Rocking the Pink by Laura Roppé

air into my lungs and then expelling it required a massive effort. Making a grilled cheese sandwich for Chloe was a Herculean feat.
    I cried easily and often.

    My face felt heavy. Numb. I was sinking, sinking, sinking into darkness.
    And Brad wasn’t faring any better.
    Brad had never been a crier; I could remember only a handful of times I’d seen him cry in the twenty-three years I’d known him. And yet now he could not contain his despair. While I put on a brave face to watch a movie with the girls, Brad skulked off to our bedroom to cry in private, and then, when I could no longer maintain my stiff upper lip, we’d switch places. At night, after the girls had gone to sleep, we lay in bed together, relieved to be able to break down together in the privacy of our bedroom. Every night, we clutched each other like rock climbers clinging to a boulder.
    The closest I’d ever come to feeling this way was when my beloved childhood dog, Darrow, died in his old age during my senior year of high school. Back when I was five, my parents came home from a weekend away with a black-and-white terrier mix from the pound. Almost hyperventilating with joy, I stormed outside, into the middle of the street, and shouted at the tippy-top of my lungs, “We got a puppy!”
    At this, children swarmed out of neighboring houses and into our back yard, eventually huddling tightly around the main attraction. Amidst our shouting and cooing, that poor, overwhelmed puppy yakked, and then, on wobbly legs, teetered, with hardly a splash, right into the swimming pool. Like a superhero, Dad scooped the soggy ball of fur out of the water with our blue pool net and plopped him back onto the patio.
    â€œWhat should we name him?” Dad asked later, when the commotion had died down.

    â€œLemon Drop,” Sharon suggested.
    â€œFruity,” I proffered.
    But Dad, a Stanford-educated attorney and the man I loved most in the whole world, dismissed our suggestions with a wave of his hand. “We’ll call him Darrow,” he declared with full authority, “after the famous trial lawyer Clarence Darrow.”
    And thus Dad foretold, or perhaps even charted, my future.
    When Darrow died as an old dog, I lovingly laid every single photo of him ever taken on my bed, creating a makeshift shrine, and then reclined facedown right on top of them, my heart disintegrating like plastic wrap in a microwave, my grief a bottomless well. For three days, I wailed my lungs out on top of those photos, not knowing how to climb out of my dark hole.
    I’d adored Darrow’s hangdog eyes and tear-sopping fur—and his pragmatic advice through the travails of my childhood had always been right on the money. No matter how much I had pestered him—trying repeatedly but in vain to perform the Lady and the Tramp spaghetti trick with him, or forcing him to emulate the closet scene from E.T. by peeking his head out of my stuffed-animal collection — he had offered unwavering and uncomplicated companionship.
    On the third day of my grief at losing my little four-legged attorney, Brad came over, kissed my swollen eyelids, and said, “Baby, you’ve got to pull yourself together now.” And so I did.
    But this—this horrific diagnosis, this looming death sentence of mine—was exponentially more excruciating than losing my beloved Darrow, though I’d have jumped in front of a moving train for him.
    And this time, Brad was in no condition to stitch up the gaping
hole in my heart. He was falling apart, too. At night, as we lay in bed, clutching each other, he whispered, “I can’t live without you” over and over, and tightened his grip on my body as if he could prevent me, by sheer force of will, from slipping away.
    The thought that Brad could not survive without me—perhaps literally—terrified me, since, I figured, he might not have a choice in the matter. But that wasn’t what I told