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Fireside Reading from Rob Perkins Editor’s note: As a special winter treat, KANAWA has expanded Rob Perkin’s column to run an excerpt from a wonderful essay about Rob’s 28-day trip on the Back River with his Wheaton Terrier after the death of Rob’s wife, Rene. It is a story about a paddler, his dog, and the tundra. It is a story about the wild. But most of all, it is a story about the Afterlife. Sam was a city dog ... by Robert Perkins   "Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's." Ralph Waldo Emerson After Rene died I thought long canoe trips by myself would be as close to bliss as I could still get and be alive. Until I met Rene (pronounced ‘re’ as in remember, and ‘ne’ as in knee; her name is the shortened form of Irene, or peace) I’d felt more at home camped by a great northern river, looking forward to the next day’s paddle, out alone for months, than I had anywhere else, or with anyone else. After fighting her breast cancer for two years (and its wicked offspring: exhaustion, hair loss, nausea, imagined or real attacks on other organs, and the fear of death) we thought we had beaten it. Her hair grew back, thick and black. Her strength returned. The doctors marveled and shrugged, and said, “Maybe.” On the strength of that we married in April, but by mid-June her cancer returned, tearing down all hope. She died in August at thirty-five. During the last month of her life, Rene became very thin. I would go to the ocean north of Boston on Cape Ann and bring back buckets of salt water from the beach. I would heat the water and then fill the tub so she could soak in the ocean. Her translucent skin glowed white. When she could no longer do even that, I filled the sink with seawater and held her up so she could splash her face, swish some of the salty water around in her mouth, close her eyes and pretend to be in the ocean. I brought wreaths of seaweed to her, interweaving the golden kind with the darker variety, each with tiny balloon-like knobs on them which Rene popped. Those summer nights were a strange and haunting baptism. Every day our dog Sam would come in the bedroom to jump on the bed. I tried to encourage him to do this gently, so as not to disturb Rene. He would look at her and wag his tail, as if to say, “Come on. Time for a walk.” Rene would smile and weakly pat the place on the bed where she wanted Sam to lie down. Sam was an irrepressible bundle of blonde enthusiasms: a Wheaton Terrier. Wheaton’s are mid-sized dogs; and compared to some terriers, even-tempered. They have a curly coat of wheat-gold hair with red highlights. Either Rene or I had to cut his coat because a terrier’s hair doesn’t shed. Otherwise Sam would turn into one huge ball of golden hair. We found Sam the week Rene was diagnosed. He crawled away from his littermates, came to a stop at my sneaker, and peed on it. We laughed and took it as a sign. As she underwent her cancer treatments, caring for Sam became Rene’s constant joy. Over the two years that she watched her physical world shrink into her illness, Sam never felt sorry for her, or lied to her, the way many people did. After she died, he was my link to Rene. I thought the word ‘Afterlife’ referred to where those who died went, but I learned that the word also, and cruelly, describes the terrain surrounding those left behind, us. Afterlife is literally after-life; after her life. I was numb, unused to this peculiar form of living. The world looked familiar, but its shape was different. It was flat and tasted sour. No easy passageway out, or back, to a more actual world appeared. Finally, on the second, unbalanced summer after her death, I took Sam on a long canoe trip in the north. I had high hopes for Sam in the tundra, but he was a city dog, and I knew that; still I wasn’t going to leave him home. I planned to travel with Sam for six weeks on a river north of the Great Slave Lake, a few degrees south of the Arctic Circle, beyond the last Canadian town, Yellowknife. The river runs for six hundred undammed miles in a northeasterly direction before emptying into the Arctic Ocean at Chauntry Inlet. The Inuit called it Thellichoo, or Great Fish River. Europeans renamed it the Back River after George Back, the leader of the first British expedition, who in 1837 wore a top hat and a swallowtail coat as he ‘discovered’ the river. Since 1976, when money and time allowed, my interest as much in internal discoveries as external ones, I canoed this river many times before I met Rene. Now, I was returning….to find what? There is no wilderness left in the United States compared to what exists in Canada. The Unites States has carved up wilderness into manageable units called National Parks, Wilderness Refuges, and Designated Conservation Areas for scientific, tourist and political purposes. For example, in Zion National Park there is a designated Wilderness area of 5,000 acres. In Zion’s case, that capitol “W” is a specific designation that means no people are allowed in that area. The designation makes a lot of people mad. “How dare you keep me out!” complain tourists, hunters, and natives, while conservationists fume because 5,000 acres is not a large enough parcel of land to preserve. Thoreau