It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch. ~Unknown
John Green was right when he said in his book, “Funerals are not for the dead. They are for the living.”
I bent over to water my baby guava plant. Then I walked over to the bougainvillaea plant at the edge of my garden, collected its fallen magenta bracts to fill my now-empty water container, and walked back to empty the container once again over Touto (the name of said baby guava plant) while whispering to it words of encouragement as the papery magenta leaves landed in-between Touto’s pale green ones.
As the words of my whisper escaped my lips, a drop of water trickled down my forehead.
Another drop landed on my wrist.
Then another on my arm.
And another.
I looked up at the threatening sky, and to my surprise and amusement, I spotted a group of clouds in the shape of a paw: an almost rounded, triangular-shaped fluff with a crown of four little oval cotton balls. I knew it sounded silly, but I’d like to think that Toushirou hears my daily whispering at her grave and is sending me a sign, nudging me to look up with each gentle raindrop.
Toushirou in Japanese is a boy’s name and is said to mean agile, talented, or intelligent. Another source translated the name by individual syllable to mean Tou 冬 = “Winter”, Shi 獅 = “Lion,” and Rou 郎 = “Son.” Also, the phonetic “Shirou” is a homonym of Shiro 白 = “White.”
Those were not the reasons we named our first dog Toushirou, even though she was a whitish shade of light brown, looked boyish, and sometimes acted as cold as winter when she wanted to ignore us.
When we first spotted her in a coffee shop near my office in Batu Maung, she was playfully chasing a little plastic bag that seemed to tease her as it was carried by the wind and danced around between the legs of tables and chairs. While she was very animated, she had a very sad face, as though the world owed her a living, which it probably did. We jokingly agreed that her expression reminded us of Toushirou, one of our favourite characters in our favourite anime, Bleach. Seeing our amusement as we watched her, the shop owner wasted no time packing her up in a little box and imposing her upon us. As we declined, he even followed us to our car, telling us sob stories about how these stray puppies would get infested with diseases and eventually become roadkill unless we adopted her, and before we knew it, he had already placed the boxed-up “Toushirou” in our car.
Toushirou’s first act of gratitude was to fart in the car as we drove off.
We adopted little Toushirou on September 9, 2008, when she was about three months old. She was the quietest little puppy ever. And for at least the first six months, we thought she was mute. She was cheeky, to say the least, chewing furniture, nipping at heels, eating inedible knick-knacks, knocking over things, attempting to escape our flat and into an occupied elevator, and getting her little head stuck between the metal bars of our front gate, but never once did she bark or make any significant noise until we moved out of our flat to a terrace home. I imagined that living in a landed home rather than a high rise must have given her greater viewing access to activities and excitement. Our relief at hearing her first bark did not last long, as she became noisier after being exposed to more and more bustling activities outside the house, as we now have direct access to the street, unlike when we lived in our small flat.
She grew up to be a beautiful, arrogant, and dignified dog. She was average mongrel size, with very short light brown fur that was almost white, two large upright ears that seemed too big for her face, and the most expressive, clear brown eyes. By the time she was three years old, we had adopted two more stray dogs into our little family.
At this point, one would expect a very lively household with three dogs running around, playing fetch, and chasing each other. One would be wrong.
Don’t expect Toushirou to play fetch because she’s not one to fetch anything for you at your command, even when her two little sisters seemed excited enough to do it. She took pride in sitting upright with her head held high and proud, ignoring her two sisters, especially the youngest one, who liked to chew on her ears or climb on her back whenever she got the chance.
As Toushirou aged, the years ate away at her muscles. She started having issues with her spine, and her hips eventually began to give way. She reached a point when she could no longer proudly sit upright. As a result, she would either be pacing about for hours until she collapsed or lying down for hours until she managed to pick herself up, where she would repeat the cycle of pacing in arthritic pain for hours until she collapsed again.
She was a proud and dignified dog who did not kowtow to anyone, not even for the sake of earning her favourite chicken jerky. As her physical frame deteriorated and her daily struggles to mobilise herself turned into frequent agonising cries, we decided that euthanising her might be the best thing we could do for her to preserve that dignity.
Toushirou was euthanised on January 14, 2023. Nearly 14.5 years after her adoption. She was cremated.
We collected her remains two weeks later, on January 28, 2023. A little white urn of remains (bones and ash) was all that was left of almost fifteen years of life. That, and memories of her.
Death can take away her life, but not our relationship. We wrapped her urn in our old clothes, so she could always smell our familiar scent and feel our familiar embrace. We buried her urn in our garden, so she could remember her walks in the garden when she was well enough to roam there. Right beside her urn, we planted a baby guava tree. We named it Touto and covered the fresh soil with fallen bougainvillaea bracts, the only type of flowering plant we had in the garden, so she’d know that she was resting on familiar ground.
Toushirou may not be my whole life, but she has made my life whole during her short years. If Toushirou could speak, I wondered if she would tell me,
“After I die, please don’t tell yourself, ‘This loss and pain are more than I can bear. I’ll never adopt another dog again.’ Instead, find an unloved dog, one whose life holds no hope, and give my place to her. Perhaps the love I left behind is the only legacy I can leave.”
…
Nah, she’s probably too proud to say that.
A crash of thunder startled me out of my daze. The trickles were getting heavier as my outstretched arm started to drip raindrops. I couldn’t tell if my face was wet from the tears in my eyes or the darkened sky. I stole another glance at the paw-shaped cloud, which seemed to have faded. The sun will come out again after these rain clouds disperse. I’ll speak to you again tomorrow, Touto. And I love you, Toushirou. I always have, even when I used to chase you around the house and beat you (I’m sorry I did that) for chewing, clawing, and nipping at my heels, legs, and arms when you were a teething puppy. And I always will.
Perhaps the pain of grief is the price we must pay for the joy of love. Or perhaps grief is how love perseveres.
I walked back towards my front door, feeling comforted as a little quote (from Winnie the Pooh, I believe) popped into my head, “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
Grief is like the ocean; it comes in waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim. ~Vicki Harrison
Written by: Agnes Chin
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Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal. ~from an Irish headstone
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