Little things

When you lose something you love, you miss little things you never imagined.

I've had one permanent loss this week (Leo), and one temporary reacquaintance with something I've lost temporarily.

In both cases, it's small things. For Leo, it's realizing that my jeans are denuded of their customary dog hair layer, or opening a suitcase and finding all of my clothes are dry instead of in their typicallly damp, just-sniffed state. It's missing the warm, heavy weight of a sprawled body on my feet, like the one I have right now at my friend's house, courtesy of his massive Australian Shepherd. It's wishing for one more whine, one more incessant "in-and-out" of the door routine, anything that used to exasperate me. Since I missed his actual passing, I still can't associate the too-small plot in the backyard with the dog I loved. I keep thinking I'm going to wake up and, if I just keep my eyes half-shut, I'll see him again, curled up and hoping that I don't make him get out of his bed just yet. He would have been 14 today.

For the other, the second hole in my heart (more painful because it's being refilled only to empty again soon?), it's coming home to the city where my soul still resides. I might live physically in England, but my heart and dreams are here, somewhere between 15th's crowded streets, Fremont's sun-speckled sidewalks and the Burke's rain-slicked, solitary nights.

I've never felt so good coming back to a place. I don't actually think I've felt this alive in months. Everything routine becomes special, and I find it's the little things I was missing again, like the careful detail of a foam-embossed leaf on my drink at Victrola's, or the smoldering burn of my legs as I slog up the back side of Capitol Hill.

It scares me, really. I am so desperate to come home for good someday that I don't know what I'll do if I can't. We both want to be here, despite the skyrocketing housing costs and the bad traffic. This city nourishes me in a way that no other place has; in an instinctive way, I know no other place could, even the tucked-away corners of the world I haven't seen yet. There are parts of who I've become that are entwined with this place. But the best-laid plans go awry. Standing in an empty home for sale yesterday, I listened to the realtor tell me we'd be lucky to find anything we could afford now, let alone in a few years. That's when the jitters set in, the comingling sensations of hope and dread that kept me up last night and chased me over the city streets today.

So maybe we'll rent forever. We wouldn't be the first. Is it crazy that I'm willing to bend everything else -- grad school, career goals, lifestyle, potential firstborn -- to be somewhere so right that every fiber in my body cries out to stay when I'm here?

I never thought I'd want to stay in one place, but now I'm afraid of being uprooted from the only place I want to be. Maybe if I dig down deep enough and hold on with both fists clenched, nothing will be able to tear us away again.

In memorium

I didn't have any pictures from his younger years on the computer...




Fourteen years. So why does it feel like no time at all?

Bon voyage

I'll be back online in a couple of days, but I'm flying home tomorrow for fieldwork and will probably be incommunicado until I've recuperated from the jet lag.

Keep a candle lit in your hearts for Leo tonight. I can't write about it yet because I'm having a hard time keeping my composure, but he'll be winging his way home sometime this evening. It's time. It's for the best.

It's still awful.

But I'm going home to good food, good friends and great weather (gasp!). Yay! Talk to you in a few days!

So, that post I don't really want to write...

It's strange how easily we can deny the obvious. When all the facts lie bared before our faces, we suddenly focus on the shimmery horizon beyond them.

These are the facts I don't want to see, the ones that render me mute whenever an opportunity arises to bring them to the surface, the ones I wish I could shove back in the shadows:

1. My dog, Leo, is 13.
2. He is deaf.
3. He is going blind steadily.
4. He doesn't always know where or who he is. This is the only fact that could be fiction; it's impossible to tell, but that vacant gaze shows something.
5. He has a condition that's making him slowly, incrementally, agonizingly lose the function of his back legs. It's bad, bad, bad.
6. On Emergency Vets, they euthanize animals who exhibit symptoms like his.
7. Watching him try to lie down without putting any weight on his back legs makes me sick.
8. Having him look right through me makes me sicker.
9. There are days when he is scared, anxious and in pain. His vital organs might be fine, but nothing else is.
10. Sometimes I think he is only holding on because we can't let him go.
11. I don't want him to die.
12. I really don't want him to die if I'm not in that room with him.
13. Sometimes, when I come through the front door and he doesn't raise his head, I feel relieved. When he wakes up, I ache.

Ever since vets diagnosed him with cancer a few years ago, Leo hasn't been well. Surgery excised all traces of his disease, but it also sapped his energy; ever since, things have been deteriorating.

Leo is the first -- and only -- puppy I've had. I remember watching him steal a full head of romaine lettuce off the kitchen counter when he was a few months old; he triumphantly dragged it outside, all the way around our deck to the front of the house before exuberantly tearing it to pieces. Ever since, he's chosen lettuce over kibble and banana over beef.

When he was just a baby, he caught kennel cough, and we slept beside him on the kitchen floor as the husky gasps racked his tiny body.

