A Dog of Her Own

Zoetica Ebb
9 min readJan 17, 2024

I first saw Micron through a screen while browsing a Los Angeles shelter’s website. A grainy 2008-cellphone photo reduced her features to something resembling a cross between a shadow and a bat, the ears a formidable wingspan. She was alone in a huge cage when I first met her, growling from the shadows for a solid ten minutes before emerging to inspect me. When I first brought her home, hard-won as she was in a silent auction at the shelter, my flatmate suggested I name her “Shadow”; it would have made sense, the way this tiny creature followed me around. “Micron” sounded better and it suited her; small and ink-black. Micron also happens to be the brand name of the pens I use to draw.

There were so many firsts between us.

I was on the precipice of monumental life changes when Micron joined my side: career highs and lows, deaths of friends and relatives, The Worst Break-up, a woeful first marriage, finally leaving Los Angeles, marrying again (exuberantly this time), and several intercontinental moves.

At the first house I lived in after LA, Micron took charge of its two resident dogs (a great dane and a pit bull mix) with one short, vicious fight. After just two weeks, she began to herd them and took to sleeping on their faces like she’d always run the show. She was there when my husband, Gašper, and I moved to Ireland, staying good and silent as we hid her in a communal hostel while searching for an apartment. We managed to hide her many more times after that, in hotels, trains, and Air BnBs; this dog was an expert at staying quiet and still. She joined us on road trips across America when we had to move back for a short while, traipsing across Arches National Park, sniffing the strange air by the Salton Sea, distrusting waterfalls near Lake Tahoe.

Micron saw a glimpse of Paris, where we flew first when moving to London just to make sure she could stay in the plane cabin instead of the luggage hold. After Ireland, I promised that she wouldn’t see the inside of a cage again, so we flew Air France, which permits in-cabin dogs on flights to Paris, to keep that promise. We hired a man with a van to drive us from Paris to London, stopping in Calais to present her papers. He makes a steady living doing this, he told us.

Micron loved our first London home, a flat in Clapton with wall-to-wall carpet. She was absolutely obsessed with carpet, running and rolling on it to her heart’s content in those three years. She was perhaps her happiest there, when the entire pack was home during the first Covid lockdown and she could spend her days sleeping on me, or squeezed between Gašper and I. Despite all our adventures together, she was not particularly active when left to her own devices, preferring serene moments at home, especially in her later days.

Micron was there when we bought our house, another first. She was outraged when we tore out all the carpet inside, but it had to go. We kept the stupid astroturf in the garden just for her though, and she got to relish a few summers there, basking in the sun, listening to the bees when she could still hear. She was getting older, but joined us in Scotland and Dartmoor anyway. In the Cotswolds for my most recent birthday, we carried her across fields and forests on a nine-hour hike — her last.

When I was struck down by long Covid, she stayed on me, near me, watching me at all times, nursing me, licking my tears in the moments I lost hope. She’d done that any time I cried in her presence, earning herself one of her many monikers: Drinker of Sorrows. And she was. Once I started to return to myself, I drew us in a barren land, me, a small bedouin fighting to survive and leaning on Micron, my fierce protector, the size of an elephant. I couldn’t finish the drawing, but the point was to honour what she’d done for me all those months.

Around then Micron gradually lost her sight and hearing. Even as the vet assured me she was in peak health, her personality began to change. Her hind legs didn’t cooperate too well anymore and she began bumping into things. I could feel her exhaustion. When I watched her wobble around the garden this past summer I got the sense it could be her last. The medication stack grew. The interest in food waned. I knew what was coming. And although I started quietly panicking about Micron’s mortality when her first white hair appeared back in Dublin nearly ten years ago, now that we’ve had to let her go I’m experiencing grief on an unprecedented scale. A first I could do without.

When we came home without her on Friday morning after a final “Good girl, Micron” through heaving sobs, I laid on the floor and cried myself to sleep. After, Gašper and I took turns crying/consoling/crying/consoling. In the days since, I’ve noticed that amidst more intelligible feelings like “loss” and “sorrow”, there is another: abject fear. It’s the kind of fear I imagine one might feel faced with something truly anomalous, like a rift into another reality opening up in the middle of a meadow, or a surprise argument with a previously-inanimate object. Something is wrong.

As an analytical person who is reasonably acquainted with death, I’m compelled to interrogate this feeling. What’s the shape of this fear and why does my subconscious feel like it’s in mortal danger? Gašper and I have been talking about cognitive interdependence and considering exactly what I lost when Micron died. Besides the obvious moments when her absence is clear, like the times of day she used to get her walks or seeing vacant sunny spots in the garden, there is a sense of aberration which, I think, has to do with who she was to me. I lost a near-constant companion, sure, but also a touchstone, a protector, and even a moral compass. Someone who supported me through innumerable formative upheavals, helped me grow, and who could tell when anything was amiss from rooms away, hurrying over to quite literally take away my sadness.

