What We Bury

The dog stopped eating three days after the funeral. He just lay on the rug where her scarves used to puddle, ribs showing through his matted golden fur, eyes following me with that wounded accusation. I'd place food bowls — papaya chunks, because she'd always said tropical fruit kept the soul light — but he only turned away.

I moved like a zombie through those weeks, shell-shocked and mechanical. Sleep was fragmentary, interrupted by the phantom weight of her beside me, the hollow where her breathing should have been. My coworkers murmured condolences, their eyes sliding away from my raw, unpretty grief. I was the bear in the room, dangerous with mourning, better avoided.

She'd loved bears — collected them in ceramic and plush, wrote poems about their winter hearts. "We're all just sleeping through the cold," she'd said, six months before the diagnosis. I hadn't understood then how carefully she was measuring her own hibernation.

The dog died on a Tuesday. I dug the grave in the backyard, under the papaya tree she'd planted,笑声 between the roots that would never fruit in this climate. My hands bled into the soil, and I thought about how we bury things we love — people, pets, hope — and how they transform, becoming something else entirely.

Maybe that's what grief is: a zombie that wears your face, walks through your life, eats your food, sleeps beside someone who isn't there. Some nights I catch my reflection and don't recognize the creature staring back. Other nights, I feel her absence so sharply it's like she never left at all.

Today I bought fresh papaya at the market. The vendor said it would be sweet. I told her I didn't mind the bitter parts anymore.