said, “…in wildness is the preservation of the world.” I grew up in the suburbs outside Boston, not far from Thoreau’s pond, and early on became addicted to being by myself, preferring the un-judgmental woods to people and their complicated lives. To seek the “Wild” felt more natural, and subjective, than to hike in a designated “Wilderness.” It’s still possible to experience “the wild” in the US, but not in the vast proportions that exist in Canada. We all have that “wild” in us, no matter how much we pretend otherwise. In meeting Rene, I found that wild I was looking for at home. Now, my desire to feast on the wild drew me north. The tundra reeks of it. I just hoped I could connect to it again. If you want to travel in the tundra, and you make mistakes, you die, and are free to do so. At the Royal Canadian Mounted Police post in Yellowknife where I went to file an itinerary before Sam and I left, the young Mountie at the On Duty desk yelled over his shoulder toward the back room: “Do I need to Xerox a photo ID of this guy, or not?” This was the first year a thick plastic window had been installed to separate the public from the staff. Maybe they thought I couldn’t hear them through the plastic, but I liked what the woman hollered back: “No, don’t bother. They never look like their picture when we find them.” One factor limiting the number of people that travel in the tundra is the millions of black flies and mosquitoes. During the short arctic summer, hundreds of bird species migrate into the tundra following the “invertebrate bloom,” a biological term meaning “lots of bugs.” In addition to the bugs, waiting for Sam and myself were Barren Ground Grizzly bears and wolves that roamed free without radio collars, or good manners. If you get hurt, help is not near by. I told friends at home, and ones in Yellowknife, who felt this trip sounded risky, given my shaky state, that I’d been there before. I said, “Believe me, being there is more healthy than being here.” The tundra is like an untamed alphabet still beyond our control, forming and reforming itself into just the story we need to hear. I was heading back to a place that had tested me, and given me peace, yet this year, it would be different. I found my mind continually gnawed on a limited number of subjects. My thoughts circled back on themselves, like a Mobius strip, I uncovered thoughts and then buried them, then uncovered the same thought again. Gnawed some more: why had Rene died so young? She was only thirty-five. Life sucked. It wasn’t fair. Why did this happen to me? No one understood my pain. No one. On July 10th a Cessna 185 dropped Sam and me, the canoe and our gear, including enough kibble for Sam, at the headwaters of the Baillie River, a tributary to the Back River. After the small plane taxied downstream, turned, and zoomed over our heads, every thing became very quiet. I felt a chill run up my back, and I looked at Sam. He was already running into the alders, sniffing. I knew it would take me longer to connect to this land. The Baillie is narrow, not much wider than a two-lane road, and carves through sandy, esker-riddled country on the way to its confluence with the Back River, a hundred and twenty miles from its headwaters in Morraine Lake. It is a run-off river. I wanted to get there early because by August, even mid-July, the water levels become awkwardly low. Along the river’s length, rapids occur frequently; not drawn-out ones, but ones compressed into short drops, easy to navigate, if you pick the right route. For the first two weeks, the riverbank was lined with giant icebergs, as large as beached whales, left stranded hundreds of feet above the current water level, a slowly melting outline marking the power of the fierce river the Baillie had been during breakup. I’d walk up to one, taller than myself, and marvel at the plowed up pile of boulders and dirt ahead of it. After the icebergs melted there would be only the roughed up earth and boulders, heaped like the discarded and undecipherable pieces of some god’s game. I learned quickly what I should have realized before: Sam was defenseless against the onslaught of the bugs, especially the inside of his ears, around his eyes, and on his bare belly. The blackflies were worse than the mosquitoes. When a blackfly bites it tears a little piece of flesh away. Sam was safe on the water, in the canoe, or on land in a breeze, but on calm days the mosquitoes and blackflies chewed and sucked him relentlessly. On the worst days I set up the tent so Sam could rest in shade, away from the fury of the of bugs. He would not let me put bug dope on his skin, and he would not wear a T-shirt soaked in DEET. Sam became what I worried about, imagining all the ways he could be killed. Sam amused himself by chasing Sic-Sics, or ground squirrels, and they amused themselves by taunting him before diving into the safety of their burrows. Once, while standing on top of an esker, lost in the view, I heard the rumble of caribou moving up the rise at a slant toward us. I wondered what Sam would do. As 500 caribou thundered by, they spooked and fanned out like spilled peas, pouring past us, some as close as twenty yards. Sam twirled in circles, jumped straight up, landed, planted