Grief is a weight that you carry

Sarah came home for the last time yesterday. The vet called Hal at home, so he got the thankless job of going to fetch the box from the crematorium. When I got home it was waiting on the couch, on the side where Sarah would often lie. You don't put your dog on the mantel, after all. It was just an anonymous brown cardboard box, about the size that you might get a book from Amazon in.

Last week I had observed to Hal that it didn't seem quite right that it costs $130 to have someone kill your dog for you, but it then costs another $190 to get the dog back. That's the upcharge if you want single cremation so that you can get the remains back. I was imagining we'd just get a heavy-duty plastic bag of ashes in the box. I was wrong about that.

I guess I didn't count on the sort of person who usually wants their pet's ashes.

Inside the cardboard box was a much smaller wooden one, about the size of a cigar box. The inner box was cherry-stained softwood -- pine perhaps -- with a brass catch, and a small brass plaque on top that just says "Sarah" on it. Also in the cardboard box was a little bubble wrap envelope with a white clay medallion in it. The medallion looks a bit like a child's grade school art project: about the size of the top of a can of soup, it's a rather imperfectly smooth and slightly blobby disc that has a ribbon run through the top, and Sarah's name hand stamped along the bottom edge, and in the middle, somewhat smudged and spread too wide for nature, is a paw print. I guess it's the pet equivalent of a death mask -- they must take a final paw print before they cremate the body.

The paw print looks wrong -- too round, too shallow. It doesn't have the impression from her claws at all, just the paw pads, and it's much too broad relative to its height, like the tech rolled the paw rather laboriously from side to side to get an impression. But still, when I put my fingertip into the little depression made by Sarah's paw pad, it unmanned me again, and I started to cry.

When we took Sarah to the beach that first sodden, awful Sunday after the cancer re-bloomed, we let her run off leash along the tide line. I noticed the way the successive wavelets would fill up her paw prints with salt water, soften the crisp edges, and finally obliterate them, leaving nothing but smooth, fresh, unbroken sand again. I knew even then that we were close to having nothing more left of her -- just the memory of paw prints. So it's sweet that the crematorium takes one last print to remember her by. But it looks all wrong. It isn't the sort of print that a dog running full tilt at the horizon, at the waves, at the next flock of birds, leaves behind.