I Wept for a Dog I Had Not Met

The thing nobody warns you about being a twin is that some days your feelings arrive in the mail from someone else. You learn to check the return address. That skill failed me completely one afternoon in a grocery store, and I ended up crying into the frozen peas over a dog I had never met.

My twin sister Rosa lives overseas now. We came up together, two halves of one loud childhood, and even with an ocean between us the wiring holds. Usually it is subtle. A good mood that arrives for no reason turns out to belong to her promotion. A restless night lines up with her insomnia. I have gotten used to the faint background weather of another person's heart.

But this was not subtle. I was pushing my cart down the freezer aisle, thinking about nothing more profound than whether to buy peas, when grief came down on me like a collapsed ceiling. Not sadness. Grief, the heavy specific kind, with a shape to it, the kind you feel when something you love is gone. My throat closed. My eyes filled. I stood there with my hand on a freezer door and cried in a way I had not cried in years, and I had absolutely no reason to.

I want to be clear about how strange that is. I was not sad that day. My life was fine. There was no news, no memory, nothing. The grief simply arrived, fully grown, and it did not feel like mine. It felt like standing next to a furnace of someone else's loss. And under it, as always, was that faint signature, that sense of Rosa, the way you know a room she has just left.

I abandoned my cart. I sat in my car in the parking lot and called her. It was late evening where she was. She picked up already crying, and before I could ask, she told me. Her old dog, Bruno, a scruffy rescue she had adopted after moving abroad, had been put to sleep that afternoon. He had been sick for weeks. She was holding him when he went.