his four feet and faced them, as if into a strong wind; then he barked. Sam kept his eye on me, and most of the time, he followed my commands. We had trained hard before leaving Boston because I knew his life would depend on his training. He learned to follow voice commands, and some gestures. If he did not pay attention to me he ran a greater risk of being killed by a wolf or a bear. I didn’t realize soon enough that paying attention was reciprocal. I rarely listened to him, although he was constantly showing me things I could not see: ground squirrels, birds in bushes, animal scat, scents he’d bound off after, his present-ness. He could jump straight up from joy alone. He constantly wagged his tail. Instead of joining in, I made him come when I called, and stay when I gestured. If he did something wrong, I hit him. I rarely smiled, and I never wanted him far from me. I often found myself yelling, “No! Don’t do that!” “Come here, now!” Back in Yellowknife, before we left, I was scolded by friends for even thinking of bringing Sam into the tundra. They told me the bugs would eat him, and that he would act as a lure to bring wolves and bears straight into camp, jeopardizing our lives. But Sam was the one part of my life with Rene that could come with me, and I didn’t listen. When the bear arrived, I was in the tent. I heard Sam barking. I looked out and saw a large grizzly bear lumbering across a hillside. We were camped on a long, narrow point. I gathered up my can of bear spray, some ‘bangers’ (small explosives launched from a spring loaded, pen like holder), my whistle, and the empty metal fuel bottle filled with stones that makes noise like a rattle when you shake it. I walked up to and past Sam. I didn’t want to put him on a leash, and I didn’t want him to run at the bear. He was excited, but was happy to stay behind me. I did not want the bear to get behind us, into camp and in our food. I walked out to the beginning of the narrow point. Bears are always hungry. As opposed to Polar bears who only eat meat, a Barren Ground Grizzly is an omnivore. At least when you meet one of them (I was telling myself that day) there is a fifty-fifty chance he is looking for a salad. Silence rules in the tundra. My best defense would be making noise, lots of it. I was ready. As he came close, the bear would stop to wriggle his nose in the air as though he were using it to tease something off an invisible shelf. Then he’d amble closer. Once, he rose up on his hind feet and sniffed the air. He had silver-white hair along his back and seemed to be a young bear. I matched the intensity of his watching, and mirrored his movements, as though we were dance partners. Each move we made was done in slow motion. When he tried to pass around us on the right, across the narrow spit of land, I walked slowly to the right. When he moved to the left, so did I, slowly, Sam behind me, barking. Back and forth we walked with thirty yards between us. The sun was out. It was the middle of the afternoon, a good day to die, if you had to. It’s always a question when to use the bangers. They fire out quite a distance before exploding. Shot straight up in the air, as the instructions advocate, doesn’t always work. A loud boom high in the air can be ineffective and not scare the bear. To point your hand like a gun and fire the banger to land just in front of him works better. However, if you over shoot the bear, or the banger hits in front and bounces over him before exploding, the sudden noise right behind him can propel the bear right at you. Bear spray is the best defense, but unfortunately it won’t work until the bear is close, really close, within ten feet of you. The spray is cayenne pepper under pressure. It can save your life because it works. It saves the bear’s life because the effects wear off in a few hours. Even ten years ago, I would have had a gun. Back then the bear and I are both at risk. If I miss him, or only wound him, he’ll be angry and tear me apart. If I shoot him well, I’m alive, but he’s dead. I don’t carry a bear-stopping gun because when you do, you begin to think like a killer. It takes balls to wait until the bear is within ten feet. A small bear, like this one, weighs about 600 pounds, and if they want to, they can out run any man, Where would I run, anyway? I knew the stuff worked because getting ready to leave in Yellowknife, I was packing in a shed and wanted to see how big a pattern the spray made on a wall at ten feet. I sprayed, and the red brown pattern looked dense, and big enough, to hit two bears. Satisfied, I turned aside to do something else. The next thing I knew, the spray that bounced off the wall settled over me. I was choking. I was blind. My lips were on fire. I barely got out the door before collapsing. The bear spray would be my last resort. I blew the whistle. I shook the rattle. Sam barked, and the bear kept advancing. I fired a banger and the bear backed away, sat down and considered the situation. I stood still and silent. I told Sam to hush up. We waited. After half an hour, the bear started to come again, and we mirrored his motions. This time, I advanced on him. He was ruining my afternoon. He disappeared over a rise to our right where perhaps he thought he