Butz and Besio (2009) assert that autoethnography may help dissolve the boundaries between self and objects of study, which makes it a particularly relevant method of inquiry for those of us in the human sciences, in particular those with a humanistic ethos. Yuan and Hickman (2016) use the term autopsychography to emphasize a self-narrative premised in an investigation intrinsically rooted in the humanistic principles of change and growth. They also emphasize that within the many emerging applications and methodologies premised in self-narrative are differing connotations of the “self.” The current research employs autopsychography to consider my understanding of the self in relation, in this case in relation with an animal companion, in order to explore the relationship between love, grief, and horror.

In doing so, this autopsychography toggles between psychoanalytic and existentialist theories and concerns. While existentialism embraces a self-reflectivity naturally, psychoanalysis, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, is skeptical of such an endeavor as it assumes such work cannot get at the unconscious associations made available only in speaking to another. I do not claim to be doing self-analysis here and, instead, use the self-reflectivity advocated for in an autopsychographic method, which is then informed by Lacanian and existential notions. Existentialism provides a way of thinking through events that are deeply personal as fundamental to the human condition, while Lacanian psychoanalysis provides insight into the particularity of such phenomena. Though this may be an uncomfortable alliance, thinking through both of these theories provides an opportunity to investigate those experiences that disturb our assumptions and make us question our own desire in the relationships we have with others. The autopsychographic approach facilitates an apprehension, even an ephemeral one, of the relationship of the Other in the other. This relationship of the Other in the other will be elaborated on further with regard to Lacanian psychoanalysis. However, in elucidating the potential of using existential and psychoanalytic theories within an autopsychographic approach, this relationship can be understood as the different ways in which the universal become imbued in particular others. In the existential tradition, mortality and meaning in relation to one’s understanding of self and purpose, understood here as a form of the Other, may be realized through relationships with others, especially when confronted with their illness or death. Lacanian psychoanalytic theory then allows for a consideration of the ways this Otherness becomes grounded in our egoic identifications and projections. An autopsychographic approach allows for a dialogue between these orientations as they pertain to an experiencing subject.

Human and Animal Relationships

Many other scholars have elaborated on the ways in which animals enhance the lives of their human companions (Knight & Edwards, 2008; McCarthy, 2016; Power, 2008; Wood et al., 2005). Such research typically focuses on the evolutionary reasoning behind human–animal relationships, or the ways in which animals can be productive in the human world, such as therapy dogs. This is not to say that such research is not pertinent or illuminating. However, such research typically maintains an object-oriented stance toward the animal(s) in question, making them, and by default, the humans in relation to them, a knowable object. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze noted this, as well as Jean Baudrillard. Schuster (2016) explains that Deleuze preferred cats to dogs because they resisted our attempts to territorialize them with our language and remained separate to us. Dogs, instead, are brought stubbornly and haphazardly into language, in which a demand is made of them that they could never respond to. Similarly, Baudrillard (1981) derides humans for what it has done to animals, arguing that in domesticating them, we have psychologized them, ripped them from their freedom and condemned them to entertain us.

Such arguments are not without their merit, but they too claim a certain knowledge on the part of the human subject. That is, they assume a conscious intention on the part of the human subject—one that manipulates others and its environment for a knowable means. This is of course true in many circumstances, especially with animals, but it trivializes all human–animal relationships for both parties. Research has also demonstrated the physical and mental health benefits of having a relationship with an animal (Allen et al., 2002; Beetz et al., 2012; Duvall Antonacopoulos, 2017; Headey, 1998). It is also important to note that animals grow and learn in relation to their human companions. Research has demonstrated that dogs are keen observers of our faces and that they frequently look to our facial reactions for information, reassurance, and guidance (Horowitz, 2009). Even more illuminating, Nagasawa et al. (2015) suggest that mutual gaze, a behavior that typically occurs between mother and child during bonding, also occurs between dogs and their owners. Furthermore, writers like Haraway (2003, 2008) and Satma and Huopalainen (2018) consider the interdependency we have with animals, especially companion animals, and emphasize a value for the alterity of the other we are in relation with, while also considering the dynamics of a relationship in which communication has been barred. In her work on companion species, Haraway advocates for ridding ourselves of the human–animal distinction, and thereby, the nature–culture one as well. She argues that our irreducible otherness to each other—in the case of this article, woman and dog—should not be mistaken for a complete separation, as once a relationship is established, one is always constituted by the other. Similarly, Morley and Fook (2005) suggest that much of the knowledge produced about the relationship animals have to humans seems to understand animals as a substitute for another human relationship, such as a child or a partner, as in the case of Veevers’s (1985) research and, thus, fails to appreciate the species to species dynamic and significance for all involved.

