What We Carried Home

The morning after Sarah's funeral, I woke before dawn and drove to the lake where we'd scattered her ashes three years ago. I was thirty-four then, a corporate zombie moving through quarterly reports and board meetings, my soul eroding like coastline in a storm. She would have hated what I'd become. She hated the man I was before her death, too.

The dog—a golden retriever named Bear, because Sarah had laughed that he lumbered through life like he was carrying the weight of the world—sat in the passenger seat, his muzzle now white with age. He'd been her service animal during chemotherapy, trained to detect seizures before they hit. Now he was mine, a living bridge to a version of myself I'd lost.

I pulled on her old baseball cap, the one she'd worn to every minor league game we'd attended during our brief, fierce marriage. The brim was frayed. It smelled like her still, or maybe that was just what I'd come to believe loss smelled like: vanilla and rain and something like hope.

On the passenger seat lay a baseball. A minor league player had thrown it to her during the seventh-inning stretch of what turned out to be our last date. She'd caught it one-handed, grinning, her cancer already staging its quiet coup in her blood. She'd signed it: *For when we're old and gray and still arguing about everything.*

I'd never thrown it. Until today.

Bear and I walked to the water's edge. The lake was glass-still, reflecting a sky that was just beginning to bruise with dawn. I held the baseball, remembering how Sarah had taught me to throw properly—fingers across the seams, wrist snap at release. She'd played Division I softball before law school, before the diagnosis, before everything became before and after.

"I don't know how to do this without you," I whispered. Bear pressed against my leg, his solid warmth anchoring me.

I threw the baseball. It arced against the pale sky, a small perfect thing against the vast emptiness, before disappearing into the water without a splash. Not a ripple. Just gone.

Bear sat. I stood. And for the first time in three years, the zombie-ness of it all fell away. I was just a man, standing by a lake, with a dog who had loved a woman who had loved us both. The sun rose. We turned toward the car. Some griefs you carry forward. Some you finally learn to set down.