Post-Mortem: Chasing the Ghosts of Motherhood

Phoenix and I on our last big adventure. Shelter Cove, Lost Coast, CA. 2024.

(read posts and access the audio version on my Substack, Unsevered)

As I was out walking in my neighborhood this afternoon—passing parents unloading kids and dogs from their cars after a day of adventures—a different reflection began to take shape in my consciousness that requested my attention.

While I will publish the mystical and beautiful details of her passing in a few weeks, today calls for something else. Something deeper about my own life, my grief, and the meaning of loss when it pulls at something so undeniably archetypal that you cannot refuse its weightiness: motherhood.

A year ago, I was a mom.

Sure, a dog mom. But I was the only kind of mother I have ever been in this lifetime. And I was laying my baby to rest one last time.

With her death went the daily routine. The feeding schedule. The vet visits. The endless toy and treat purchases. The morning walks and afternoon park time. The daycare and training. The dog community who I saw nearly every day. The unrelenting pull to get home from wherever I was, regardless of how much fun I was having.

With her death went the part of myself that mothered, that parented, that loved fiercely as protector and guardian. With her death went that squeaky-cute-irritating voice I only used with her, and so many other parts of myself that she brought into being when I brought her home from the animal hospital in January of 2014.

When I lost her, I stopped being mom.

Which made it only the more disorienting when somebody would say “well, it was her time” or “it’s time to focus on other things now” or “that chapter is over and new opportunities lie ahead” or—the worst one of all—“now you’re free.”

These are unimaginable things to say to anybody who has just lost anybody.

Even more so when that loss is archetypally parental.

Searching for Ghosts

About four months after Phoenix died, I started looking—perhaps a bit obsessively—at rescue dogs. My Instagram algorithm dutifully transformed itself into a puppy-scape of black and tan pittie-rottie-shepherd mixes, many of whom looked a lot like my girl.

I visited a few, even driving to Santa Barbara and to Calabasas wondering if I was about to collide with my next soul dog.

Inevitably I would hear that intuitive “no” coming from somewhere beyond my own thoughts. This is not your dog.

But I would resist the message and proceed to entangle myself in an anxiety-addled tug-of-war within my exhausted heart for several days. Should I? Shouldn’t I?Mercifully, close friends and family would patiently listen as I rattled off the pros and cons, as I hedged and tried to read the tone in their voices for some inclination of what to do.

I already knew, but I was possessed by some compulsion, some shadowy complex that looked on as I twisted myself into knots over a wild and handsome Dutch shepherd mix named Dewey, then swore off the whole quest for a dog, and then inevitably found myself filling out another application a month or two later for a loyal and loving mutt named Mags. No sooner had I walked away from him and all of this rescue business than I met Cactus, a whip smart Malinois-pittie mutt who responded to all of my training cues in a crowded adoption event. I regretfully, almost shamefully slunk away that day feeling the dismay of the rescue volunteers after giving them some false hope he had finally found his home.

The truth was, I didn’t want a dog. Not quite yet. I had some big events on the near horizon to tend to first. But the impulse persisted.

Maybe I was still searching for Phoenix. Every meet-and-greet began with some unconscious anticipatory hope that she would come running out from a kennel, a puppy again. I’m sure this is how it looked from the outside.

Then along came Pine.

He was the first dog who didn’t feel like Phoenix to me (even though everybody else pointed out how similar they looked). He was also the first puppy I met who didn’t immediately trigger some deep inner anxiety, like he didn’t carry some karmic baggage.

So, I said yes to a trial run with him: a weekend foster-to-adopt situation that turned into a full week when the rescue organization was unprepared to take him back after two days.

As I adjusted to having this extremely high-energy shepherd-rottweiler puppy in my home doing parkour off of my sofas and stealing anything fun he could get his mouth around while I howled with laughter and corrected with structure, something happened.

A part of myself returned like the violent gasping inhale of someone submerged too long in water.

Through Pine I was reunited with motherhood, with that essential piece of myself that was equal parts tired and devoted. I felt a resurgence of life.

Each puppy I encountered during the year was, in part, an unconscious and unrelenting pursuit of the ghost of myself as mom.

Laying the Mother to Rest

At the end of the week, I gave Pine back to the rescue instead of adopting him.

As I returned to an empty and silent home once again—just barely a year after losing Phoenix—I collapsed into an uncontrollable and excruciating heap of grief for the mother I was for her, and for Pine, the mother I was no longer for anybody or anything. I fully succumbed to the weight of my heart where a wound had festered, a wound that was asking to be honored and healed with each obsessive adoption pursuit.

I’ve written about my experience of maternal ambivalence elsewhere, but having children was never a driving factor in my life. I knew two things after growing up in a chaotic home where my mom raised three of us on a stretched teacher’s salary after an ugly divorce from a largely absent and wildly unfaithful husband and father: (a) I did not want to have kids if I didn’t have money, and (b) I did not want to raise kids alone, or unequally in partnership.

If I met the right partner and they wanted children, a partner who was down for egalitarian parenting, and who could help provide financial stability, I would probably decide to have kids. Maybe. Perhaps. Who knows. But I was never compelled in the way my friends seemed to be—more focused instead on tending the soul and spirit of the world around me.

What I do know is that in my early 40s, Phoenix’s passing felt like a simultaneous curtain call on both my real and hypothetical roles as mom.

I had to face her death while also confronting the inherent residual grief of a parallel life unlived.

I understand now why neuroscientists and psychologists most closely correlate pet loss to child loss than any other type of loss.

Parental energy is archetypal, pulsing through most of us, and it needs to be expressed. There’s an unrelenting sort of pain when that energy was flowing and suddenly has nowhere left to go, nobody and nothing to mother or father. There are so many ways to become a parent aside from procreation—and for over a decade Phoenix was mine.

I did not just lose her in her dying.

Resurrecting Motherhood

Each of the dogs I visited this past year connected with me nearly instantaneously. They felt secure in my presence, engaged earnestly, and cared for. They knew I was a safe harbor.

This is one of my innate qualities. It has had various forms of expression throughout my life, from protecting my younger brother when we were kids to leading students and groups of adults into the wilderness to learn about survival and selfhood.

In my time with Phoenix, motherhood materialized in its most primal and parental nature. And once this aspect of oneself is unleashed, it demands expression.

For now, this energy begins to flow toward the culture through my work and writing, but I also feel like the runway has cleared (thank you, Pine) so that the next dog(s) can arrive, free from the complexes and compulsions that have tied me up in a sometimes-unlivable grief since Phoenix’s death.

Phoenix was the gravitational epicenter of my life.

She was the absolute best thing about my day, every single day, for over a decade.

When the heart outside of your body stops beating, as hers did at 11:37 a.m. on May 28, 2025, the mother turns to ash. But then she rises again and demands creative expression. Just like the Phoenix.