Being mortal

When the Fogies were around the age I am now they announced that, when they got too old, they would sail into the Bermuda Triangle and vanish from this dimension. They never actually defined “too old”. Nor did they ever acquire a boat, or learn how to float one. But as far as I can tell that really was pretty much the full extent of their planning for the final stage of their lives.

As it turned out, they downsized a couple times, and eventually moved into a tiny apartment in a senior housing complex. It was more cramped than it needed to be because the Olde Buzzard never actually retired, and although his clients (he was a PR consultant) drifted away one-by-one, he refused to give up his gigantic desk and related paraphernalia. So, to the Marmeee’s enormous frustration, his “office” occupied about half their living room space. But that room opened onto a covered stoep, where the Olde Buzzard spent many hours building the framework for Marmeee’s garden. Beyond their tiny garden there was a common area – green lawn, and trees loud with the birds that used to bum off them when they sat out on the stoep to eat their lunch. A pair of plovers raised a family nearby every year, and toward the end of every afternoon the hadedas would fly overhead, shrieking. And they had lots of friendly human neighbors, too.

It was only after Marmeee died that we had to move the Olde Buzzard into a facility specializing in Alzheimer’s patients. That place was also quite homey, and although his room was small it also opened directly onto a garden. Not that it mattered, really. He didn’t have to be there long; he moved on just a couple months after she did.

Anyway, maybe not having much of a plan wasn’t such a problem for them. I mean, maybe the Bermuda Triangle would have been more interesting … But on the other hand they may have ended up being vivisected by some otherworldly mad scientist … Or even being passed over as unworthy of interest, their little boat eternally becalmed in the middle of the Sargasso Sea. Instead, they got to watch their plover neighbors and grow flowers, and I think, by the time they got there, it was enough.

Between them – supervised and assisted by passing wildlife – Marmeee and the Olde Buzzard created gardens everywhere they lived. And this didn’t change just because they got old and had to downsize.

Sometimes, when I get mad at the Hubbit for glomming down more than his share of pie or ice cream, I threaten to put him in a home the day diabetes eats his legs and dumps him in a wheelchair. I wish this were an empty threat, but realistically he’s too heavy for me to lift. I end the threat with, “And don’t think I’m going to live in some crappy little studio apartment so that you can afford to go to a nice home!” Again realistically, even if he went into a cheaper facility, this is America, the Land Of Fuck-All Is Free, and I’d probably end up sleeping in my car. I’ve always been pretty easy-come, easy-go with money, and the Hubbit refuses to think about it at all … so, yeah, not a lot of late-life-stage planning happening here.

Mind you, sleeping in my car is sort of part of my game plan for after he wanders off into the Great Workshop In The Sky – assuming he does so (a) before I head for the Heavenly Library And Chocolate Shoppe and (b) before I achieve an extreme level of decrepitude. I’ve thought for a while that the best way to see America – which is something I’ve not done enough of in the quarter century I’ve lived here, the Hubbit not really being one for travel – is from the (admittedly questionable and probably over-romanticized) perspective of a van. So … the plan is a van, and then we’ll see. It’s not much of a plan, but it’s what I’ve got. And after all, if there’s one thing I learned last year it’s that you can’t depend on life to follow a plan. So, you know … why get hung up on making any?

I have a friend who’s a bit older than I, and in way better health, frankly, but she’s getting forgetful, and that scares her because her parents both developed quite advanced Alzheimer’s before they popped off. She lives alone – that is, her son inhabits a room in her house but he really lives inside his gaming computer. In any case, he’s not the nurturing type. So her plan is to off herself as soon as she feels she’s seriously lost the plot. She used to have an actual deadline to do this, but then the deadline year came, and she was busy, and her forgettery wasn’t actually interfering with her quality of life. Plus when I mentioned it a little while ago, in a spirit of friendly mockery (because how else does one respond when a friend is chatting about her suicide plan?) she’d forgotten ever having had a deadline – and since I don’t particularly want her to do herself in so long as I’m capable of fixing us a couple of mugs of rooibos tea, I changed the subject.

I really don’t think she’s ever going to get worse than moderately dotty. She’s healthy, active and energetic, involved with friends and volunteer activities, engaged in caring for a huge menagerie – horses, dogs, cats and birds. She’s conscious of the need to take care of herself, and she’s far too bloody-minded to tolerate anyone trying to tell her how to live. Also, she has me to hassle her to Write It Down, and Use Your GPS, and Remember The Last Time You Did That? Yeah – You Have Done It Before And This Is What Happened So Maybe Do Something Different This Time, Okay? But nonetheless there’s a flaw in her plan, in that she’s relying on her brain to tell her when her brain doesn’t work any more.

