In Memory of a Friend
Photo Credit: Author
In Memory of a Friend
2012–2025
The following is an obituary of a dog. If reading it might be upsetting, consider this your invitation to step away.
***
I grew up reading newspapers on American military bases in the nineties, an era that lasted a little longer overseas. We had an N64 with one game (GoldenEye), and a family computer that lived in a “computer room,” but I preferred reading—anything I could get my hands on, really. But I especially loved newspapers, mostly for the obituaries.
I didn’t understand death then, but I understood the strange, shining intimacy of strangers trying to hold on to someone through language, through witness. When done right, an obituary is a love letter disguised as a public notice; when done badly, it is unintentionally hilarious. Either way, it is an act of devotion.
So when my dog died this past August, I felt I owed her the same devotion I’d seen in those pages. No major newspaper would print a dog’s obituary, and I don’t know if local papers even run obits anymore. Luckily, the Law Weekly is a benevolent dictatorship in which I still hold power (for a few months), so here we are.
For Arya, I miss you every day (eight-six at the time of writing).
***
To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one—and here he lies.
— Lord Byron
Arya “Kitten” Demitry, a forty-five-pound reincarnated cat trapped in the body of a dog, died this August the 30th, the day before her thirteenth birthday, at 4:00 p.m., after struggling with a variety of illnesses, old age being the worst of them.
What follows is a tribute to my dearest friend, the most strategically aloof, ruthless killer of plushies, singer of the highest caliber howls, queen of deep grass pounces, judgmental glances; a player of intricate games, both mental and physical, a cheese-lover, loyal companion, and the absolute love of my life.
***
I got Arya shortly before I turned seventeen. I had already been living on my own for almost a year, and she entered that isolation like a flare. Our bond was immediate and intense. She was my greatest joy, love, protection—my structure, my witness, my tether— in my most formative years. Her partnership shielded me from a lot of the growing pains of young adulthood, and then from the growing pains of all my twenties—the loneliness, insecurity, and fear of the unknown. She made me brave.
She was there for the doomed early relationships, the first big heartbreak, the passing of my mother. She lived in a car with me, slept on couches with me, curled beside me in a tent. We saw the Grand Canyon together for the first time. We climbed mountains and fought off angry donkeys on a Route 66 road trip dubbed “Jack Kero-wacking” by myself and our roommate and friend, Evan.
She went with me to college, then graduate school, then law school. And honestly, if she had to pick one graduate program to kick the bucket in, I can’t fault her taste or sense of humor in choosing law school.
I thought we had a couple more years. She only grew more beautiful as she aged. As a puppy she looked so much like a coyote that I routinely had to assure people she was, in fact, a dog. In her last year she returned to that feral elegance, slim from her old lady picky eating—so I thought. I didn’t anticipate that the lethargy that took us to the ER would be a ruptured stomach tumor. Or that it was just one of many. Or that I’d lose her the next day.
Sometimes it feels like I disappeared with her.
Every difficult thing I’ve endured, I endured with her beside me. There was a version of me before her, but that Nicky wasn’t fully formed yet. The self that exists now—the self that grew through thirteen years with Arya—is impossible to disentangle from her. Without her, the edges of everything blur. Nothing feels real anymore.
And worst of all, I knew this was coming. Like all the best Greek tragedies, I realized the ending—our ending—was inevitable and unavoidable. As the scholar George Steiner writes, one of the bitter lessons of Greek tragedy is that “the forces which shape or destroy our lives lie outside the governance of reason or justice.” You can try to fight the universe, but you won’t win. You can only, at best, lose with dignity. It’s like being a Mets fan.
I came to the above realization when Arya got sick with a mystery illness back in 2019. Though it eventually passed, she was lethargic and not herself for a period of months. All she wanted to do was lie quietly on our patio in the cool October weather. She was not interested in any of our normal activities. And I discovered a truth about myself I had successfully avoided for years: I am not, nor have I ever been, the stoic and independent loner I believed myself to be. I loved hiking alone with Arya. I loved reading alone with Arya. I loved watching movies alone with Arya.
