I’ve often wished for a slowing down of my brain, this rapid-fire-never-stop-thinking-about-anything-and-everything-at-the-same-time brain of mine. I’ve not always chosen the best methods of slowing it down, but at least I found some rest from my incessant thoughts. For nearly a week now, however, my brain has been clouded in a fog… only capable of a singular thought – “Jackson”.

Grief, I’m finding, is a close cousin of depression. Except with this emotion, people don’t tell you that you don’t have anything to be sad about (“Look at your life! You have a great job, a great family, a wonderful home, etc.! How can you be depressed?”). But the motions are the same: staying in bed so you don’t have to face reality, going to bed early to escape, wanting to hide away from the world so they don’t see your sadness and look at you helplessly with pity in their eyes.

I’m reminded of Jackson everywhere I turn – from the black pawprint house key on my keyring, to his hair on our bathroom floor, to places in our house where he carried out particular routines and occupied the spaces with his big and beautiful personality (the rug in the kitchen where he would lay under my feet as I cooked, the step into the sunroom where I would sit down as he would wiggle and greet me in the mornings before heading to the office to greet David, and of course that beautiful doggie hotel that David built just for him). I’m haunted by his absence when I think “I need to get out of bed to let Jackson out” or “I need to make sure he doesn’t lick the dishes in the dishwasher I’m leaving open” or “I just dropped some food, but he’ll get it.”

Our den, the room I thought of as mine and his – where he was allowed on the couch and couldn’t snuggle enough with me – has become a place where I feel the absence of his presence the very most. With his picture on the wall above my TV, the scratches on the couch from when he would try to get even closer to me as we snuggled, and the lingering smell of him on the throw blanket we would snuggle up with at night – he is everywhere in that room and nowhere at the same time.

I’m sure I will eventually get back to some form of normal, but for now, I’m swimming in a sea of sadness and grief. My best boy is gone, and all I can wish for is that I could have him back.