Category Archives: Dexter

#augustbreak2013 Day 27

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Number

dexterstomatoesThis was this morning’s harvest from Dexter’s plant, a Sweet 100, which I always mistakenly call a Sweet Boy. If I were to count them, there would probably be more than the number of days Dexter has been gone. He was still here when I put the plant in the ground. As I picked them today, I remembered how every summer before, he’d be right there, begging for some, sometimes even trying to pick them himself, and how last summer, I gave him the last tomato knowing it might really be the last tomato.

#augustbreak2013 Day 19

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White

dexterspawprintThe pawprint, the box and the ashes inside, all white. I have two full sets of these, one for Dexter and one for Obi, both lost to fatal cancers, treatable but ultimately incurable. Over the past four years, two of them have been spent living with, loving, and letting go of a terminally ill loved one. It’s been hard, probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done, to love that much, to hurt that much. And yet, to do so, to open my heart to them, love them so big even though I knew they would ultimately leave me, break my heart, to be there as a witness when they did, is a precious thing, a horrible, terrible, brutal, tender, beautiful thing.