As I crept into bed last night at two am Sarah was fast asleep. Within a minute she started to talk in her sleep. It sounded like she was calling for help but the words were gibberish. She then settled down again but didn't look like she was sleeping so I asked her if she was awake and if she remembered talking her sleep. She didn't remember talking but she told me that her dream had forced her awake because it was a nightmare where she was being suffocated intentionally by our baby. We don't have a baby.

In general when I am about to die in a dream it forces me awake. I've had a few dreams like that. When Ron and I were living in the studio apartment in Cambridge above 930 Mass Ave. he went home to Chicago for the week and left me alone in the building I had a dream that I was in a convenience store and a crazy truculent man with a gun was holding-up the store. The crazy man found me cowering on the floor and I pleaded with him not to shoot me but he pointed the gun at me and fired. I could feel the bullet beginning to enter my skull as my eyes bolted open and my body filled with adrenaline. I pounced out of bed. Neither Sarah or me sleep well when nobody is beside us. We both grew-up with siblings and never got accustomed to sleeping alone. I was one of the people who was happy to sleep in a double or a triple when other fraternity brothers were fighting over the few coveted single rooms available. Among my worst fears is to be alone.

This morning my phone was ringing at seven thirty am. Sarah was getting ready to go for her day. I looked at the callerID and saw that it was from David Housman, my dad. I had an immediate feeling of dread because I don't get calls with unexpected good news before 8am on a weekday. I assumed that something terrible had happened to one of the dogs. I imagined a car accident. He let me know that my grandmother Evelyn in Toronto had unexpectedly passed away.

The morning was a scramble to find Lisa. Nobody could reach her on the phone. Dad called the T station and the token collector said that they had seen two folksingers enter the subway so dad and I discussed going into common T stops where Dave and Lisa might be performing to find them. Luckily Lisa was actually home feeling sick and eventually called dad so we were all back together by two o'clock rushing to get to the airport to catch the flight to Toronto. In the car ride over Lisa and my parents were talking about Dave's father who had a heart attack over the weekend while he was working in the hospital. He is having open heart surgery tomorrow. The mood in the car was very somber as we felt the combined weight of another relative who was recently diagnosed with cancer, the hundred thousand people dead from the tsunami and hundreds dying from suicide bombers every month. Lisa mentioned one web site she had visited on New Years that was advertising that this would be the best New Years ever. Dave noted how out of touch the author must have been. I thought back and realized that it was just an assumption I had made a few days ago that all was going well in the world as a grand new year had begun.

Now I am here in Toronto with my whole immediate family on my mother's side. We aren't very big. There were seven of us and now there are six of us. I am mainly in shock because my grandmother had been the stronger of my grandparents. My grandfather is nearly blind, doesn't hear well, and broke his hip in the fall. Grandma Evelyn was tall and always fixing dinner complete with tea and cookies whenever I arrived even a few months ago. We would all debate politics and economics and I would never agree with my grandfather. I think I got a strange gene that gives me pleasure when arguing from him. Now I could see my grandfather slouched in his chair alert but trapped in a decaying body and more than ever he was almost alone in the world. I could almost see myself as him and I counted the years in my head. In less than sixty years I am slouched in that chair asking the question - what is the point of living like this? I wondered who would be around me then.

My mother has always had challenges with her family so her mother's sudden death is difficult for her. She has been arguing with them for the past few years because she wanted them to relate to her in a more loving and informal way. It didn't ever work well and both she and they got frustrated with each other. Dave told Lisa last summer when we visited Toronto after the Dylan conecert that it was like my grandparents were a family of penguins who gave birth to a rainbow colored unicorn and they didn't know what to do with her. Mom was touched by this. I didn't have such beautiful things to say so I just kept quiet.

So she now is feeling guilty because she lost the contact that she had with them when she reached out to change their relationship and she has regrets that she didn't spend more time with them. Now there will never be a resolution and reconciliation that she had hoped might arrive.

It is hard not to think about my relationship with my mother when I hear her talk about her relationship with her parents. It often sounds like she is talking to me about us when she is talking about them. We have our own troubles and have fought about some of the same things she has always worried about with her relationships with her parents. Her relationship with Lisa is much more emotional than her relationship with me. I am more stoic and more cold. I don't show much affection and love. My mother worries that I don't ever call her and I avoid her when she calls. She tells me that she is hurt when I don't comment on her poems and that she wishes we could have a closer connection like she has with Lisa.

I go out with my dad all the time to sporting events like the Patriots games and the Red Sox games. With my mom there isn't that natural overlap of activities. We discussed going to plays but since we had the discussion six months ago we still haven't gone to a play. We had one good chat over lunch in Newton Center a month back when we both found ourselves in Newton because I was returning the car to the space. Now I have a space again in Brookline so that won't happen by accident again. I imagined that I might be a penguin whose mother is a colorful unicorn and she doesn't know what to do with me.

I haven't seen a lot of death in my life so far. I didn't have the heavy gut emotional reaction that my mother, sister, and aunt had. I did relate to her death in my own way. In bits and pieces I felt many of the things that they are feeling now from when Bijoux, my pug dog puppy died.