So I’m her backup plan. In her mind this means I’m named executor in her will. Once she’s “taken care of business” I will be responsible for selling her house, providing for her animals, and handing whatever is left in her estate to her son so he can find some more convenient place to set up his computer. (He doesn’t drive, so if she’s not around to ferry him he needs to move closer to town.) In my mind it also means I get a power of attorney, so that if she wakes up one day and can’t remember how to wipe her own bottom I can sell her house, provide for her animals, set the son free to follow his dreams, and pay for her care in the best place her money can buy. (She’s a good friend, but I’m probably not going to be the one doing any butt-wiping. And I’ve also firmly rejected her suggestion that I remind her that it’s time and hand her the pill bottle, pistol, or whatever.) So that’s her plan, and I think it’s a good plan … provided I outlive her.

It just occurred to me, dear reader, that I might owe you an apology. I really don’t mean for this to be a Grow-Old-And-Die Blog, and I’m sorry that’s been so much a focus here lately. I do think about other things – in fact I mostly think about lots of other things – but what got me writing about this today is a book I’ve just finished reading that’s set me to pondering the Important Stuff. I want to tell you about it, because I cannot recommend it too highly for anyone who expects to get old and/or die, or who is closely involved with anyone who is likely to experience getting old and/or dying.

Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, is a doctor’s thoughtful discussion about how modern Western medicine has lost its way in terms of meeting the needs of aging and dying patients. And he talks about how we might choose a different way.

For starters, he questions our assumption that doctors are the people we should be turning to for much of this care – because not all aspects of one’s hoary decline are medical. The problem with Western doctors, he says, is that they’re focused on fixing things. And when something can’t be fixed they don’t really know what to do with it, so they get stuck in a cycle of flinging fixes at the unfixable, often to the great detriment of the patient’s quality of life. Even when they want to recommend that a patient pass on further treatment, often they don’t know how – and the patients don’t get it; they think the doctor doesn’t care. Add just a soupcon of scare politics – dire warnings about “Death Panels”, for example – and any suggestion that people should, at some point, be allowed to quietly lie down and, you know, die … well, “cruel and unusual” doesn’t begin to cover the standard American reaction.

Or, when the doctor says a treatment might give them “a little more time”, they don’t understand that the doctor is thinking in terms of months, for which they will likely pay dearly in suffering. So they embark on suffering expecting years, and the end is heartbreak and devastation.

I’m not suggesting that doctors don’t have a role to play in keeping us going, of course. The guy with the scythe tapped me on the shoulder a year and a half ago, as you know, and then again last August, because – according to my doctor – custardy blood is “one of those things that happens as we age”. So, thank you, Western Medicine, that I’m here now and writing this instead of … not. And thank you also for putting the Hubbit back together each of the many times he tried to take himself apart, and for keeping him trundling along despite rusty joints and creaking organs.

But one can think of this kind of care as being on a spectrum – and over on the darker side of the spectrum is the case of my old friend Gummy. He was in a home when I met him – one of the better ones, but it still smelled of shit and boiled vegetables, and the residents spent most of their days scattered about the place in their wheelchairs, staring at the walls. Sometimes they sat in rows, side-by-side, but you never saw them talking. An hour or two before mealtimes they’d start working their way to the dining hall, and they’d sit around tables, staring sometimes at the tablecloth, sometimes at the door to the kitchen, still not talking.

I met Gummy outside church one holiday weekend, when he was slumped in his wheelchair waiting for the facility bus to pick him up. I chirpily asked him, “And what will you be doing tomorrow?” and he dealt me a withering stare and said, “What do you think I’ll be doing?” So I, shamed into being real, started visiting him, and that progressed to occasional outings and invitations to holiday dinners, and for a while he was pretty much part of the family.

He was slow, soooo sloooowww, and as the years passed he got slower. Sometimes, at first, and then later most times, he’d fall asleep mid-conversation when I visited him. We had the same conversations over and over again… I was so sad when, at last, I attended his memorial service and his older friends and colleagues shared their memories of him. I’d known him for years by then, but there was so much I hadn’t known, because we simply didn’t have those conversations.

