Dogs

Dogs matter to Eileen less as a source of fear than as the objects of a grief she finds difficult to justify to others. Through Mona, her childhood Scottish terrier, the narrative sets a dog’s death beside her mother’s and shows how the animal’s loss becomes one of Eileen’s most private and enduring attachments.

Mona and the Experience of Loss

Eileen describes Mona as the runt of her litter and says the dog died the week before Eileen’s mother. She insists that her heart was broken as much by Mona’s death as by her mother’s, though for a long time she felt ashamed of that comparison. To Eileen, the difference between the two losses is not difficult to explain: her mother was mean, while Mona was nice. The bluntness of that judgment rejects the idea that grief for an animal needs to be defended through elaborate reasoning.

The account of Mona’s burial makes that attachment physical and difficult. Eileen found the dog belly-up in tall, uncut grass, dead beneath the bleaching sun. She cried with her back against the house, then covered Mona with a wet pillowcase. It took her a day to return. When she lifted the cloth, the sight made her gag; she vomited chicken and vermouth into the dry dirt. Using a trowel, she spent several hours digging a hole, then pushed Mona’s body in with her foot because she could not bring herself to touch it with her hands. She covered the grave with brittle earth.

A Grief Met with Silence

The household gives Eileen little recognition of what the burial meant. A week later, her father kicked over Mona’s dish of stale, smelly kibble and dismissed the dog. Eileen threw the dish out and told no one. A few days afterward, her mother died, and Eileen finally let her tears flow openly. The contrast does not diminish her grief for her mother; it reveals how the earlier loss had been contained, with no one around her acknowledging Mona as a subject of mourning.

Eileen later admits that the story may not be entirely accurate: she has gone over it repeatedly for years, whenever she felt it useful or necessary to cry. That qualification makes the memory itself part of the account of grief. The scene remains emotionally consequential even as Eileen recognizes that repeated retelling may have shaped its details.

Dogs and Eileen’s Later Plans

On a later drive, Eileen sees a woman passing along Moody Street in a bright red parka, pulled by two German shepherds as if on a sled. She says she does not like dogs, not because they frighten her, but because their deaths are harder for her to bear than people’s. Remembering Mona, she links this aversion to the intensity of attachment and anticipated loss rather than to fear of the animals themselves.

Back in X-ville, Eileen looks out over the icy backyard and thinks about Mona’s grave. As she considers leaving, she wonders whether she should dig up the bones and take them with her. She imagines putting on winter clothes and going out with a shovel, but does not try: the grave is unmarked, the ground would demand something like a pickax, and she doubts she could manage the labor. Mona’s burial thus marks a limit within Eileen’s plan to leave. She can imagine carrying the dog away, but the frozen earth and the difficulty of disturbing the grave keep the attachment rooted in the place she hopes to escape.

Narrative Significance

The dogs’ place in Eileen’s story turns private, seemingly disproportionate sorrow into evidence of what her family fails to see. Mona is not simply a measure of Eileen’s feelings about her mother: the dog has her own particular history in Eileen’s memory, from being the runt of the litter to lying beneath the pillowcase and receiving a hurried, painful burial. The repeated return to Mona connects loss with silence, shame, and Eileen’s imagined departure, while the discarded dish and unmarked grave show how little of that bond is made visible to anyone else.