But then what else is new?

Days like today I feel like a loose-knit sweater with a stray bit of yarn tied to him. The farther away we get, second by second, the more I unravel.

1. 
   Natalie 2011 06 06 at 12:24:08 am

   Zeke was such a beautiful dog, inside and out.

   I don’t want to presume… do you think he was an “old soul” dog? Not in a religious way by any means. I’m somewhere between agnostic and atheist. But in a sense of wisdom about the world.

   We were talking just the other day about our Chris, who passed away a year and a half after Zeke, and Jack, the dog we adopted a few months after Chris passed. Chris was an “old soul” sort of dog. Quiet, patient, tolerant, never ruffled by anything, and just a sense that he’d seen it all and understood it.. Jack really isn’t… he’s more like a young, impressionable soul just discovering the world for the first time. And very charming in his unrelenting sense of anticipation about every bend in the road, every new experience. He’s probably smarter than Chris was but also less world-wise… Jack is very anxious and high strung. Not Zen at all.

   I don’t know why I ask. It’s something in Zeke’s eyes that makes me think he understood a whole lot more than he let on.

   I miss Zeke and Chris and know the hole left behind.

2. 
   Chris Clarke 2011 06 06 at 4:26:09 pm

   Well, as you and many other regulars around here know I am not a believer in an afterlife, which pretty much precludes belief in souls old or otherwise.

   But of course that’s not really what you were getting at. I will say this: My maternal grandfather died about two years before Zeke was born, and for the first few years of getting to know Zeke, as boisterous as he was as a young adult, I had the sneakiest feeling on frequent occasions that he was inhabited by my grandfather’s ghost: the patient observations, the personality, the drollery. He also looked pretty damned dapper in a tie.

3. 
   Natalie 2011 06 06 at 11:01:30 pm

   I don’t believe in any kind of afterlife either.To me, an “old soul” speaks to the essence of a living creature, to a certain kind of wisdom about the world that the creature seems to have been born with instead of having to earn and develop over time. Born a grandfather perhaps…

4. 
   Wild_Bill 2011 06 07 at 5:33:25 am

   I’m thinking Zeke would have not wanted you to unravel.  This world needs you whole. 

   I love your dedication and memories to this wonderful companion.  Thanks.