Anyway, back to the point of this post … I used to accompany him to medical appointments, and one day … I forget the details, but I think he was having difficulty swallowing. The doctor, like most of them, tried to insist on talking to me – because waiting for Gummy to ponder a question and then, sooo sloooowwwly, whisper the answer, cost money, I guess. Or maybe he thought he was stupid as well as slow. In any case, as always, I glared and told him, “Just give him time – he’ll get there. He can speak for himself!”

Only on that occasion he couldn’t. And I quickly realized I was also out of my depth.

Or maybe it was the doctor who didn’t explain his options properly. The doctor, a middle-aged Asian man who kept his firm body packaged inside his smooth skin as neat and tidy as pork sausage in its casing, was clearly uncomfortable with the conversation.

He explained that difficulty swallowing was “one of those things that happen when you get old.” He said Gummy had two options: to continue eating as best he could, or to have a feeding tube surgically inserted into his stomach. He warned that there could be complications with feeding tubes … I don’t remember what the potential complications were. What I do remember is that the doctor really, really didn’t want him to have one. The doctor clearly thought it was time for him to just … let … go. To go gentle into that dark night.

But he couldn’t say that, especially with me glaring at him, so he talked about the feeding tube and potential complications and no longer being able to enjoy food.

Gummy said, “I don’t really enjoy eating any more anyway. My smeller stopped working years ago.” But then he said that he was worried about possibly dying if he kept losing weight. He wasn’t conscious of being hungry, you see, so he wasn’t afraid of starving – but he could read the numbers on the scale. I tried to ask him if he was sure, but ran out of words in the face of his puzzled stare. How could I ask him if he really wanted to keep living? How could I suggest it was time for him to die – that that’s what his body was trying to tell him?

Well, they inserted the feeding tube, and there were issues, and after a few weeks he ended up back in the hospital, where someone inserted the tube at the wrong angle and his food went into his abdominal cavity, and that was that, although it took a few days.

I don’t think he suffered, but really I don’t know, because to my eternal regret and shame I wasn’t there. I visited him only once during the week he was in the hospital. For a few years I had been his closest and most faithful friend – we had fun together, going on outings around town. But then the Hubbit and I moved to our farmlet some distance out of town, and visits were harder and became less frequent (although I still did the necessary stuff, like doctor visits), and one day he’d forgotten my name and I had to write it down in the little notebook he kept in his shirt pocket. So by the time we reached the end I didn’t know what to do about him dying … so I pretended it wasn’t happening until it was too late.

In Being Mortal, Gawande discusses a different, more honest, more accepting way of approaching our mortality. He discusses different ways that seniors might live – alternatives to the typical modern old age home, designed and planned to allow us to have agency right up to the end. He discusses ways that communities might be set up to enable seniors to continue living in their own homes. He describes one place where residents had been like the ones at Gummy’s facility – sitting around waiting to die – until a newly-appointed doctor in charge brought in several cats and dogs and 500 caged birds, as well as a forest-worth of living plants – and all those old folk started living again, invigorated by having something to care for. In other places he describes, seniors have freedoms unheard of in conventional old age homes – specifically, the freedom to make poor choices that might shorten their lives but that make life sweeter (like pie and ice cream for diabetics).

Then, moving on to the subject of care for the terminally ill, he offers an approach free from medical “cures”. The priority, he says – and this is precisely the priority I have for my dogs, so why not also for my two-legged loved ones? – is quality, not quantity of life. Rather than asking, “Do you want this treatment or that treatment or simply to die?” he says we should ask, “What constitutes a good life for you, from the perspective of what you’re capable of right now?” That determined, the question becomes simply how to accomplish that goal. It may be freedom from pain. It may be the ability to enjoy a dish of chocolate ice cream. It may be a clear head and time to spend with the people one loves.

Looked at from that perspective, it will almost certainly not be months of pain and nausea chasing an elusive, all-too-temporary “cure”.

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash

Since reading his book I find myself looking at my own life from a different perspective. I’m still at the early stage of my slide into decrepitude, and as far as I know I’m not terminal – except in the sense that we all are. But I am creakily, crankily aware that three-score-plus years of poor choices about diet and exercise are demanding a toll. I make plans but not promises; I write to do lists, but I forgive myself if I can’t fulfil (or, some days, even start) them. I’m increasingly conscious of the need to cross things off my bucket list – not because I’ve achieved them, but because I’ve run out of time.