could work his way behind us. Very carefully, I went up to the rim’s edge to spot him. If I can see the danger I’m dealing with, I feel safer. I spotted him further down the riverbank. He was rolling on his back, the way Sam would, and I realized he was rolling in my early morning shit. After that he seemed content to walk inland on his way to parts unknown. Sam and I followed leisurely, keeping him just in sight to be sure he wasn’t pulling a feint on us. The rest of the day, and into the next, I kept jerking my head around quickly, sure I had heard the bear come back. The only other time Sam scared me was after we’d been out two more weeks. I was paddling us down a calm, winding stretch of the river. The water was crystal clear. The river current waved the few green weeds under the canoe like flags in a slow motion wind. The different size boulders under us sped past. Sometimes I would make accompanying noise as though the boulders flying beneath us were the musical notes on a score the river was writing. Whenever I round the corner of a river, I stay close to the inside curve to avoid the stronger current in the middle. I prefer to be close enough to shore to get there quickly, if I need to. I don’t want to be surprised by an unseen, or unheard, rapid. I’d always enjoyed the intense feeling of being alive that facing death gives me. Now, I was having a hard time finding that intensity for more than a moment. I had to laugh remembering a thought I had: that I didn’t mind dieing in the tundra, I just did not want to die slowly out here. This morning Sam was sitting half in the bow, facing me in the stern with his head and his forefeet resting on the packs. I could tell he was bored. On land he could cavort. I was paddling around a corner close to the river’s inside curve, past a small, stony beach, when Sam raised his head. He jumped up, his eyes riveted on the shore, tail wagging, ready to hop out. Just then, I saw the wolf close to the water, lying on her side, napping. She was all white, and raised her head quizzically when Sam jumped forward, ready to launch himself at the wolf, no doubt to play. As Sam sprang out of the canoe, I lunged forward and grabbed a hind leg. My lunge, and his aborted leap, with me holding his leg, almost tipped us over. I hauled Sam out of the river and back into the canoe. In that short time, the current had carried us out of harm’s way. I yelled at Sam to stay put, then looked back at the wolf. She hadn’t moved. As if what had happened was merely a mirage, the wolf lay her head back down on the round stones and continued her nap. After a month out, I began living a dog’s life. I started to follow Sam on our walks, letting him lead. He slept in the tent. He dragged in sand. After I would fall asleep hundreds of blackflies that had hid in his hair would launch themselves at me. His body smelled foul from all the animal shit he’d rolled in. His breath stank from eating odd things. At dinnertime Sam stared me down until I shared my rice, or my cooked fish, or captured goose. He wouldn’t eat raw fish and neither of us wanted to eat the kibble. I threw it out. Black thoughts about ending my life began to haunt me. Why had Rene died? I railed at the river, at Sam. In the middle of a thought I’d smash the flat of my paddle blade on the water. It seemed that when I breathed in more black thoughts entered. I breathed out and none of them left. Sam became scared of me and would cower in front of my anger. There was no other person there to dispel these thoughts and Sam was no help. I began to blame him for Rene’s death. I would start talking to him about it and end up yelling at him. He shrank away from me, unable to run away, but afraid to stay. Then I’d realize what I was doing and I would smother him with hugs, and treats, small pieces of desiccated cow’s liver in my pocket. The river carried us. I was good in the rapids. I looked forward to the roar of the next one, and the minutes of total focus they offered. I did not like the calm stretches in between because I had too much time to think. Everything in my head and reflected around us seemed to be about dying. I watched doomed moths on the water surface flutter wet wings. I watched dark-feathered, fast jaegers swoop over the flat tundra, hoping to scare up small birds. The first two birds would swoop in on top of a promising looking clump of willow. Then they would slide away after their shadows and their eerie cries startled fear in small chests. A minute behind them, as though loafing, the next pair would sweep in. This pair of jaegers would be silent. If a sparrow made the wrong move and tried to fly, these jaegers would nail him. I watched a red-tail hawk actually bounce on a tall clump of willows, hoping to flush a meal. There were the always seagulls sitting quietly on rocks, watching. Others flew over me to see if I could be eaten yet, or whether I had produced any good leftovers like fish guts, or food scraps. If I died, they would go for my eyes first. We were walking away from the river at about 11pm, our shadows stretched out long and thin in front of us. The sun would remain up another two hours because just below the Arctic Circle the sun barely dips underneath the horizon between midnight