Heathcliff

I adopted Heathcliff from the humane society in St. Catharines, Ontario. It had been my intention to adopt a dog, named Fuzzy, who I had seen on the website, and who I vowed to rename Heathcliff, after Emily Bronte’s brooding protagonist. He was a lab mix, mild mannered, good with children and cats, a stark contrast to his namesake, but I figured that would not matter. I grew up with a dog, but this would be my first dog that was my very own. The decision to adopt came after a dramatic life transition, which left me living alone in a city more than 1,000 km from my home and family. When I got to the shelter, Fuzzy was on his way out with his new family with children gloating over him. I decided to look at what dogs were left and went into the kennels where I was assaulted with barks, yips and yelps, and the pungent smell of urine. This is not the locale I was expecting to fall in love, but in the back right corner being otherwise ignored by all of the families visiting, was a 5-year-old, 80 lb Black Lab mix, who was found as a stray. He was sitting in the back of his cage, not looking at anyone. I pitied him and sat on the floor beside the cage. He cautiously came over to me, not looking at me the whole time, and sat parallel to the cage door, letting the fur from his neck poke through so I could pet him. I glanced up at the sheet on his cage to see what his name was. His name was Heathcliff (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Heathcliff, age 10, with stuffed penguin toy.

This is at least how I remember it. I know that he was already Heathcliff and I know that he was cautious. I do not know if he was actually being ignored, but it has become important for my story of Heathcliff. More important, it came to inform our relationship. He was for me, and quickly became of me. I gave him a voice and a personality, as we do with the animals we take in to our homes. I attributed thoughts and feelings to him that exemplify projection. In doing so, what was most intimate in myself came to manifest in this curly coated beast always beside me. Similarly, I found myself thinking through him and his needs. I came to resent the sun on sunny days because it would beat down on his black fur, and I would get anxious when dark clouds rolled in because it could mean thunder, which would mean whole-body, and by default whole-bed, vibrating from fear. The organization of my apartment was based on an internalized blueprint of what he would eat and where he would roam, with the top of my fridge now home to all forms of bread in an attempt to prolong their existence. Walking into another’s home was just as overwhelming for me as it was for my man-resistant companion, and many of my friends and associates became reconceptualized based on their height and depth of voice. Spaces became reterritorialized, in which I developed a vast knowledge of where the butter was kept in a number of my friends’ houses and if they kept their garbage locked up or out in the open for prying noses.

Heathcliff’s interests and concerns became intrinsic to me soon after I adopted him, and like many people, I spoke to him and pretended he spoke back. I had the distinct impression that he understood me, perhaps not the meaning of the words, but that I was trying to communicate with him. As a result, being a “dog person” became central to my identity, not only because pictures of his face were on my phone, computer, walls of my home and office, but also because I always thought of myself in relation to him. When I met who would become my husband, I was wary of him because I knew Heathcliff would be unsure of him. However, when they met and Heathcliff barked and snarled at him, my future husband scooped up all 80 lb of Heathcliff into his arms, I saw Heathcliff relax and wag his tail and I in turn fell a little more in love with both of them. It was in being with Heathcliff that potentialities were revealed to me, and as a result, my entire sense of self was reconstructed to emphasize this being-with my dog.

What Lacan’s Theory of Love Can Tell Us About Grief

In Seminar XX on love and female sexuality, Lacan (2015) famously proclaims, “Love is to give what you do not have to someone who does not want it” (p. 34). In saying this, Lacan argues against the commonly touted couple that completes one another, in which a harmonious relationship between the sexes occurs. Sex, for Lacan, is not a biological category but an ontological and epistemological one and refers to where one finds oneself in relation to language. The person of affection then must be understood as inherently unable to fulfill all our desires and fantasies about what our love object is and could be, and vice versa, as we could never entirely embody perfectly that which our partner desires. It would be fair to say that this understanding of love is inherently narcissistic, though reducing it to only that would be to disregard what Lacan is implying about what we must do in a loving relationship. For a relationship to work, and here I would like to extend the notion of relationship to the human–animal one as well, one has to recognize the otherness of the other and their irreducibility to the status of object. The narcissism that manifests in love then should be understood as a deep concern about one’s own desires, which according to Lacan are the desires of the Other, or the Other of the unconscious that one is always in dialogue. Fundamental to this notion of love is an understanding of one’s own desires, as well as respect for the dignity of the other person or love object. Failure to do so would result in not only a relationship in which both parties are frustrated, but that frustration is misunderstood as something to be overcome via fixing or changing the other. For Lacan, this “fixing” would amount to attempting to nullify the desire of the other person, a form of subjective smothering.