Micron was no snivelling chump; she judged harshly and often, but she forgave absolutely. She loved me in a way humans are incapable of, no matter our aspirations to the unconditional. Her absence is a chasm and that boundless void terrifies me. As I continue to grieve her death and celebrate her life in these raw early days without her, the conclusion of the paper linked above resonates:

With the loss of the relationship, one also loses access to the differentiated portion of transactive memory held by the other. This loss will be recognized only slowly. As one fails to find phone numbers, recipes, household objects, or the like, it begins to become evident. But more profound losses will be noted as time goes by. One’s memory of favorite episodes will fade, almost inexplicably, because the other is not present to supply the differentiated details that one never stored for oneself. One will also lose the benefits of the other’s special skills, never again savoring that chocolate mousse or being able to look on a flat tire as a mere inconvenience. Indeed, because transactive retrieval is no longer possible, there will be entire realms of one’s experience that merely slip away, unrecognized in their departure, and never to be retrieved again. Because the other has served often as a context for one’s personal encoding of events, there will also be a personal deficit in retrieval. Everything one has learned in the presence of the other, even without depending on the other for transactive encoding or retrieval, will become a bit more difficult to retrieve from one’s personal memory. The other has regularly served as a backdrop for one’s experience, a part of the setting in which the experience was encoded. And even though the other may have played only a bystander’s role in the event, one’s encoding of the event is specific to the other’s presence and may not allow for retrieval without the other. (Daniel M. Wegner, T. Giuliano, Paula T. Hertel )

Although the authors refer to transactive verbal information offloading and retrieval in human relationships, when I consider the depth of connection between dogs and people, or, at the very least, that of Micron and myself, it makes perfect sense to extend cognitive interdependence theory to emotions. And then that fear seems reasonable, because without Micron in my life, I am in danger; in danger of losing access to the ineffable perspectives and joys I experienced with and through her. We shared so much. No one else could (or should) be who she was to me. She gave so much in our sixteen years together, and it’s all in me now.

A further selection of Micron fables below.

Micron preferred her own company with few exceptions, of which I’m proud to have been one, and it was only in her later years that she developed an interest in other dogs. I still remember our early outings at the dog park, when she’d find a high vantage point, usually a picnic table, bench, or tree stump, from which to observe the hoy-polloy.

Despite her chilly demeanour, Micron enjoyed one great infatuation with a small white dog belonging to a friend of mine and never got over him. For the rest of her life, she exhibited unusual levels of interest any time she saw a similar dog.

During our first week in Dublin, a grizzled, cheerful passerby saw Micron in the street, stopped, and rumbled, “Oy! Where’d ya get the moose?”. He meant, “mouse”, but his accent had other ideas. Thus another moniker emerged: Weeniemoose.

Micron was the very definition of strong opinions, loosely held. She absolutely despised horses until meeting a particularly mellow one in Cornwall, after which she was fine with them. For years, she hated bicycles, skateboards, scooters and rollerblades, but then stopped, seemingly suddenly.

Micron was cat-curious, and this never changed. When I first adopted her, my flatmate had a cat much larger than Micron, and she’d attempt to engage him in play, often chasing him around the apartment much to his dismay. When a stray tomcat began visiting our garden last year, she made him aware whose garden it was, but remained cordial.

Once Micron started trusting Gašper, she began to do the cat thing whenever he laid down on the floor to stare at the ceiling: come over, make sure he’s OK, then settle on his chest. He recalls this being endearing, but also distracting, as he usually lies down like that when there is serious thinking to be done.

Micron was a notorious trickster. Among her many adventures, she went to Slovenia, where she convinced Gašper’s mother that she had a limp. Gašper’s mom had never taken care of a dog before, and moreover, it was the dog of her then-new daughter-in-law. The stakes were high! Much fretting ensued, but when we had Micron looked at by a vet, he concluded she was fine. After this experience, she occasionally feigned limps for extra attention and to avoid walks.

Micron was an excellent judge of character. She only bit five people in her time with me; three of them deserved it, two were suspicious children with poor manners. She treated kids, puppies, and drunks with roughly the same measure of apprehension.

Micron’s obsession with bread, particularly croissants, was legendary. Not only did she know precisely when consumption of baked goods was going down, she’d be incensed if she didn’t get at least a morsel. Micron knew what was hers, and demanded it. Hence one of her monikers: Queen ‘Cron.

Micron loved dairy in all forms and could smell cheese from a great distance. Sometimes, when out for coffee, I’d ask the barista for a small saucer of milk to indulge her. One morning, I walked in on her atop the dining table, ravenously scarfing down a block of butter which had been left out to soften before breakfast. The look she gave me said, “How dare you interrupt my feast?”.

In Memoriam

Micron von Chewenstein (née von Wheezinstein AKA Queen ‘Cron AKA Weeniemoose AKA Drinker of Sorrows AKA Tetragrannycron)

2007–2024

--

--

Zoetica Ebb

Intergalactic Naturalist. Made in Moscow, steeled in LA, docked in London.