In the 2001 earthquake, when I panicked and screamed for him to get in the downstairs bathroom doorway with me, he flew down the stairs roaring, every hair on his nape elevated, trying to kill whatever was scaring me. This is the same dog who wagged his tail and silently watched teens steal pumpkins off the front porch.

Traces of my dog remain, but they are fleeting and come with greater infrequency. For awhile, I didn't know if he'd make it to my wedding -- but when the day came, he was 10 years younger and pranced across the grounds like a king. Still, it took a lot out of him; the heat made him a little sick, and after he came home he slept for a day. I think that was one of the last times I saw my dog. Now, he's frequently underfoot, crying at nothing...and I realize he's probably doing everything he can to ask for his release.

I feel like a bad person because the part of me that knows he's slowly dying wants to be sure he dies in my arms. I don't want to get that phone call some evening. Of all the things making me anxious about our trip, this one might be the worst. It's unspoken, but we all know what we see. And I can't handle the thought of being away when he goes, or of letting him linger because his body won't die. The thing that scares me most is that he could live another two, maybe three years, and they would be the worst years he's ever endured. I'd always hoped he would die in his sleep, but I don't think that's going to happen. His heart is good, but he can't stand long because he's too stiff: why ask him for more? If this were a relative, a friend or me, I'd long for a choice to end the suffering...for Leo, we have one, and as much as I don't want to let go, it would be wrong to keep holding on.

Sometimes, I think dogs run away to die because they sense their owners can't ever let them go. I don't want to push Leo to that brink. He's given us his entire life: it's time for us to repay that gift as best we can.

So, we'll talk to the vet and then to the family. It's worse because lately, he seems better: he goes on longer walks, perks up when we're around, and responds to our commands. But there's a suspicious growth getting bigger on his eye, he's tripping over one front leg a lot, and I keep wondering how long his rebound will last. Right now, the family is in denial. I can't even talk to them about it without making them upset -- I will never show them this post, and I hope they don't find it. I'm worried that their insistence on his health will persist until something really bad happens. I'm worried that I'm overreacting. I need a sign, but all we have is instince -- and our instincts as a species are so damned lousy.

Before too long, we'll probably take him for one last car ride. God, he loves car rides. Deep down, I know this is the right thing to do, that we probably should have done it months ago. But it hurts. An empty spot by the steps where he used to sleep. Rugs we don't have to vacuum every week because of his incessant shedding. It hurts so bad to say goodbye, but I can't live with the knowledge that we're the only thing holding him back.

Reeling

Within an hour of arriving home last night, my blissful, tranquil state of mind splintered. My room is a disaster. I don't know how I'm going to fit everything into my suitcases without taking a hammer to every three-dimensional object I own so I can pile all the fragments into the bags. My dog is old -- too old -- but that's another post, one I've written but can't bring myself to publicize yet, in case family members still in denial choose to read it. Hell, what do you do when your dog's fine one day but falling apart the next, only to swing back to "good" again?

And then there's the hurricane.

I was away for most of the aftermath, so I'm learning the extent of the damage now. What I cannot get over is the racial composition of the victims. Or the absence of discussion around it. Hey, America! There's a massive elephant stampeding through the room with renewed fury, probably because it's been cooped up with us for a couple of centuries. Could we please acknowledge and deal with its presence before I ever have to look at the television again and remind myself that I'm not viewing images from Somalia? The hurricane is a class issue AND a race issue -- it's a sickening reminder that everything is not equal in the USA.

I can't even write about it now. If the pictures don't speak for themselves, what will?

Body modification, part II

Our dog just joined me as another member of the body modification family. I went home yesterday to drop off a few boxes, so naturally I had to spend the requisite amount of time showering affection over the house's king-in-residence. Labradors have incredibly thick coats, so it's easy to lose track of anything that's going on under the surface, even if you regularly brush and groom them. So, as my fingers worked their way around his massive neck, they ran into something oblong. And hard. And, well, gross.

Today's diagnosis? A severely infected hair follicle that was ready to inflict serious damage on my boy's system. Normally, they'd put the dog under for a quick removal -- but our dog is special: he goes into cardiac arrest whenever he's given anesthesia. The vets just love him! Hey, here comes that patient we've almost managed to kill in the past - yay! We usually deal with the problem by ignoring any health challenges that might require putting him under, which worked up until now. Today, however, the vets needed to do something before the infection advanced...so it was time for a little local anesthetic.

Apparently, my dog is better behaved than any of us envisioned; he remained quite calm while they made a three inch gash in his neck to drain the abcess. Now he's home, where he clearly expects to be nursed back to health with generous quantities of green beans and strawberries (yes, he's a freak). And I? I'm nervously checking my eyebrow every half hour or so...you know, just in case any of those eyebrow hairs take a turn for the worse.