For the human–animal relationship, this is particularly difficult. Animals have become objectified and commodified in both the literal and figurative sense. We wear them and eat them, but we also purchase animals from breeders so that we can have a particular breed or crossbreeds that we feel speaks to an aspect of our identity or social status (Maher & Pierpoint, 2011). In many ways, we are guilty of negating the lifeworld of the animal. To some extent, our attempts at training them to be more suitable, whether it be to walk on the leash without pulling or to shake paw for a treat neuters some of the drives inherent in the animal. However, those who form a bond with an animal, and in this case I will refer specifically to dogs, also have an intimate understanding of the otherness of their love object, as well as the cooperation needed from both parties to have a satisfying disjunctive relationship. In fact, it is through loving a dog that one can come to understand what it means to love another in the Lacanian sense. In the days after I adopted Heathcliff, I was confronted with the very real fear of having a rather large foreign animal living in my home, one that came with a warning on his paperwork that he may not be entirely friendly all of the time. This fear was exacerbated by the fact that I was supposed to give him very large pills following his neutering. He was too smart for the peanut butter or cheese tricks and after googling and talking with family members all day, I sat beside him on the floor and begged him to trust me. With that, I pried open his jaw and stuck my hand to the very back of his throat and dropped the pills down his throat, massaging them down. In return, he licked my face. In that moment, I had to trust him and had no way of communicating to him that he could do the same. Being bitten was worth his health, and apparently, I was deemed trustworthy. These moments with Heathcliff helped me learn that love was not consuming the other, guiding or training him to be more manageable and align with how I decided our lives were going to be but, rather, recognizing and appreciating him in his otherness.

Lacan (2007) suggests that “love creates its object from what is lacking in reality” (p. 439). That is, the object of our love is imbued with significance based on what we are lacking from our own lives. This is why the person, or dog, can never truly live up to the ideal that love has created out of him or her. However, this is not as important as the repetitive encounter of the conditions of love for the person to whom the object is dear. Repetition compulsion is typically referred to as a frustrating game in which the neurotic frequently returns to his or her object of desire only to be disappointed. This is of course true and is most easily demonstrated in the case of the addict returning to his or her drug of choice, only to be frustrated that it does not produce the longed-for effect. However, in the case of love, because the loved one is both other and more you than you in that it has been imbued with an unconscious desire of which one knows little about, an opportunity for an ethical relationship emerges.

Badiou (2009) has a similar notion of love to Lacan, suggesting that one ought to understand love as an event rather than a pairing of souls. Finding one’s matching partner or soul mate dates back to The Symposium. Aristophanes suggests that humans were made of both male and female halves, but because they were too powerful and unruly, Zeus split them in two, resulting in humans spending their lives desperately in search of their other half. In contrast, Lacan and Badiou’s understanding of love allows for an understanding of love that goes beyond an idealistic pairing of souls and instead understands it as a disruption that confronts us with our own humanity and intrinsic otherness to the other as well. It also allows for a theory of love that extends beyond anthropocentric articulations and can speak to the deep emotions that are present in a human–animal relationship. In understanding love as an event as Badiou (2009) does, love seemingly comes from nowhere and yet changes everything. He states,

I think . . . that love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply an encounter, a trifle, you learn that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity. And you can even be tested and suffer in the process . . . love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potential universality, and is thus central to philosophy, as Plato was the first to intuit. (pp. 16, 17)

In searching for one’s soul mate or other half, one must have a notion of who or what one is, which for psychoanalytic thinkers is problematic, as what is most intimate about ourselves is unconscious and thus hidden. It begins with an assumption of knowledge, whereas the Lacanian–Badiouian conceptualization understands love as revealing something to ourselves that reterritorializes our world and relationships. It is from this perspective of love that the potential in a human–animal relationship is revealed. In its complete alterity, a dog (or other companion animal) has no awareness of their owner’s ego, imagined or otherwise, and the dog’s imagined ego tends to be glaring projections on the part of the owner. What is present in the human–animal relationship are two distinct and different bodies acting on one another in a space that, though accustomed to the human, now also considers the animal. When confronted with such alterity, especially one that intrudes on one’s space and time, hostility and aggression can arise. George (2016) and Owens and Swales (2019) discuss this intrusion through a Lacanian analysis of racism and xenophobia. However, to respond to that intrusion with love is to enact an ethics of love, and inevitably, care. This becomes particularly pertinent when euthanasia of the animal is concerned, as demonstrated below.