But I still have choices – so many extraordinary choices! I can still make a garden … acquire new skills … save a few more dogs … write stories. I can still pour myself out; I’m not yet reduced to a trickle. I can go to new places and ask questions and find answers. I can read. I can pray. I can love.

It’s not what I thought it would be. But, as it turns out, now that I’m here, it’s enough.

Sudoku

Usually it’s still dark when I wake. And it’s cold – I turn the heat down at night, and crack the window because when you share a bedroom with two large dogs you have to. I burrow under my nest of blankets and ignore my bladder for as long as I can, then I jump out of bed, stumble to the loo, put Argos out (he and his bladder are also getting old), scurry to the kitchen to turn the heat up from 65 to 67 F, let Argos back in and dive back into bed. I promise myself that as soon as I hear the heat exchanger fans stop running I’ll get up, get dressed, do all the morning things, tackle my to do list. I will have a good, productive day. I will write.

Then, while I wait for the house to warm, I play games on my phone. Fishdom is the most addictive. Wordle, of course – does anyone not play Wordle? And the other free games offered by the New York Times – Spelling Bee (I win if I find the bingos) … Letter Boxed (three moves max) … Tiles … the crosswords … Sudoku. I like games because you can solve them. There are no grey areas – either you win, or you lose. Take Sudoku – there’s only one right answer, but you go through the process and the solution emerges and then it’s done. There’s no fallout, no leftover parts, no mess.

Sometimes I use up my lives on Fishdom, then switch to the NYT games, and by the time I’ve done those I have more lives on Fishdom … It’s remarkable how long one can put off getting out of bed just switching back and forth between games. And of course there’s the news, and the advice columnists, and Reddit, and all of YouTube.

So many hungry, jostling people, yawping for attention, love, justification. Relevance. Meaning. Isn’t that what we all want?

Which brings me to the point of this blog post – which I started in October. In fact I pretty much finished it in October … but then I set it aside, as I usually do, because I wanted to add some pictures, and also I like to wait a day before publishing and give one last read – only I every time I tried to do that I pretty much fell apart all over again. I’ll try to do better this time because it needs to be done and posted so I can move forward.

As I was saying regarding the point of this post: I need to yawp. I’ve been needing to yawp for a long time. The problem is, this is not a depression blog, and I don’t want to write misery porn. But this year has sucked so much, just one swipe of the cosmic vacuum cleaner after another. It has sucked the skin right off my body, leaving me flayed. Defenseless. When I leave my bed, my soft nest of blankets, there is no protective barrier between me and … everything else.

But this blog is where I come to figure things out. I take a snapshot of my life that, for some or other reason, feels significant, and I put it into a frame, and I hang it up on a wall and point to it and say, “See? Look at that! What do you think?” Sometimes I indulge in a spot of mindfuckery – I hang it upside down, say, or I point at a different wall and wait to see if you notice the picture. Because you are a crucial part of the process. I don’t journal – I’ve tried; everything I’ve ever read about writing preaches that journaling is a crucial part of Being A Writer, but I cannot commit to writing without at least the hope of a reader. There has to be a dialog, even if it’s imaginary, or there’s no point.

Everything I’ve tried to write this year – both here and in the maddeningly almost-but-still-not-quite-finished book – has been pointless. It’s been coins dropped into an empty well – instead of a splash and a glint if the light is angled just right, there’s a faint, sad thud and a sinking into mud.

It’s been that kind of year.

So. Anyway. Here I am. Yawp.

Just call me Kilroy. (Photo by David Clode on Unsplash)

I am here to draw a line under 2022. It’s nearly over anyway, but I need the line now. Sometimes a line is necessary – you draw it, and then you total up whatever’s above it, and then a kind of magic happens. Everything above the line is captured, encapsulated, contextualized in the solution. It may still not make sense. It may still have the power to make you cry. But still it’s a solution, boxed up, and you can set it aside and it looks tidier than having everything just all over and anyhow.

2022 actually started last December, after I wrecked the pickup and Patchee died. I was discombobulated and needed to take a few days out to take stock, to think, to plan. To pray and prepare my heart for the new year. So I kissed the (only slightly resentful) Hubbit goodbye and checked myself and Argos into a nearby hotel.

