A Little Soulmate
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Dodge was the last kitten left in a litter that was born in a barn on the rural edges of town. He looked like a little black ink spot with bright green eyes and a smear of white hair on his chest. He screamed on the drive home, staring at me while he dug his tiny claws into my chest as I held him close. When we got back to my apartment, he perched up on my knee, and we napped together, the first of a thousand naps we would take in the next two decades, always curled up around each other.
For the next 19 years, a little piece of my life was totally, utterly, and completely perfect, even when everything else was very much not so.
Dodge greeted me at the door of my first apartment each morning when I came home from my graveyard shift at the hospital, a little sprite eagerly waiting my arrival. He patiently sat in his place on the sink as I washed my face and brushed my teeth, then curled up on my lap as I wrote in my journals or watched a show on my laptop until sleep took us both over.
Even as a tiny, wobbly kitten, his green eyes conveyed a knowing beyond the confines of his small world.
One morning in the beginning, I lay in bed with my eyes closed, suspended between sleep and awake, trying to shift toward the former. Dodge was next to me, no bigger than a skinny potato, and he gently pressed his tiny paws onto my eyelids and kept them there.
At the onset of my life with Dodge, I was in a dark, desperate place. He led me out, day by day, until I didn’t know the way back. When I read, when I scrolled, when I wrote, he was always next to me, purring and gently staring. Often, he would close his eyes and lean his head into the back of my hand, and keep it there.
Over the years, Dodge and I developed a language of gazes, glances, tongue clicks, chin scratches, ear rubs, pets, gentle head pats, purrs, meows, and leaning into and curling around each other. Together, we formed a world for just the two of us.
When Dodge was seven, he got outside while I was away. By the time I got home, he hadn’t been seen in days. I was living at a family home, the landing pad for my siblings and me whenever life shifted, and we needed a place to land. It was my turn.
I stapled missing posters to telephone poles. I knocked on doors. I posted on neighborhood apps. I circled block after block, calling his name. I fell sick with the flu, but still looked for him, crying myself to sleep every time I returned to bed without him. After ten days, I thought that was it, our story together had ended.
On the eleventh night, I awoke from a feverish sleep to the unmistakable sound of his meow. It was faint, but I knew it was him. I leaped out of bed, put on socks, and was in the backyard in moments. Snow was falling, and my fever burned against the cold. I called to him, shouting his name and clicking my tongue to beckon him to me. I quietly climbed our neighbors’ fences, a feat I perfected as a teenager. I moved through backyard after backyard in the quiet winter night, desperate to find the small creature to which my heart belonged.
After an hour, my feet were soaked and stiffening. I retraced my steps and got back into bed, defeated and devastated all over again. I resigned to the likelihood that I hadn’t heard him at all, that the fever, the sleepless nights, the sick ache in my heart made me hear him in my dreams.
The next day, the neighbor living behind us knocked on our door to tell me he had found Dodge in his garage. I cried as I walked again in the snow, this time with him in my arms.
I was his person, but Dodge was a social prince. When we had company, he liked to sit among the people, floating from lap to lap and getting ample time with each person. He loved who I loved, trusted who I trusted. As I added more pets to our lives, he let his place be known and would always take his spot in my lap, even if it was occupied by the lumbering head of a dog.
Dodge was with me through relationships, break-ups, moves, deaths, career milestones — always, sitting in my lap, next to me. When I began writing for a living — my dream since I was a child — he developed a habit of lying on my desk and resting his head on my wrist as I wrote articles. I eventually got a tattoo of his face in the exact spot he would place his head, so that when he was gone, he would still be with me, coaxing me along as I typed.
When Dodge turned 15, I became gripped by anticipatory grief. He lived with kidney disease and a heart murmur. I was terrified of life beyond him. Sometimes, I would look at him and see his age: his legs lost patches of hair, and he lost weight. But always, he would bounce back into my little panther with the gleaming coat and bright eyes.
Five years ago, we moved into a house with a large back deck and little tree cover. Dodge was always an inside boy, but I slowly grew comfortable with letting him out to bask in the sun with our two dogs. He was never more beautiful than in the bright, unfiltered light, tilting his head up to the sky, absorbing the warmth of the sun’s beams.