I had been fully deluding myself. It was suddenly so clear, and it terrified me. I knew that losing Arya would do more to me—worse to me—than any of the grief or pain I had yet experienced. There’s damage in life, and I’d seen a good amount—enough to know what to do, how to put my head down and cope. But in that moment, I knew. This would be something else.
So I tried, I really did. I tried to create a self that could exist without Arya. But this turned out to be a predictably impossible and even insulting task. And I realized there was nothing I could do to avoid the inevitable (other than not being born, if we’re keeping with the Greek tragedy parallels).
My entire identity as an Independent Person was really just the identity of a person who only needed one companion. And that companion is gone.
***
It’s been eighty-six days now. I’ve kept a journal, though it’s devolved into a chronicle of grief and the occasional brush against madness. Obituaries do include grief, but they also require transformation—the raw pain must be shaped into something gentler, something that can be held. I don’t know if I’ve pulled that off. I don’t know how anyone does, so soon after losing someone. I never thought about the speed of obituaries before.
Her essence is fading from our apartment. I’ve packed up her things, unbearably. I’ve kept some others close. Our blanket from freshman year of college has become a sort of totem. There’s still fur on it. It still smells like her—cold sunshine, loamy earth, wind-touched with a hint of clean laundry (due to her affection for hunting down errant dryer sheets and rolling in them). It’s losing the scent a little every day. I think about sealing it in a plastic bag and rationing out desperate, embarrassing whiffs, but I know she’d judge me for that, so I keep it beside me when I sleep at night, more valuable than John Keats’s tubercular relic. I try to read from her favorite poems of his, like “To Autumn,” but I keep getting stuck at letters he wrote near his death: “I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter.”
***
In September, a burn on my right-hand pinky finally began healing. Burns take forever to heal, and I’d gotten this one on a candle-lit metal lantern on the porch a few days before she died. She hadn’t wanted to sit outside, but still liked to be close by in case she was needed. She was lying just inside the doorway on my bed, and when she heard me yelp she came to check on me. The burn finally healing sent me into a spiral. I know I’m still fighting the inevitable as time goes on, and I’m still losing.
I know I’m not the first person to experience any of this. I still find to-do lists scattered everywhere and as usual Arya has her own prominent heading. Her personal list reminds me to make her an acupuncture appointment, buy the groceries I used to make her meals, submit her to the indignity of teeth brushing—this week, on Friday. I throw them away when I find them, because what else is there to do? But it has added a new layer of grief for me. I’m watching an erasure of our life together. In fact, I am participating in it actively. The me that shared a life with her for thirteen years is slipping away. Soon there will be a me that has never touched her, never buried my face in the thick fur of her ruff. There will be a me that doesn’t automatically expect to see her in my apartment—our apartment, a me that no longer pauses expectantly when opening any type of crinkly package, waiting for her to magically apparate to be nosy, a me that doesn’t feel the overwhelming wrongness that is going to sleep every night without her. Grief is a companion I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Even outside the acute pain, I feel constantly as if I’ve forgotten something vital. I’ve realized this sensation is the aftershock of an uneven death—one side gone, one left standing. Significant loss is radioactive. The initial explosion devastates; the fallout lingers in increments.
And grief shifts the axis of your world. It breaks the architecture of reality in some imperceptible but irreversible way. It is the stoat at CERN, gnawing the wires of the Higgs-Boson collider and knocking you into the wrong universe.
Thirteen years of someone riding shotgun is hard to shake.
Sometimes I still catch myself singing to her: “Why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near? Just like me, they long to be close to you.” My singing always embarrassed her, I think. She acted above sentimentality, but she stayed close.
***
Arya and I lived together for thirteen years and were never apart for longer than two months. I made my most important decisions in accordance to a schedule that conformed most with our spending time together, the timing of law school being one such decision. As she aged and developed some stomach issues, we made countless trips to our vet and dear friend, Dr. Tawna Purcell, and eventually I ended up cooking daily for my old lady and her discerning palate. At times, she would refuse food unless hand fed with chopsticks (no forks), a fact that provided unending amusement to Tawna and the staff at Earlysville Animal Hospital.
