Honeyblossom Tree (2018 - 2024)

In loving memory of a tiny, floppy teacher

On Sunday evening, after five heart-wrenching days of searching for her, we learned that Blossom, our five-year-old rescue Cocker Spaniel, had passed. These words are not just to mourn her – a kaddish for our sweet muppet girl – but to testify to how she helped us, how lucky we were to have known her even just for the short time that we did.

Fig and I met the nineteen-pound ball of fur who was to become our baby on July 2^nd at a rescue in the Chicago suburbs. She was skittish when we first met her, and I worried she’d struggle to adjust to our fairly full house, but Fig reassured me that she was the kind of honey-sweet baby who’d blossom and eventually take root with the right kind of love. So we adopted her, and gave her the name Honeyblossom Tree.

What a relief it is when such a bright bundle of light enters your life on the heels of intense darkness. For three months, spanning from the last days of December to the tail end of March, I had been under the hypnotic and malevolent influence of a new “friend” in town who turned out to be a grifter and career criminal with designs on my resources (professional, pecuniary) and a sizeable team to back him up. After a series of rapidly escalating events that I don’t care to recount here, it became clear that his designs were on my life as well. Were it not for Fig’s love and commitment to total honesty between the two of us, I may very well not be around to type these words. And were it not for Blossom’s bouncy, goofy, soft licks and cuddles, the grifter’s constant insults and injuries – stored ex post facto in my brain and body as the kind of debilitating intramuscular pain and relentless mental distortion that makes just waking up in the morning difficult to the point of near-impossibility – would have continued to overtake me like the most suffocating kind of creeping vine. It was through watching the rapid blossoming of Blossom that my own healing was accelerated.

We brought her home and she was shy for a day – if that. Then she trotted happily from room to room, wagging her little stub of a tail. She jumped onto and off of the big bean bag her older dog-sister Mina sleeps on, flashing a big silly smile. She was thrilled to wake up in the morning with us, and to go to sleep at night. When we went back to Chicago to see Rachel Bloom live, Blossom came with us for her first overnight trip. On a walk by the beach, Blossom became irrationally afraid of the trash collecting truck. I felt sad and a little exasperated – Come on, baby, please don’t wiggle out of your harness on account of the garbage man – but then it dawned on me: Had I, too, not been irrationally jumpy and distrusting since my entanglement with the grifter? Were there not totally harmless social interactions and daily rituals I now sought desperately to avoid out of the depths of my own recent trauma? Blossom, skittish and fearful of everyone and everything when we first met her, had been able to reclaim her sense of peace and the ability to trust precisely because of the love, patience and understanding we’d given her. So perhaps I ought to give myself some love, patience and understanding as well.

That was when I first realized that Blossom was a teacher.

The second time I realized this was when Fig pointed out that we were being sent on a kind picaresque to find her, going around our town and having conversations and experiences we wouldn’t have occasion to otherwise. This was on the second or third day of looking for Blossom after the humid Wednesday morning when I’d accidentally dropped her leash and she’d inexplicably bolted in the millisecond before I could pick it up: Fig and I were both exhausted from pounding pavement, but heartened by the warmth we were greeted with when we informed people that we’d lost our dog. Only a small handful of interactions were adverse – the rest were enthusiastic and compassionate. Fellow animal lovers, small business owners, residents of apartment buildings and detached houses, hippies and normies, riders of scooters, schoolchildren and their teachers, purveyors of gas station food, community organizers and spiritual leaders: they all said they’d keep an eye out and do what they could to find her. Residents of the apartment building next to us even started a small search party of their own. The printing team at the local Staples went above and beyond in printing our lost dog flyers, giving us price breaks whenever they could. Friends from town canvassed with us, leaving each of those flyers taped to mailboxes and front doors. The post office and local police shared our flyers widely – one officer seemed keen to search for her as if she were a missing person. She was a member of our family, after all.

And when I found her in a condition I don’t care to describe here, it was these same local friends who helped us: aiding in the retrieval and dressing of her body, gifting us a succulent, bringing us food when we were too grief-stricken to remember to eat, let alone cook. A pernicious scarcity mindset played as much a role in Blossom’s passing as it did in my grifting, and these events are now being felt in my brain and body in the worst way – redoubled since the awful events of March, even. But what remains true is the fact that Blossom has taught me a lot in between, her most important lesson being that there are more people in this world who want to give instead of extract, who want to fill my cup just as I want to fill theirs, to surround me and my family in love instead of isolation and deprivation.

Sweet Blossom, even though you’d had quite a hard go of it before meeting us, we are so thrilled by how quickly you blossomed. You loved meeting your new cat-siblings, Bubba and Cowboy, and didn’t even care when Cowboy got peevish and meowed at you as you trotted happily past him. You adored your dog-sister, Mina, and often slept cuddled up with her – sometimes even resting your entire lower half on her head! You were such a silly, muppety teddy bear, and Mina thanks you every day for teaching her how to be brave.

Words cannot describe how much you will be missed. Thank you for the self-compassion you taught me. Giving you big hugs when you were scared reminded me that I should give myself one whenever I’m scared, too. You were an utter joy for Fig: she beamed and giggled whenever you chewed up Post-Its or socks or your croissant chew toy. She loved walking with you and talking to you and brushing your gingerbread fur and caring for you. You were the puppy light of her life.

We’re heartbroken that we didn’t get to know you long enough to hear your bark, but we’re so glad your beautiful, playful spirit continues on. Goodbye, Honeyblossom. We love you so.

Blossom's Many Joyful Moods

If you would like to make a donation in Blossom’s memory, please do so to St. Francis Care Animal Shelter in Murphysboro, IL or Border Tails Rescue in Northbrook, IL.

PLEASE: If you spot a lost dog or cat with or without collar, leash/harness or any other form of identification, notify your local animal control, a local rescue shelter, or your local police immediately. The animal is in fight-or-flight mode and will almost certainly not come to you when called. Chasing after the animal and/or trying to keep them will only scare and endanger them more. Odds are very high that these animals have parents who are looking for them – they are a member of someone’s family, so please return them.

PET OWNERS: If your pet is microchipped, please register the microchip. If your pet is ever lost and the microchip is scanned by animal control, a shelter, or a vet, you will be notified of the pet’s location and be able to retrieve them. Also, if your pet is lost and on the run in fight-or-flight mode, they will respond to signals like those in this video, not you calling their name: