What Drowns in the End

The dog's name was Buster, though I called him 'zombie' sometimes—the way he'd lurch toward his food bowl, hips failing, eyes milky with cataracts. I found him three years ago wandering Route 9, a walking corpse then, and now he was dying properly on my living room rug. I should have taken him to the vet weeks ago. But Sarah left in October, and I'd been moving through my own half-death since.

That's the thing about grief—it doesn't kill you. It makes you a zombie, shambling through meetings, signing documents, nodding at jokes you don't hear. I'd forgotten what it felt like to want something until the morning I found Buster.

The baseball glove in my closet still smelled of leather and teenage ambition. I'd played through college until my shoulder gave way in the regional finals. That was the first death—the person I might have become. Now, at forty-two, I understood that we outlive so many versions of ourselves.

Buster whimpered, and I carried him to the truck. The clinic was thirty miles north, through bear country. I'd seen one once, standing in my headlights like a dark prophecy, massive and indifferent. It had looked at me with those prehistoric eyes, then turned away. That's the world's message: your problems are not problems.

We passed the old ballpark where I'd almost made history. Empty now. Water flooded the infield every spring, drowning whatever grew there. Some things are meant to stay buried.

Buster died in the parking lot, head in my lap. I sat there for an hour, not crying, not moving. Just feeling something—finally, actually feeling it. The veterinarian found me there, offered condolences. I drove home with an empty passenger seat.

That night, I stood in my backyard and let the hose run over my hands. The water was freezing. I thought about the bear, about baseball, about all the versions of myself that had died to make this one possible. I turned off the water and went inside. Some things, I decided, don't need saving. They just need witnessing.

The zombie, finally, began to heal.