and 2 am. Glancing toward the sun, I saw a gauze fabric of bugs backlit and dancing above the green tundra. The bugs were all the black thoughts I still had to swallow. The density of their tiny bodies created a golden haze stretching to the horizon. My stomach felt tight, and tension pinched my shoulders. Except for the sound of my breathing, and the whine of those bugs as they flew by my ear, the silence was complete. I hardly noticed where I was. When I bothered to look ahead, Sam was frisking two hundred yards away, crisscrossing the marshy landscape, pushing his nose into each bush. I gasped. I became scared. What if a wolf saw him? How could I get him close to me? He was too far away to hear me yell. I didn’t know what to do. Then, I lifted my right arm out from my side in a wide and slow motion, a gestured command, and slowly brought my arm back into my chest, keeping my elbow extended away from my body. Amazingly, Sam looked up, as if he had heard me call. Then, as if considering something, he bobbed his head both ways, and casually began to trot back toward me. From two hundred yards away he had simply answered me. I felt like I was in a dream. Everything around me slowed down as I watched his wheat-colored body move across the green tundra. Watching him was to feel a key turn, unlocking blocked pathways in me. As he came in the last twenty yards, my chest began heaving. I could not control it. I cried, deeply. The tears seemed to come from all the way back to the ones I’d not found at Rene’s death. I crumpled to my knees. I hugged Sam, rocking him back and forth in my lap. I didn’t want to loose him, too. Holding Sam in that rich, low-angle light, among the kaleidoscope of images that flooded through me was the memory of one of my last conversations with Rene. We talked about angels, something I scoffed at. Remembering this was as though the plate glass encasing me shattered, for a moment, and I felt the light breeze that had come up, and the roughness of Sam’s tongue as he licked me, the taste of his sour breath. I kept shaking my head and shoulders back and forth, as if waking up from a long and confused dream. For the next few days, my body felt lighter and I breathed easier. but I did not want to stay longer. I saw how dangerous it was for me to be on the river and, equally, how dangerous it would be to go home. Yet, I knew that I had to make my peace among people, and not here, not now, because if I stayed here, I couldn’t trust myself. I’d make a bad mistake. The next day I unpacked the orange short wave bush radio, spread out the sixty feet of copper antennae, one end pointing toward Yellowknife, and called Air Tindi. The distance back to the float base was too great to reach directly, and David Olsen at the Hoar Frost River patched me through, relaying my message and GPS coordinates to the dispatcher. Then David relayed their expected arrival time back to me. After a few days in Yellowknife, Sam and I flew home, exhausted. Getting on the plane felt like an admitted defeat, but I no longer cared. Flying south from the arctic is to climb out of the attic and to watch the world below become more civilized. As we approached Edmonton, the land became farming country. The different colored fields appeared like paragraphs on the page of the earth, and the roads between them were like margins and line breaks. It was meant to make more sense than the treeless wastes of the north, yet I wondered. Caught between the two worlds, seeing the fields only made me sad. Sam had to ride in cargo. I did not feel complete without him beside me. I felt itchy. My skin ached for the touch of the wind. Our last leg from St. Paul to Boston was held up four hours due to heavy thunderstorms in the flight path. We would not be in Boston until early am. I had rented my house for the summer, and a cousin outside Boston had offered us a bed until the rental ended. I had to call and tell her it would be too late to pick us up. We’d find a hotel, and she could come in the morning. The only hotel I knew that would take dogs was the Ritz Carlton. I called the hotel and explained that we’d be in late. “No, problem,” said reservations. “How many did you say you were?” “Two,” “And would you like twin beds, a queen, or a king?” I said we wanted a quiet room, preferably one high up, with a view over the Public Garden. I wanted to look down on trees. We’d take the twins. “Anything else?” she asked. “I’d like to order some food to be left in the room for us.” I ordered a filet mignon, rare, with all the trimmings, a turkey club sandwich and two beers. We flew in the wake of the storms. Off on the horizon, more thunderstorms blotted out small countries of stars. These huge black clouds were lit up from the inside with diffused explosions of light. Further along the horizon I could see jagged bolts of lightning. Near Boston more lights appeared beneath us, intensifying into dazzling clusters, and chaos. At 1am the taxi dropped us at the Arlington street door of the Ritz. A sleepy night porter opened the door. “ Is that some kind of terrier?” he asked. In the center of our room stood the trolley with the food. A starched white tablecloth hung down to the floor. Set elegantly on top of the cloth was a