Epsilon

Dear Friend,

It’s nice having Chiara home for the next few months. We’ve been enjoying London together, visiting Hampstead Heath and bookshops, cooking together, and generally getting on with our lives.

The lived moment.

Is a gift.

Seeing friends.

Wrapping presents for family.

We’ll start on the Christmas decorations tomorrow. I found the box where they’re kept while retrieving another box with all the gift tags and ribbons in it. I also came across Santy’s lead and collar. I’d forgotten—or blanked out—where it had been moved to. Instinctively, I picked up the collar and inhaled the salty smell of her. A mistake perhaps, as I was about to begin a coaching session, and immediately my eyes welled with tears, my throat caught in a plumber’s wrench.

Scent is such a powerful force. Memories flooding in—not so much as pictures in my mind but thunderbolts in my body.

The loss never seems to leave completely. But it softens, urging you to allow yourself to go deeper down, to where a smile or recognition rises to meet your lips, and you’re glad to have been blessed—to have loved without reserve another being.

Four legs or two.

What does it matter?

It’s a highly charged day for us. Chiara checked her emails after breakfast while I was doing something at the table—I don’t recall what—when she said, “Oh no!” It could have been anything, really.

Maybe a deal falling through or a delivery delayed. But it wasn’t anything like that.

“Epsilon,” she said.

It was Marianne in Corsica, with the sad news of Epsilon’s passing, accompanied by some photographs. Epsilon was sixteen and had an extraordinary life, living on the land where she was born along the Corsican coastline.

Here she is on the beach near her home.

Look at the joy in that face!

She wasn’t a dog that had much time for anyone other than Marianne, her owner, or Eliza, our niece. Except maybe Missou Rosso, a red cat who was Epsilon’s friend and accomplice.

The two of them schemed in partnership to supplement their diet with delicacies from the kitchen that might otherwise have evaded them working solo. Missou Rosso would jump up on the kitchen counter when the opportunity arose, knock whatever morsel was lying around to the floor, so Epsilon could abscond with it, and they would share out the loot between them.

One summer, I was quick with my phone camera and caught them red-handed.

It’s the hardest thing for me to accept about this life—its impermanence. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. Everyone who knows what it means to love an animal as deeply as the bond between Marianne and Epsilon knows the thought you push away.

You notice, maybe, they aren’t as fast as they once were. Maybe they’re slower to get up or sleep longer. You know it’s coming, but not today, and so you do what you have to do and enjoy the moment.

It’s no use thinking about it.

It does no good.

You can’t prepare yourself for it.

All you can do is feel it when it hits and let it knock you down.

The basic design fault of a dog that will grow to be a teenager, and then you’ll have to say your farewells. But maybe it’s that way for a reason. The heartbreak is the soil from which compassion grows—eventually, naturally, given time.

We loved Epsilon for who she was, not for how much we mattered to her.

We were, I’m convinced, an irrelevance to her, loyal mountain dog that she was.

A shaman once told me that dogs are enlightened beings who volunteer to take form on earth to help humans evolve and learn to love.

She went on to say how dogs have a group soul, so you’re meeting all dogs in each one.

I like that idea.

Here’s to Epsilon.

Thinking of Marianne.

And of all the loved ones we remember.

Keeping their memory alive in our hearts.

Till tomorrow,

Love,
Mikey