The Bite Was One Moment. The Zer0 Was Different for Everyone.
Less than a year ago, my son was bitten by my mother’s dog.
The bite itself happened in a moment.
What happened afterward didn’t.
My son was hurt. My mother was devastated. My brother lost a pet he loved. And eventually, the dog was put down.
One event happened to our family, but none of us walked away from it carrying the same thing.
For My Son, It Was Safety
My son survived the bite.
The physical wounds healed.
But we’re still learning that “healed” and “back to normal” aren’t necessarily the same thing.
He’s still working on his relationship with dogs.
He puts on a brave face. Sometimes you could probably look at him around a dog and never know that he was afraid.
Then a dog barks.
Or one gets a little too close.
And his heart starts racing.
His body remembers something that the rest of us can’t see.
But fear wasn’t the only thing he carried away from that day.
He carried guilt, too.
The dog was eventually put down, and my son knew his grandmother and his uncle had lost their family pet.
Somewhere in his child’s understanding of everything that happened, he began to feel like it was his fault.
He was the one who had been bitten, yet somehow he felt responsible for what everyone else lost afterward.
That’s a heavy thing for a child to carry.
For My Mom, It Was Something Else
My mother loved her dog.
She also loves her grandson.
There isn’t a clean emotion for what happens when something you love hurts someone else you love.
There was guilt.
There was resentment.
There was grief.
And there was no decision that could make what happened unhappen.
That’s one of the hardest things about some moments: every possible direction afterward can hurt somebody.
For My Brother, It Was Loss
My brother didn’t get bitten.
He didn’t make the decision about what happened afterward.
But his life changed too.
He lost the family dog.
That’s the strange thing about moments like this.
Sometimes we think we know who “the person affected” is.
We point to the person who was physically hurt.
But pain has a ripple effect.
The person standing next to the person who was hurt can have a before and after, too.
And Then There Was the Dog
This might be the hardest part to write about.
He was put down.
I can know why the decision was made and still understand that he was someone’s beloved pet.
Those two truths don’t cancel each other out.
There doesn’t always have to be a villain for something terrible to happen.
Sometimes there’s just the moment.
And then there’s everyone left afterward trying to live with what that moment changed.
One Moment. More Than One Zer0.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what a Zer0 actually is.
I used to think of it as one point on a timeline:
Before.
Zer0.
After.
But maybe it isn’t always that simple.
The dog bite was one moment, but it created a different Zer0 for everyone involved.
For my son, Zer0 became learning to feel safe around dogs again.
For my mother, Zer0 meant living with a decision and emotions she never wanted to face.
For my brother, Zer0 began with losing a pet he loved.
And even though I wasn’t the one who was bitten, I had my own after.
I became the mother watching my child put on a brave face while knowing that sometimes, underneath it, his heart is racing.
We’re still living this one.
There hasn’t been a neat ending where everyone healed, everything was forgiven, and life returned to exactly what it was before.
Maybe there won’t be.
Because sometimes the point of a Zer0 isn’t getting back to who you were before.
Sometimes you can’t.
Sometimes Zer0 is simply the moment life changed.
And healing is everything you build from there.
That was our Zer0.
Actually, it was our Zer0s.