It was April, raining, those early months of the pandemic, when the dog got into a nest of newborn rabbits in the side yard. I combed through the herb garden, collecting the cold and rain-soaked dead newborns with a plastic bag and garden glove when I heard the still living kit. Its eyes were closed and it was hairless and weakly pawing, back legs immobilized by a puncture wound to its naked rump. Its pink nose trembled through tiny, irregular gasps and I knew it would not survive.

As the dog sulked, I set the poor thing up in an old shoebox and retired kitchen rag, made a handful of calls to surrounding animal and wildlife centers to inquire if they were open and explain the situation. One center answered eventually, said they could ease the newborn’s passing, and so I grabbed the shoebox, my keys, and set out on the forty-minute drive to the site located in the middle of a forest preserve three towns away.

Six months after you left I found your old shirt, unwashed, forgotten, fallen between the bed and the wall. I held it in my hands. I pressed it to my face. Real or imagined, I could still smell you.

I slept with my face buried in that shirt. Woke with it pulled over my eyes, my open mouth. Cried. Came. I did this for days, perhaps a week or two, maybe more, until what remained of you and your scent was gone.

You probably don’t remember—back then when I first told you the story about the rabbit—how, not unkindly, you told me what some shamed and secret part of me had known even back then. How I could have spared the poor thing further pain had I just had the heart to kill it right there in the yard.

You were right about the rabbit. You were right about us, too. The swift fall of a garden spade, closing the door on that apartment of three years—the truth is that these acts, even in their pain and violence, are not without their kindness. I’ve just never been brave enough for it all.

That day with the rabbit I drove with one hand on the wheel and one hand cradling that old shoebox, scared in my distraction and in the rain that I’d blow a red and crash, more scared that poor little thing would die right there in my lap before arriving at the shelter that would euthanize it anyway. When you told me you were leaving you were so gentle with me. I knew I couldn’t tell you to stay and so I clung to you without looking at you and I cried and cried and cried.

You let me hold you as I cried. Let me hold your hand as you ushered me into the passenger side of my Honda CR-V. It was late, already dark out, Juan Gabriel wept on the radio, and you held my hand back as you delivered me to my father’s house in the suburbs because you didn’t want me to be alone in that apartment without you.

I still live here in that same apartment. I still keep your shirt tucked away in the dresser. I know it is wishful to think you left it here with me by design, but even so I still choose to consider this abandonment of relative insignificance an act of mercy. A simple comfort that we are, at times, permitted to hold that which we cannot save.