Unraveling Grief and Love: The Haunting Journey Within "Rosie: A Memoir of Farewell"
Sleigh’s earlier reflections on Rosie have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Plume, Five Points, and The Sonneteer. In an interview with writer Sari Botton, he discussed his lifelong desire to write a book about her: “When she died at 97 by her own hand, I knew that if I didn’t start working on it immediately, then the impulse might pass.” What began as a way to keep her close “was just the opposite…I didn’t feel a sense of resolution… Instead, it felt like I’d lost her a second time.”
That melancholy is evident throughout Rosie. A tight bud of a book that withholds its secrets until almost halfway through the narrative, it begins with a deceased Rosie wheeled out “to a battered Chevy station wagon outfitted as a hearse” by an undertaker after “lying in state under a full length blanket of white dog fur.” About the odd covering, Sleigh explains, “first dog to last, she kept only breeds with white fur.” She’d comb them weekly, collecting the “expanding white cloud” of dog hair for “the Dog Weaver who would card and spin it into thread, and then weave it into my mother’s dog-fur couture—a shawl, a lap robe, and of course the blanket-cum-shroud.”
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