red rose in a crystal vase, the turkey club on a silver platter, two beers; and I found the steak underneath the tablecloth on a warming shelf. I cut up the steak so Sam wouldn’t choke wolfing it down. I drank the two beers and ate the turkey club. After he finished his meal, Sam went into the bathroom and lapped water out of the toilet bowl. “Sam,” I said. “We’re back in civilization.” The air conditioner hummed. Out the hotel window, the leaves on the trees looked lush and extravagant, even sexual, compared to the bushes in the north. I felt more confined than on the plane. I could not feel the wind. I couldn’t sleep. We went for a walk in the Public Garden across the street from the hotel. As we left the hotel, I said to him in a daze, “We’re really back, Sam.” He looked up at me, happy to be outside, eager to cross the street. I’d have to start picking up after Sam. Once inside the Public Garden fence, I let him off the leash. I thought there was no one around, but Sam found a woman in the shadows, sitting on a bench. “What a nice doggie,” she exclaimed, To me, she said, “And I don’t usually like dogs.” She wore a short red mini-skirt, high heels and a black tank top. Sam began licking her legs. “Honey, I like you, too. But I don’t like that.” With Sam between us, while I got him back on his leash, she hinted that she’d like to go home with us. I said we were staying at the Ritz. “Honey,” she said. “It happens all the time.” Two years earlier, in May, Rene and I had celebrated our wedding with family and friends at the Somerset Club on the other side of the Public Garden. After Rene changed from her dress, we walked with Sam to the Ritz where we’d spent our wedding night. At the time we married, Rene knew she was not completely cured of cancer. We knew that cancer would be part of her life, but not the end of it. Many people made it to five years. And if five, why not ten? The night we walked from the Somerset Club, towering cumulous clouds caught the last rays of sun turning them as bright white as the dress Rene wore that afternoon. We took our time crossing Boston Common to the Public Garden where we walked over the footbridge and stopped to show Sam the swan boats tied up for the night. Leading us out of the Garden onto Arlington Street, Sam peed on a granite column. In our room, we laughed a lot, talked about the party, and later, after we showered, we put on those ridiculous white robes the hotel provides. When it was late, I took Sam out into the hall. I had a soft rubber ball. Long hotel corridors are good for playing fetch ball. “Don’t,” Rene said. “You’ll wake people up.” “Then they can play, too, right, Sam?” And off the two of us went. Late in her illness, I cut my finger, a simple but deep cut from slicing carrots. I walked into our bedroom holding a paper towel clamped around my finger. “What’s that?” “Nothing,” I lied. “I cut my finger.” “Oh, let me see,” she said. She held my hand. When the blood welled up to the surface, she surprised me by sucking the blood. “They say doing this cleans a cut,” she said. After she pressed the edges of a Band-Aid around my finger, we talked. Near the end of her life, while she was able to talk, I was not always sure what evoked the topic of our conversation, or what our words meant. “Do you believe in angels?” she asked. “Do you mean like with wings?” I scoffed. “Some have wings. Some don’t,” Rene said, speaking softly, rolling her head towards the window. “What do you mean?” I asked, realizing she was serious. “Everything has a message for us. Isn’t that an angel’s job?” she said. “To deliver the message?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. “Then what’s cancer’s message?” I asked. “I don’t know exactly,” Rene said. For the last days of her life, Rene was in a coma. I took my turn, along with each member of her family, gently swabbing her cotton-dry mouth with a tiny water-soaked sponge on a stick. Sam would jump up on the bed to lie beside her. He sniffed all over her body. He licked her arm. After she died, we decided to each spend time with Rene, me first. In those few minutes alone with her, I did not know what to do. I said a prayer. I held her hand. By now it was cold. I brought Sam in to say good-bye, but he would not get up on the bed. I knelt on the rug, my head on the sheets. For some reason, I pushed my hands under her back. She was still warm there. Soon, there was a knock on the door. Kate wanted her turn to be alone with her sister. Gently, I pulled out my hands from beneath her back. I looked at my hands, at the finger with the Band-Aid, and realized that was the last time I would touch her. Kate pushed into the room, her face wet with tears. Sam tugged on his leash and I found myself back in the Public Garden. He was wagging his tail, looking up at me. This was not going to be easy. I’d been walking randomly. I took Sam out of the Public Garden past the swan boats tied up for the night. It was that odd hour of the morning when everything is very still. There was no traffic crossing Arlington Street. There was nothing but the sounds of the cicadas high up in the trees, each picking up the long drawn out drone of the other, passing their late August lament back and forth among the upper branches.