Arya had many friends, despite her personality quirks and overall aloof tendencies. She adored my freshman roommate, Ali, and grudgingly tolerated our friends on the Virginia Men’s Rowing team. She came to the college radio show I hosted with my friend Paul, to sisterhood events during my brief foray into being a sorority girl, and to my office when I worked as a teaching assistant in graduate school, where she was stoically polite to my students and very much expected compensation for her efforts.
When I worked late nights as a bartender, she loved to spend time with our housemates (when we had them) but particularly with our good friend Wendy, who would come to hang out with her while I was gone and claimed Arya liked some TV shows (Stargate SG-1) but not others (Survivor, Jeopardy). Arya gravitated to cat people and people who treated her like a cat, but had a soft spot for certain individuals that were objectively too loud and physically affectionate for her—namely Evan and Conor.
Our favorite thing to do was be in nature, especially in the fall and winter, where we cold-weather creatures were happiest. We could be found most early mornings on the stretch of the Rivanna River trail that starts at Darden Towe Park and runs all the way down to the old abandoned mill. In the warmer months, I couldn’t keep her out of the river, and she would alternate between frenzied sprints around the shallows, snapping at fish and grass, and wading around slowly at neck-level, eyes closed, nose to the breeze, soaking it all in like a tiny god taking milk. She loved the river turtles and hated the muskrats, particularly the bastards at Mint Springs Park. She used her proficiency in all things nature to help with several foraging expeditions with me and colleagues from the Alley Light, joyfully digging up sassafras roots and chewing on twigs.
Arya leaves behind her best friends: our college roommates and friends Mikaela, Maeve, and Helena; our friends Effie, Allen, Billy, Connor, Suhaib, Felicity (our Ghost Adventures buddy), Smriti, Claire, Evan, Wendy; her favorite salt-lick and rough-housing partner, Conor; Andrea, who introduced her to the magic of carving pumpkins (a delicious October treat for her), and our restaurant industry friends Niko, Hilary, and both Annas; my father; our oldest friends Emily and Zach; our friends at Earlysville Animal Hospital; our newer friends—Lucy, our 1L section-mates, and our neighbors Anya, Kevin, and Juna (who was really wearing down Arya’s aloof-ness to puppy cuteness); many more I haven’t named; and, of course, me.
And she leaves behind our vocabulary: our hundreds of inside jokes and bits; her nicknames, from Kitten to Stinch (an accidental combination of stinky and stench); our words. She leaves behind a lifetime of memories and thousands of photos with her tongue stuck out to varying degrees. She leaves me with gratitude, both for her existence in my life and for the relationships we’ve shared with our friends for all these years; and gratitude for our DVM friend, who came to our home to help me let her go and cried with me, and our breath slid together for a moment, the way wolves harmonize in the dark. I don’t think I’ll forget that as long as I live.
She leaves behind a legacy of love, and beauty, and her lessons to me: what it is to love something too much—to love someone more than yourself, to be utterly decent and kind but no one’s bitch, what genuine loyalty looks like and feels like—to me, it will always feel like a bony spine pressed firmly against mine when settled into bed at night.
In the words of Lynn Crosbie, whose obituary for her dog Francis moved me to tears well before I lost my Arya:
***
“I do not know where he is now, where he went when the light vanished from and deep into his eyes. But I pray he is running in a huge field with a pack of his long-departed friends, napping on the clouds I saw him understand through the plane window, and listening to me, occasionally, when I sing for him, brokenly,
Forsaken, jagged, but grateful to God for giving me my one and only, the shining superstar I intend to find one fine night,
I will find you, I told my dying dog. And for the first time, I went home without him and slept where I sleep, curved around the negative space he has left behind the echoes and devastating silence, yet still, there is life.
There is life in the lessons he left me, and be good he tells me, as he and all his soft, fragrant beauty escape me with every breath I take.”
Goodbye, Arya. There’s so much more I want to say. You are the very best of friends, and I will always miss you.
Until we meet again.
N
