Billie Jean
In loving memory of the ones we leave behind.
They will stay with us, always.
Winter knew that something was amiss from the moment he came home. Both his parents were home from work and the grave silence of the house was an ill omen. They both looked up at the little snowshoe hare as he entered the room. He tossed his backpack to the floor.
"Where's Billie?" Winter asked, but due to his mild speech impediment it came out sounding like 'Whuh's Biwwie?' At 8 years old, he still had a mild slur in his speech. It got better over time with speech therapy but his nickname "Winter" stuck with him forever because he had trouble pronouncing his own name, Whitaker. "Whit-uh"
His parents exchanged a glance. His father, still dressed in his ACU from work, furrowed his brow and sighed deeply. Winter noticed the red ring around his mother's eyes. She had been crying earlier. Winter felt an icy pit in his stomach and his palms begin to perspire. Neither parent answered him.
"Mom? Where's Billie?" he asked again. Billie (or Billie Jean) was the family dog, a black Labrador retriever.
His father didn't say anything. His mother's eyes began to tear up.
"We took Billie to the vet," she said, her voice gravelly and quiet.
"Why?" Winter asked, alarmed, "Is she okay?"
She shook her head softly. Her husband spoke in her place. "Billie had a heart attack this morning. We didn't make it to the vet in time."
The sudden news hit Winter like a tidal wave and he stood there in the doorway, trying to absorb the impact. He refused to accept that his dog, his friend and companion long before he was even able to speak or crawl, was gone. But she was.
She had already aged to a mature dog by the time Winter was born, growing ever older as Winter grew up. He had never noticed anything wrong with her. She seemed as happy and boisterous as she had always been, if not a little tired sometimes. He hadn't even noticed the light graying around her muzzle, over looking it as one would the wallpaper as a part of the scenery. He had overlooked Billie's aging and the inevitability of her death by choosing to ignore it. He could never imagine losing his dog, nor his mother or father. Death was retribution for the bad guys and villains in movies. Death was a slapstick joke in cartoons where the characters would all come back alive and well in the next episode.
"I want to go see Billie," Winter said after a moment.
"Billie's gone, Whit," his father said.
Winter ignored his father's words. They were about as real as Death had been prior to his arrival home.
"I want to see Billie!" he said again, a little louder and indignantly.
His father stood up. There was a sunken, stern look in his face as he glowered down at the cub. Still dressed in his military uniform, he looked infinitely taller and imposing to Winter, yet defeated and broken.
"Billie died, Whit," his father said plainly with little flecks of impatience in his voice.
Winter's little paws curled into fists. Tears of hot anger brimmed in his eyes. He wanted to refuse what he heard. Death was becoming to him what he had always feared it had been. Not the running joke or retribution in movies but the lurking, omnipresent thief of the living. It was the verity that all living things will die.
Billie was dead. Billie was gone. Her last act on Earth was routine; to lay her head on the side of Winter's bed until he woke up. She had escorted him to the door, seeing her little hare cub off to school before going back to her bed for the last time. He realized in that moment that she would never be the first thing he sees when he wakes up. There would be no more walks around the neighborhood with Billie leading the way. No more trips through the play park and teasing the two ornery geese behind the fence on the way home. Death had come in and taken her away while Winter was at school, oblivious to the intrusion.
As Winter looked up at his towering father, he felt overwhelming anger. He felt it in his fists and in his head, boiling over and channeling throughout his body. He was angry at his father's cold callousness. The universal indifference of Death. Tears stung his eyes and rolled down his cheeks.
Suddenly, Winter let out a wild, shrill shriek. He screamed of pain and sorrow and loss and misplaced adolescent rage. He lunged at his father, like a David at Goliath. He kicked at his father's shins and punched at his waist, pounding his tiny fists against a brick wall. His father held him back by the shoulders and kneeled down to face the cub.
Winter shook softly. The anger was still fresh but his burst of energy had run out. He hung his head and cried, his face red and scrunched, tears rolling down his cheeks and hanging in beads on his quivering whiskers. For a moment, he expected words of comfort or some kind of solace from his father. He looked up into his father's stern, angry eyes and saw none to be given.
"Go to your room and don't come down until supper."
He looked to his mother. She was looking out of the window, crying gently again. He wouldn't understand through his own grief that she had lost a friend too.
Winter did as he was told but ran up the stairs stomping his paws and slammed the door. He threw himself on the bed and wailed into a pillow, leaving the anguished imprint of his eyes, nose, and mouth on it. He stayed there until the sun began to set and his room was filled with the dim, gray blue ambiance of the rain outside. He stayed in bed, watching the rain leave trails down his window and listening to his mother cooking downstairs. He lay alone with his thoughts of Billie, remembering her as the heartache gnawed at his chest.
As time went on, Winter accepted Billie's passing and helped honor her memory with a little plaque in the backyard. Not long after, there was another Billie in his life (Billie Holiday, a Welsh Corgi) which Winter learned to love as much as he had his first dog. He grew to accept Death as a part of Life, never forgetting the fragility of existence. How brief life passes and how rapidly a life can be snuffed out. He never forgot Billie Jean. But the hardest part of letting her go was never getting a chance to say goodbye.