Saying Goodbye

One day after Valentine’s day and about 1 month before the whole world was bonded through a shared grief from COVID-19, I said goodbye to Heathcliff. A few weeks prior, I noticed he had started slowing down on his walks and no longer followed me up the stairs. Not being able to handle the thought of him not being able to come to bed with us, my husband and I moved our king-size mattress into the living room. We took him to the veterinarian and she ran some tests. She noted that he was demonstrating some early signs of a neurological impairment, explaining that it could be a neurological disease, but also with these “big guys” cancer could be hiding in the spinal cord. However, he was not losing weight and was otherwise happy, so she gave him some anti-inflammatories and we went home and built a ramp and made plans for a cart. He completely rebounded for a few weeks. He was following me around the house again, but something cautioned me from moving our bed back upstairs. One day in early February, I noticed the slightest limp in his back leg. Later, when we took him to the park and he fumbled getting out of the car, the limp became pronounced. When I got him home, I noticed that his right hip was swollen. Thinking that he must have had injured himself, I told the vet and she had me bring him back in for some more tests. This time she gave him some pain medication as well. By the next day, he was barely able to get up on his own and the day after that, Friday, February 14th, my husband and I were carrying him everywhere, his back legs completely unusable. The next day, we talked to the vet and learned that he had a tumor that had seemingly grown overnight and that neither surgery nor amputation would be possible. We gave him a steak and some vanilla ice cream, and then we held him while he went to sleep.

Horror and Grief

In the weeks and months following the death of my dog, I cycled through many of the emotions I would typically associate with grief. Mourning brings with it anger, guilt, apathy, and pain. I felt a deep sense of injustice that the thing I loved so dearly would be taken from me, though knowing the moment I adopted him that he would likely die in 5 to 10 years. As anyone who has grieved knows, rational thought is frequently useless in such moments. I also felt a substantial amount of embarrassment because he was “just a dog.” I read a number of articles and watched videos on grief, desperately hoping there was a quick fix. I felt ashamed that these articles and videos were written by people who had lost their spouses or parents and that I did not have a right to have their words resonate with me. However, the emotion that I was most surprised by, which continues to creep into my waking routine, was horror. As a horror movie fan, I am intimately familiar with the emotional and corporeal experiences that a good horror movie elicits, and I was surprised to find these became woven into the sadness of my grieving.

Horror, as being used here, should be understood as a disruption in meaning that extends to one’s sense of self, body, and social world. Freud (1919) utilizes the term uncanny to denote the unfamiliar familiar, or that which has been repressed returning, albeit disguised to the subject. Incorporating an existentialist perspective, Santilli (2007) suggests that the uncanny can be understood in light of Heideggerian philosophy as “the disturbing absence of permanence, solidity, and naturalness in our everyday existence” (p. 180). Similarly, Schneider (1993) suggests that horror arises out of a confrontation with infinity in the form of boundless sensation. Take an everyday experience and deviate substantially enough, he goes on, and one could produce horror. Boundless sensation, such as seeing microscopic details on a fly or hearing the cacophony of sounds one is embedded in would demand endless attunement and categorization. Infinity evokes horror because “the more a thing differs, the less manageable it becomes; the less manageable it becomes, the greater its linkage to extremity, obscurity, and ultimately, endlessness” (Schneider, 1993, p. 7). Each of these elaborations suggests that horror occurs in the realm of the familiar and destabilizes our illusion of ontological security. Lacan explains that this radical alterity without differentiation is what undergirds our attempts to make meaning through language and identifications. Experience itself is cut and truncated in order to manage, but there is always a threat of a reemergence of what Lacan refers to as the Real, or Schneider’s understanding of infinity.

When a loved one dies, especially one who shared a substantial amount of time and space with the griever, the world and the self may look the same, but a fundamental disruption has altered the nature of reality. Just as Badiou speaks of love as an event that changes the course of reality, the death of a loved one too alters the ways in which one experiences his or her reality. In the moments that grief intrudes on one’s lived experience, the familiar can take on an ominous feel. I was confined to my house, as many were during COVID-19, and had the distinct impression that something was not right. I woke up, stretching my legs out to try and pet him with my foot, or reach my hand out to run it through his curls while watching a film, only to be harshly flung into an uncanny experience of my space. Each time, the experience was met with heart palpitations, clenching stomach, and a loss of breath before a wave of sadness came over me. It became those experiences of horror, not the sadness, that I came to dread. Levinas (1987) speaks of the “il y a” (p. 46), or the awareness of the nothingness, “il y a” translating to “there is.” He states, “This absence of everything returns as a presence, as the place where the bottom dropped out of everything, an atmospheric density, a plentitude of the void, or the murmur of silence (Levinas, 1987, p. 46). O’Gwin (2017) gives the example of George Romaro’s film Night of the Living Dead to demonstrate this concept, stating that the horror of the film is that humanity is constantly under siege by the reanimated dead. Death itself is not the horror, but rather the presence of an absence. Horror during the grieving process occurs when this absence intrudes into the routine of daily life, and while one may desperately want to escape it, there is no “it” to escape.

