My brother’s grief is a 16 year old slyph of a girl, in a white sheath dress. She lingers in my hydrangea bush.

Lauren’s grief is a book that has folded me into its pages. Its words bleed into my skin and pulls the words ensconced in my soul, in my veins, in my memories into its pages. Always, the words slip between surfaces. Inside of me. Around me. Through me. Away from me.

This morning, I awoke into an autumn dark room. The summer hours have shifted enough that 5:30 in the morning is no longer slate gray or tawny blue-gold. Instead, the dogs, bookending me, lift their heads as I shift under the covers, sit up to turn off my phone’s alarm before the bubbly claxon snaps my dreams and interrupts my prayers. In the darkness, I migrated to the bathroom to begin the morning routines. And in my wake, words spilled across the floor.

For a couple of days, I had a reprieve. I am a woman of faith, and I am utterly certain that God and Lauren had a chat and decided to put me into the cat distribution service/system (s-word). I wonder if it was karma for the fact that the smoky pit bull puppy that darted in front of my car on Sunday was not adopted (stolen) by my daughter and me and, instead, dutifully (reluctantly) returned to the house fronting the road by my daughter. My general rule is uncollared dogs running across, along, by the roads are acceptable future pets. Especially when they are puppies. And a smoky gray one at that.

But no. The puppy was returned to the grateful and unsuspecting family who had not observed puppy-Houdini’s escape. And my daughter and I drove forward, dreaming of puppies and a sweet and loving distraction from our loss.

But grief waits. Not as a malevolent presence. Just a quiet, longlost friend-aquaintance-stranger. And in that moment of somnolent peace, it slides up and wraps me in its fibery embrace.

And I remember Lauren. I remember our last conversation about Lumibrick sets that I wanted to build and her laughter. I remember the sound of her voice. Slightly nasal and in a higher pitch. Her, “Well, okay then…” responses to my strangest or most random statements. I asked her if she wanted company. She said no.

I have a list of shouldas, couldas, wouldas that I’m trying to erase.

On Monday, the day after not adopting (stealing) the puppy, I went outside with the dogs for their morning walk. Only to hear the high-pitched crying of a kitten. I am not a huge cat person. I am terrified of having a kitten in my house because my dogs are huge and play rough. But I couldn’t dismiss the mewing. So I pushed the dogs back through the door, went down my walk to the hedges bordering my property, and peeled the branches aside.

Coiled in the boxwood’s branches, peering up at me, was a tabby kitten. Who, seeing me, promptly mewed again and I, breaking, clucked my tongue at it and called it “baby” and invited it (him) to come to me. And crawling through the branches’ webworks, the kitten came to open hands and allowed himself to be scooped up. And brought inside to two very curious dogs and a husband whose response was “Ummmmm?”

My daughter was the only person off work on Monday. And going up the stairs to her room, Lauren’s grief book opened just a bit more for me. The words tumbled down the stairs and puddled on the ground floor. Words like Bubsy, Beth, creek, crying, Timshel, and love drifted like autumn leaves, brushed up against the door, their letters tumbling under the dogs’ feet. I knocked on my daughter’s door. More words swirled between the pages: SPCA, puppy, want, give away….why? The serifs’ sharp edges knocked against the thin bones spanning the top of my bare feet.

No response. More knocking. More urgent. Imperative. Abandoned. Baby. Save. Release My daughter’s grumpy voice, “I’m awake!” Not fast enough. I have to leave. I don’t want to let go. Lauren’s words strung into sentences, into an expository voice pleated with urgency.

The 120 year old door opened to a non-morning 20something year old woman who wasn’t wearing her glasses and squinting at me. At the tabby kitten coiled in my hand, still mewing. At the dogs sniffing the words piling up around my ankles.

Keep. Save. Rescue. Live. “What the?” My daughter’s voice. “Lauren” was her first word. Her golden-curled halo head turning to peer over her shoulder. She was trapped in a high chair at Panera. She ignored the food in front of her. She wanted Lauren. Sunlight filtering through the windows struck her curls. Those same curls only appear on humid days. They are acorn brown in low light. I’m still jealous that of them. I have stick-straight hair.

I don’t know what I said. I don’t know if I just thrust the kitten at her. I know that the kitten was transferred from my hands to hers. That she cradled it against her chest and I grabbed the dogs’ leashes and took them on a half walk. That somehow I came back to the house still syllables that couldn’t coalesce into words.

I found my husband in our kitchen. He had dished out our lunches into plastic containers. Mine was on the counter. He was settling his into a yellow Dollar General plastic bag. I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want a no. I didn’t want him to feel like the bad guy if he said no.

“It has to be trained to walk on a leash.”

Stay. Safe. Loved. Grow. Thrive. Survive.

The puppie’s name, if we had stolen/adopted it, would have been Noodle. Noodle Gnocchington the Fourth. Because Lauren named her dog Duke von SomethingIcan’trememberton the Third.

My grief-shaped book opened enough to admit the newest story. A six-week old tabby kitten named Noodle Gnoccington the Fourth. He loves to sleep on my husband’s stomach, my daughter’s shoulder, or the dogs’ bed. He loves to bite my finger and press his two front paws on either side of my nose like he was prayer-blessing me before he tried to bite it. He loves having the back of his head rubbed so much that, when I hold him on his back, he leans his head back, relaxes his body, and just sprawls like a long, limp noodle.

And this morning, when my grief-book closed a little and I numbly walked through the house, my daughter, who is unwillingly becoming a morning person, called down to me and invited me to greet Noodle.

Yes.