In March of this year, I made a vet appointment for a check-up after noticing Dodge was eating less. As the week went on, he became wobbly, almost like he was a kitten who didn’t yet have his sea legs. By the time Friday came, he grew more tired, and my heart grew more panicked.
He spent the weekend wrapped in a blanket in my arms, sleeping with his head pressed against my chest. I tried to stay grounded, to relive the past 19 years again in every single second we had left.
On Saturday, my anxiety was peaking, and I needed to run, to shake it out of me and clear my mind. As the miles unfurled behind me, I imagined what the next few days would look like. The vet would probably tell me it was time; he was old, he wouldn’t bounce back. I would call Heaven at Home to make an appointment for the next day. I would pick out a special blanket to lay him on in my office, the place we spent the most time together. The Heaven at Home vet would come and give him the shot while I held him. We would make a playlist of gentle music and light candles, and I would lay him on the floor, surrounded by lilies. We would bring our other pets in one by one to sniff him, so they would understand why their brother was suddenly gone. That’s how it would go. It would be a ritual worthy of him, one built on the love he built within me.
On Sunday, my husband took photos of us. My hair was unwashed, and my face was swollen from days of steadily crying. But his head is lying on my chest, his chin tilted down, and both of us in our world together.
The next morning, Dodge crawled from under the bed when he heard me stirring before sunrise. I scooped him up, and he relaxed in my embrace, his tummy facing up, his bright green eyes blinking slowly at me.
I carried him down to my office, where he filled the space on my lap between my stomach and my computer as I typed. We had four hours together before his vet appointment. He sat with me as he had thousands of times before, the two of us in harmony.
At 7 a.m., I called my mom and asked her to drive me. If I got bad news, I told her, I don’t think I would be able to drive. As the hour went on, he weakened. When I got up to let my mom in the house, I heard a sound and ran back into my office. Dodge had fallen while trying to drink from a small dish of water I put out for him, and he couldn’t get up. I wailed and wrapped him in a towel, holding him so close, trying to absorb him into my body so he wouldn’t ever leave me.
He had always been upset in the car, but this time, he just lay in my arms and looked at me, calm as he had ever been. I sobbed and cried and choked on my tears, and my mom drove. The sun was absurdly bright, almost cruelly so.
When we got to the vet, she examined him gently and told me it was time.
There was no music, no ceremony, no ritual, no flowers, no candles. It was just him and me, as it had always been. I told him over and over that he was perfect, that he had made my life more perfect than I ever could have wanted, that he would always be the best part of me.
And then he was gone.
It’s been almost two months, and I’m learning how to live without Dodge’s physical presence, to carry him with me. I have moments where I can feel his warmth and his gaze, and I am calm. In other moments, his absence is overwhelming, and I am wandering again in the snowy night, looking for my little soulmate as I hear him calling to me, somewhere just beyond the dark.
This is the first edition of the Dead Pets Newsletter, an accompaniment to the Dead Pets Podcast. I started Dead Pets to prepare myself for Dodge’s death, and I am so glad I did. The stories I’ve collected and shared on the podcast have made my own grief softer, more bearable.
Dead Pets now stands as my ode to Dodge, to my perfect bodhisattva, the little prince who loved me when I didn’t know how to love myself.
In each episode, guests talk about a pet from their past and how they carry their pet with them after they are gone. Dead Pets is about the death of our pets and the immense grief it brings; but more than that, it’s about their lives and all the small moments of happiness and depth and love that accumulate to something greater than ourselves.
After every episode is recorded, edited, and published, the story keeps going for me. Every interview prompts new feelings, revelations, and epiphanies.
When Dodge died, people who had been on the podcast reached out to me with kind words and camaraderie. In the early days when the pain of losing him was raw agony, when the grief was cruelly isolating, it made all the difference in helping me feel less alone. With the podcast and this newsletter, I want to help others feel less alone in their grief, too.
What You Can Expect When You Subscribe
The Dead Pets Newsletter is $5 a month or $40 a year. I’ll be publishing once a month, sharing reflections and thoughts from each episode, my own grief journey from losing Dodge, news about the podcast, book reviews, and other resources on pet grief. If that sounds like something your heart needs, subscribe here.