“I should be the one taking you for walks.” She’d always say happily, even though her life had a burden no one should be forced to endure. To make up for what she didn’t have I’d help her walk as best I could, I’d try so hard so that she could trust me completely, so that her life could be as full as possible. No one knew that beautiful woman as well as I did.
It was me in whom she confided, it was I who she trusted and hopefully loved with all her heart, I never left her side.
It was my purpose to forever aid her. And yet, now, after she left us so early, too early, I’m not allowed to be there, at the place where they remember and cry and console. As though they don’t think I can understand, as though I’m not good enough, as though it won’t affect me.
It will affect me.
It affects me the most because unlike them I have no one to hold me like they do, know one to talk to me and say “I’m sorry for your loss,” because I, creature that I am, am not counted as one who understands a loss.
“He’s so smart, your genius little helper!” They’d all exclaim when they saw us going for walks together. Even with her impairment she still had many friends. And now, it’s as though a part of me, the part they called smart, is gone, just like she is.
I wonder what’ll happen to me now. Surely they can’t think I’d want to live with another family, surely they won’t just throw me away, thinking I’ll be none the wiser.
In truth I’ll never be the same, I may as well just go and die now. She was all I had; after being taken away from my birth mother at the young age of 6 weeks, she became like an adopted mother to me, one who I was to help, till supposedly the end of my days.
And now what do I do?
With two mothers forever in my heart, but forever lost, how do I continue living?

“I should be taking you for walks.” I heard her voice in my memory say and I began to howl into the night, wishing I could shed tears like the humans.