One of the reasons for this experience of horror in grief may stem from the clash between social norms and one’s inclination to grieve in distinct and personal ways. In her work on mourning and grief, Butler (2004) illustrates how social norms impinge on grief, restricting it from manifesting in ways that may be conducive to the person suffering. Redmalm (2015) summarizes her argument, claiming that norms tend to intrude or correct one or more of the following contingencies of grief: the experience that the loved one was irreplaceable, that grief is transformative and can be unpredictable in its expression, and finally, that the loss of a loved one is always a loss of a body and, therefore, grief is always an experience located in the body. Redmalm uses these claims to investigate the grief experienced by pet owners over the loss of their pets and notes that there is also some ambivalence expressed about their ability to completely grieve. The death of an animal fails to be properly legitimized in 20th-century American society, and though there are people and services who may cater to the grieving pet owner, it largely goes unrecognized as a distinct and traumatic loss, what Stewart et al. (1989) refer to as “disenfranchised grief.” While it is custom to partake in memorial and burial rituals to honor the dead, allowing family and friends to stitch together a life via story, similar practices are not the norm, or not entertained as such, for the loss of a companion animal. Discourses of irreplaceability, unpredictability, and embodied loss are typically reserved for the loss of a human companion and as such can sometimes construct the loss of an animal companion as ungrievable, which may then exacerbate that feeling.

If then, according to the psychoanalytic perspective, in love we come to invest in the other a portion of ourselves, and then we lose that person/portion of ourselves, we can begin to understand how this may disturb our subjective foundations. This can be seen in many of the hallmarks of grief in which the self or the ego no longer functions as it once had, such as withdrawing socially, refusing to eat or shower, self-harm, such as drinking or binge eating, or a general loss of pleasure. While Heidegger (2008) states that “the dying of Others is not something which we experience in a genuine sense; at most, we are always just ‘there alongside’” (p. 282), the actions of the grieving person constitute a form of subjective death. This death can be understood through Lacan’s (1997) term extimate, which he understood as that what is most intimate to ourselves is intricately bound to the other. Pavón-Cuéllar (2014) explains that the extimate is an external entity that becomes “the navel, the source of this world, as it is for us” (p. 662).

If the investment of time and energy into maintaining the self helps to stave off this expanse of nothingness that the aforementioned thinkers discussed, and the social norms governing the grief of companion animals is even less adequate than those associated with human death, it is understandable that there may be an experience emblematic of horror. In confronting the boundlessness that death evokes, it does not matter if the initial loss is a person or animal. Rather, it is the ways in which the subjects involved constituted one another and how the remaining subject comes to be confronted with meaninglessness that then evokes horror. As Edleglass (2006) states,

Suffering is a rupture and disturbance of meaning because it suffocates the subject and destroys the capacity for systematically assimilating the world. Pain isolates itself in consciousness, overwhelming consciousness with its insistence. Suffering, then, is an absurdity, “an absurdity breaking out on the ground of signification.” (p. 43)

Death of a loved one, in this case a beloved 11-year-old Lab mix, strikes us as absurd because of its inability to be accounted for in language. Unlike a horror movie, this experience of horror cannot be contained with an insistence “this is just a movie.” As Levinas aptly noted, there is only there is.

After Heathcliff

A few days after we said goodbye, my husband and I packed up Heathcliff’s bin of gently used toys and took them to the humane society. While there, I decided I wanted to visit with the dogs there, curious how I would feel about another dog so soon. I knew there would be no replacing Heathcliff, but I also desperately missed the lack of dog activities in my life. The abrupt shift was harsh and I resented the amount of time I had to myself. Mingling with the dogs, most of them strays, some of them underweight, all of them dirty, gave me the bit of reprieve from grief I was looking for. Nine days after losing Heathcliff, my husband and I brought home a 1.5-year-old Black Mouth Cur who we named Dora, after Freud’s infamous patient. Some days I think it was too soon and others I am glad for the frivolity and nonsense that only a dog can bring. Bringing Dora home added to the uncanny feeling—she was a dog, but not my dog. She behaved like him, yet was radically different. However, it has been the awareness of her otherness to him, to what was so intimate to me, that has reminded me the challenge that love offers—to be with an other in their otherness and allow yourself to be exposed to the potential to create new ways of becoming with this other.