For Lemon: Love, Grief, and Absolutely No Lessons Learned

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Today is September 30. The date I would quite happily delete from the calendar if calendars accepted complaints.

It’s Lemon’s death anniversary. And apparently the world expects dates like this to behave like ordinary Wednesdays. Emails arrive. Things need doing. Somewhere, someone probably wants me to demonstrate resilience in a measurable way.

I would prefer to have my dog back.

Lemon was my soul dog. Two very small words for a love that refuses to fit neatly into a sentence. She was family. She was herself. And she occupied a place in my life that nobody else can simply move into because time has passed.

People talk about grief as though it comes with a project plan. A beginning, a middle, a tasteful conclusion. Perhaps a final slide reading: Lessons Learned.

Mine appears to have ignored the onboarding materials.

I miss her. That is the plain, unfunny bit underneath everything else. I miss the life in which she was still here. The ordinary days I didn’t know I would later want back so badly.

But remembering Lemon cannot only mean remembering the day she died. That would give the worst day far too much editorial control.

She deserves the love, the laughter, and all the ridiculousness of being Lemon. The memories that make me smile and then cry, sometimes so quickly that I’m not entirely sure which department is currently in charge of my face.

I don’t want grief to turn her into a solemn little paragraph. She was a whole dog. A whole relationship. A whole world of things that mattered because they were hers, and ours.

So today I’m making room for both. The ache of missing her, and the joy of having loved her. No inspirational transformation required. No silver lining forcibly stapled to the loss.

Hazel and Eazy bring their own love and their own daily absurdity. Loving them doesn’t cancel missing Lemon. There is no one-dog-in, one-dog-out policy in my heart. Even HR would struggle to enforce that one.

And her name is still here. That Zesty Lemon. A little piece of her carried into the stories, the satire, and this ongoing attempt to turn life’s nonsense into something worth reading.

Lemon, my girl: I wish you were here. I’m glad you were here. Both things are true, and neither needs fixing.

Forever my soul dog. Still my Lemon.