When I got Bijoux I had been depressed because the Internet bubble had burst and my life around me had seemed to burst along with it. I had needed to lay-off my girlfriend or at least be the one to break the news to her. I had been in a real funk but when I got that puppy I could see the world through these wonderful fresh childlike eyes. He wanted to sniff everything, eat everything, follow me anywhere. I fell totally in love with him and my world outlook was hopeful again. I could feel it the day he arrived.

In the fall of 2002 Falkoff and I went on a hiking trip and I figured it was a perfect place to take a ten month old pug dog, to the Franconia notch trail and to sleep under the stars. Pug dogs aren't the most athletic of animals but Bijoux was fit because I would keep him chasing balls and sticks and playing with other area dogs in Brookline. As we hiked up the mountain he would stop and bark at streams until I would carry him across. He seemed to stop to eat mushrooms which I kept trying to stop him from eating.

We camped out at a site in the woods near nightfall and after Falkoff and I pitched our tent I placed Bijoux in his pug dog carrying case. It was just big enough for him to turn around once but he looked cute as though he had his own personal tent. He usually went right to sleep once inside. I was exhausted from the hike and went quickly to bed but I heard him barking in his carrier and I worried that he might bother the other campers.

In the middle of the night I heard thumping sounds from outside the tent and I took a minute to figure out what they were coming from. I got out of the tent to see Bijoux inside of his carrier covered in vomit and convulsing. I quickly pulled him out into the cool night air hoping that whatever he had eaten was causing him a temporary discomforting and confusing hallucinogenic trip. He looked-up at me confused at everything that was going on and I cuddled him to comfort him. He set into more convulsions with short barks in between and within an hour of these rhythmic siezures the siezures became more powerful and I could see him struggling and barking louder as though he was fighting some horrible terror. At the final point he let out a long loud bark for over a minute and all four of his legs sprung out stiff as I held him. I could tell that he was dead or dying so I tried to give him an improvised form of mouth to mouth but it seemed more like I was blowing into the wide mouth of a dead dog. I was crying and in shock.

The hard part about watching someone or something that you love die is that it is never a moment you want to remember them by but it is among the most memorable moments of your life. As people were talking about my grandmother dying I kept thinking back to how I felt and how I still feel about my puppy Bijoux. Nancy feels terrible guilt for not having taken my grandmother to the hospital. I still wonder whether I accidentally suffocated my dog by placing him inside the carrier, or if he died of being trapped in his own vomit in the carrier, if I had killed him through heat stroke by pushing him too hard on a hot day, or if I had let him eat a poisonous mushroom. How could it not be my fault that this beautiful creature dependent upon me for every decision in his life that I loved more than anything or anyone in the world was suddenly dead before he had ever led a full year of life.

My mother told us that she still remembers when her grandmother died. She had been there and seen her grandmother just before she passed away. My mother would see visions of her grandmother's death haunting her when she saw a picture of her grandmother. I sometimes see a similar image of Bijoux when I look at his portrait in the hall outside our bathroom. It isn't a complete nightmare of an image. I see his death in a picture of him from the first day he arrived in my life but I also see life and my love for him and I am filled with a mix of loving emotions with the guilt. The picture isn't just haunted with one memory. As I grow older I can see that more and more ghosts will come to live with me and that ghosts are the cost of loving people that will eventually die before I do.

I could see the look of horror and despair that Nancy had when she cried as she told us how ghastly it was to shop for a casket. We had hiked Bijoux's body down and out of the trail for ten miles to the car with his stiff cooling body in my backpack. I called Stephanie to tell her the news after I had packed the body in a box from a snowboard shop. Falkoff and I drove home quietly and when I returned to Brookline I handed her his hard stiff body and she hugged his body and cried with me for nearly half an hour. We took him to Angel Memorial hospital since we thought they would know what to do but animal hospital emergency rooms prioritize cases based on urgency of need and a dead puppy is near the bottom of the list. After a few frustrated hours sitting in a waiting area with Bijoux's body we were finally given the option to either cremate him or bury him.

With the family huddled together around the dining table that I had been served by my grandmother every time I arrived the telephone behind my grandfather's shoulder rang every once in a while. One of the calls was Nancy's friend and it was clear that she hadn't heard the news. It is so hard to tell your friends when you are grieving. Your instinct is to go back into your cave and hide. I recall waiting two days before Stephanie and I went for a walk in the park where we used to walk Bijoux and telling the dog owners that we had seen every day that he had passed away. That was a second wave of grief as we had to watch the shock and grief of our friends reverberate around us.

Last summer when I went camping with Sarah we were together in the tent and sleeping. Near dawn I started to dream that a killer was standing outside the tent watching us sleep. In my dream I tried to be quiet hoping that if he thought we were asleep and not going to fight with him that he might rob us and not hurt us. He kept coming closer and opened the door to the tent. I stayed pretending to be asleep in my dream. He lunged towards me and Sarah with a knife in his hand ready to attack and kill us. I leapt up out of my sleep and into the air to fight him and stood in the tent petrified and confused between my fantasy and reality looking to confront the killer and crying out.

For me, I think of the fear of death and the fear of being alone as one integrated nightmare. That is why it is so tough to take a risk to love and to move forwards when someone I love passes away.