After making big plans for the summer, new developments at home changed my focus. Writing has taken a backburner, but I wrote this to process and wanted to share. My usual posting day, Tuesday, will this week be day zero. It will be a difficult evening. I don’t plan to have content out that day.

I have a coffin in my living room.

I pass it on the way to the kitchen for a drink of water. It stares at me as I settle on the couch. The wooden box stands bold in the corners of my vision, refusing to be ignored, insisting on some part of my brain acknowledging its presence.

I wanted to ask my partner to move it, but I couldn’t form the words. How does one speak casually of a coffin? It’s just a box, an empty, hollow box. Its emptiness carries heavy significance. I cannot lift it myself, not with that weight inside.

The click-click-click of nails on the kitchen floor, and incessant whine in the living room, and invisible puddles on the bedroom carpet press against my senses when I am tired and cranky and hungry and have other things to do. They grate on me, push my patience to its limit, but. I cannot imagine life without them. I cannot imagine the day these things are gone.

In a few days, these things will be gone.

The appointment is on Tuesday. “Countdown to goodbye,” I write online, posting videos and photos. Most of them are old images, from before. Before the decline, before the decision. Every day my stomach lurches as I type the number.

Today is 4.

4 days left.

I try to fill them well, though there isn’t much left. Naps and peanut butter and the various foods and treats we want to use up before it’s too late. Even peanut butter has lost its appeal this week.

On Tuesday we will take him out in the car together, three riding away, only two returning home.

My partner brought him home from the groomer with the wrong haircut. “For future reference-” I nearly said, but there will be no future haircuts. Today was the last one, and it’s over now. Too late. “Nevermind.”

There is a coffin in my living room, and it waits.