Part 2: My Golden Retriever Brings Me Something Different Every Morning — I Thought It Was Grief. The Notebook Said Otherwise.
Walter was a quiet man.
He worked for the Buncombe County water authority for thirty-four years and came home smelling like chlorine and pencil shavings every single night of those years. He read paperbacks. He kept a small notebook in the chest pocket of every shirt he owned. He drank his coffee black, with one piece of toast, dry, no jam, no butter, every morning of our marriage.
He talked to Denise more than he talked to most people.
Not loud talk. Not the silly voice some men use with dogs. He would sit on the back step in the evening with a beer he barely drank and he would tell her things — about his father, about the war he was just young enough to miss, about Helen, our daughter, who died in 1991 when she was nineteen years old in a car on Interstate 26 and after which Walter and I stopped saying her name out loud for almost two years.
Denise would put her head on his knee and listen.
She did the same thing she does to me now.
There was one thing about Walter and Denise I never understood. From the time she was about six years old, Walter used to do these strange little training sessions with her in the garage. He would close the door so I couldn’t see. He would be in there twenty, thirty minutes at a time, two or three afternoons a week.
When I asked what they were doing, he’d say, “She’s learning her job.”
I asked what her job was. He said, “Hopefully nothing for a long time.”
I let it go. Walter was allowed to have a thing.
He also kept a small leather notebook in the drawer of his nightstand. Not the work notebooks. A different one. Older. Brown leather, soft and split at the spine, with a thin rubber band around it. I had seen it for years without thinking about it. I assumed it was his fishing log. I never opened it.
I should tell you one more thing about Walter, because it matters later.
Walter was sick for thirteen months before he died.
He knew, the whole thirteen months, what was coming.
I did not understand, until last Thursday, what he had been doing with that time.
The first month after Walter died, I did the things you are supposed to do.
I called the people you have to call. I sat through a service at the funeral home on Patton Avenue that I remember almost nothing about. I accepted casseroles from women I had known for forty years and could not, in the moment, remember the names of. I let our son Daniel fly in from Tacoma and sleep in the guest room for eight days and I let him leave without telling him I was not all right.
Daniel calls every Sunday at four p.m. He asks how I am. I say I’m doing all right.
He does not believe me.
He is correct not to believe me.
For the first three weeks I did not open the curtains in the front room. I stopped reading my mail. The grocery delivery from Ingles started coming every Wednesday because Daniel set it up online and I did not know how to cancel it and also did not have the energy to figure out how.
I stopped sleeping in the bed.
I slept in the armchair in the living room with an afghan over my legs and the television on mute. Denise would stand in the bedroom doorway each night and look at me and then go and lie on Walter’s side of the bed by herself.
That was the second week.
The third week was when she started.
The first morning she brought me the reading glasses, I was in the armchair. She came down the hall and she dropped them on the afghan over my lap and she sat at my feet and she waited.
I thought she was confused. I thought maybe she had forgotten he was gone and was bringing his things to him.
I cried for the first time since the funeral. I cried for forty minutes with a twelve-year-old Golden Retriever staring at me with the patience of somebody who had all the time in the world.
The second morning it was the slipper. I cried less.
The third morning it was a paperback he had been reading — Tony Hillerman, with a bookmark still on page 184.
By the second week of it, I was sleeping in the bed again. Not well. But in the bed.
By the third week, I was opening the curtains in the morning to see what she had brought before I’d had my coffee.
By the fourth week, she had developed a system. She would not bring the same item twice. She had — and this is something I did not understand until later — chosen exactly forty-one items. She knew which ones she had already used. I do not know how she knew.
She brought me the cap on day eleven. Walter’s pocket comb on day fifteen. His pencil — the carpenter’s pencil he used to keep behind his ear — on day twenty-two. On day thirty, she brought a small wooden bird he had carved for me on our thirtieth anniversary, which had been on the shelf in his closet for as long as I could remember.
On day thirty-four, she brought me a photograph.
It was a photograph of Helen.
She had pulled it from the drawer of Walter’s dresser, where he had kept three pictures of our daughter that he could not bear to display but also could not bear to put away.
I sat on the edge of the bed holding that photograph and the dog put her chin on my knee and that morning I did not cry.
That morning I said Helen’s name out loud for the first time in eleven years.
I want to tell you about the fortieth morning.
The fortieth morning was last Wednesday.
Denise came down the hall at five forty-two — she does it at five forty-two, every morning, I do not know how, the kitchen clock and the bedroom clock both confirm it — and she climbed onto the bed and placed something small and metal on my pillow.
It was Walter’s wedding ring.
I sat up in the dark and I picked it up and I held it in my palm and I did not know it was possible to feel both broken and held at the same time.
Walter had taken his ring off the last six weeks of his life because his hands had swelled and it hurt. I had put it in the small ceramic dish on top of his dresser. The dish was four feet off the ground.
The dog was four feet long, nose to tail, and she could not reach it without putting her front paws on the dresser.
She had put her front paws on the dresser. There were two small scratches in the wood I had not noticed before.
I held the ring and I cried in a way I had not cried since the day Walter died. I cried like something was unlocking. I cried until Denise crawled into my lap, all sixty-eight pounds of her, like she used to do when she was a puppy.
I sat there in the early dark for a long time with that ring in my hand.
I thought, that’s it. That was the last one. The hardest one. We made it through.
I thought she was telling me he was at peace.
I was wrong about what she was telling me.
She was almost done with her list.
On Thursday morning — the day after the ring — Denise did not bring me anything.
She lay at the foot of the bed and she watched me. She did not move when I got up. She did not follow me to the kitchen.
I went back into the bedroom and I sat on Walter’s side of the bed and I asked her, like a fool, what was wrong.
She got up. She walked to Walter’s nightstand. She put her nose against the drawer.
I had not opened that drawer in eleven months.
I opened it.
Inside was the brown leather notebook with the rubber band around it. I took it out. I sat down on the bed. I slid the rubber band off.
The first page was dated August 14th, 2023. Thirteen months before Walter died.
It said, at the top, in Walter’s handwriting:
FOR DENISE. AFTER.
Below that, a list.
Forty-one items.
Numbered.
In order.
Reading glasses. Left slipper. The Tony Hillerman from the nightstand. The cap from VFW Post 891. The carpenter’s pencil. The pocket comb. The wooden bird. The photograph of Helen.
The list went on. Down the page. Onto the next page. Forty items I recognized. Each one of them was an item the dog had brought to me, in order, since the third week after Walter died.
The forty-first item, at the bottom of the second page, was:
My wedding ring.
I sat in our bed on a Thursday morning with my dead husband’s twelve-year-old Golden Retriever lying across my feet, and I understood what he had been doing in the garage for the last six years of his life.
He had been training her.
He had been training her for the time he knew was coming. He had picked forty-one objects from his life — objects that meant something, objects that had weight — and he had taught her to find them, to identify them, to keep them in some order in her head, and to bring them to me, one by one, on every morning of the year I was going to want to die.
He had not told me. He had not asked me. He had not given me a choice.
He had given me forty-one mornings.
I read the rest of the notebook in the parking lot of the Ingles on Merrimon, because I could not stay in the house. I drove there with the notebook in the passenger seat and Denise in the back seat watching me in the rearview mirror.
The middle of the notebook was instructions for her. Commands he had taught her. Where each item was kept. What to do if I did not get out of bed by seven. What to do if I cried for more than twenty minutes. What to do if I did not eat. (Bring her the bowl from the back of the bottom cabinet. The blue one. She used it when Helen was small.)
I had not known he remembered the blue bowl.
The last fifteen pages of the notebook were not instructions. They were letters. Walter’s letters. To me. One for each of the days he thought I would need to be reminded of something.
He wrote about the morning we got married, in 1968, at the courthouse in Buncombe County, with my mother in her good dress.
He wrote about the day Helen was born.
He wrote about the day Helen died.
He wrote about a fight we had in 1979 that I had forgotten and he had not.
He wrote about the night I had a miscarriage in 1972 that I had never spoken about to anyone, including him, for fifty-one years. He had known. He had always known. He had let me hold it in private because he understood I needed to.
On the last page of the notebook, in Walter’s small, careful handwriting:
Eleanor. If she has brought you the ring, you have made it through the first part. The hard part. I am sorry I could not stay. I taught her everything I could. Please let her be the dog now. Please let yourself be alive. I will see you when you are old.
— W.
I sat in the Ingles parking lot for an hour and forty minutes and Denise lay across the front seat with her head in my lap.
She had done her job.
It has been six days since I found the notebook.
Denise does not bring me anything in the morning anymore. The list is done. She climbs onto the bed at five forty-two — still five forty-two, still on the minute — and she lies down beside me and she waits for me to get up.
I have started something new.
Every night before I go to bed, I take one thing out of Walter’s closet or off his side of the bathroom counter, and I set it on the kitchen table.
In the morning I take it back.
I do not know why I do this.
I think I am giving her the choice, now, of what to bring me. I think I am asking her to keep choosing. I think I am pretending Walter is still in the garage on Tuesdays, teaching her one more thing.
On Sunday I called Daniel at four p.m. before he could call me.
He said, “Mom. You called me.”
I said, “I want to come see you in Tacoma.”
He was quiet. Then he said, “When?”
I said, “After Christmas. I want to bring Denise. She’s never seen the ocean.”
He cried first. He has always been the one to cry first.
The grocery delivery from Ingles still comes every Wednesday. I have not canceled it. But I have started cooking again, on Sunday nights, the things Walter used to like — pork chops with applesauce, the green bean casserole his mother made, a sheet of cornbread.
I make enough for two.
I eat half. I put the rest in the small plastic container on the second shelf of the refrigerator.
In the morning I share it with the dog.
Walter, if you can hear me — and I have decided you can — I want you to know I saw the scratches on your dresser.
I saw what she did to get the ring.
I saw what you did to get me out of bed.
You were a quiet man and you loved me in a quiet way and I did not always know what to do with so much quiet.
Now I do.
I will see you when I am old.
Denise is asleep beside me.
I am going to let her keep choosing.
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