I guess I got some praying done, but wifely habits die hard; I checked in with the Hubbit by phone to remind him to feed the chickens, and found him in a snit because he’d stumbled upon an amazing bargain while poking around the internet, and had bought me a laptop, and then – minutes after paying for it – realized he’d been scammed. And no matter how much I reminded, begged and nagged he could not and would not step away long enough to feed and water my feathery ladies. It was bitterly cold – same as the weather we’re having now, actually: weeks at a stretch below freezing, so their water froze and there wasn’t anything growing and the bugs and worms had burrowed deep. They needed care, but the Hubbit was too busy being furious with the bank (which was refusing to stop his online payment) to pay attention.

So I left the hotel and met him at the bank, where a young man was rude and unhelpful, and then I followed him home and found Mr. Roo collapsed and dying, so I dealt with that and went back to the hotel and tried to pray some more.

Meanwhile, although I didn’t know about it until a week or two later, on the other side of the planet my heart-sister Twiglet was fighting for her life in an ICU. She must have told me she was having hip surgery a month or so previously, but we’re so blasé about that kind of thing these days – a joint wears out and we pop into the hospital for a couple days and come out with a new one and it’s just a no-never-mind. Only, she developed an infection that roared through her body and sent her mind spiraling through bizarre landscapes. For months and months we lurched between “Praise God! Her infection markers are way down!” and “Oh no … a new bug has taken hold…”. It was a rollercoaster ride from Hell that went on and on, and on … and through it all I got to speak with her only once, in February. (I managed to make her laugh!) The rest of the time I was told she was too sick to speak. Or too tired. Or not lucid enough. Even when the news (I did get regular updates) seemed good, I was told she didn’t have her phone.

It tore my heart out not to be there – but even if it had made sense to go (it didn’t; she was rarely allowed visitors) how could I leave the Hubbit? In the savage, grey cold of winter he shrank and huddled into himself. I was afraid of what else might die if I left to go even further from home. I was afraid he would sit and eat nothing but junk food and get himself lost somewhere in the interwebs. I was afraid he might fall. His best friend, formerly known as the Cool Dude, lived on the property … but he’s a drunk and unreliable.

January, February, March I distracted myself by picking away at the bank, trying to get them first to cancel, then to reverse the Hubbit’s payment to the scammers. It was stupid to fight so hard for a mere hundred dollars, but rage drove me. The first customer service rep was so disdainful in the way he spoke to the Hubbit, treating him like a foolish old man; the others were ineffectual; the system was designed to be as difficult to navigate as possible. I wrote to the Attorney General, I blasted them on social media and sites like Yelp!, I pleaded and berated and threatened for months – such an appalling waste of time and energy! (And I got nowhere – there was too much else going on and I eventually let it go.)

Meanwhile, in March it was the Hubbit’s turn for had a quick little routine surgery – a simple removal of his gall bladder. It was no big deal – he was in and out in one day. Easy peasy.

They warn you that the gas pains afterwards are dreadful. The procedure involves pumping gas into the abdomen, and it floats around in there, getting stuck in awkward nooks and crannies, until it’s absorbed through the intestinal tissues and ejected in the usual fashion. The best way to get rid of the gas is to get up and move – which hurts, of course, but we were told that you have to tough it out and then it gets better.

The Hubbit wouldn’t move. He said it hurt, and also he felt sick. I summoned the Bitch Wife, who lashed him with her tongue, and he hated me almost as much as I did. And he did not get better. So I called various doctors and he went back to the hospital, where he failed to poop for a record-breaking number of days. When his bowels finally woke themselves up and performed, his nurses and doctor sang the Halleluiah chorus and packed him back home … where he continued to huddle, and shrink, and on the rare occasion that he spoke his speech was slurred and he forgot what he was saying – and usually what he was saying didn’t make a whole lot of sense anyway.

I called doctors again, and they patted me on the head and explained that he was old, until in desperation I summoned my Inner Karen, and she uttered the L word.

If there’s one thing doctors take seriously in this country, it’s lawsuits.

What I actually said was, “You know, I’m starting to wonder just who I’m going to sue when we find out his death was preventable. Should it be the hospital? Or your boss?” (I was speaking to the surgeon’s assistant. He was busy with another patient.) So she trotted off and returned a few minutes later with the surgeon in tow. He looked at the Hubbit, who was slumped in his chair and staring into space, and said, “You’re really worried?”

“Look,” I said. “He’s old. And he’s annoying and cantankerous. But outside of his political opinions there is nothing wrong with his brain!”

“Hmm,” he said. “Well, he doesn’t have any of the usual symptoms of an abscess, but let’s just check it out to set your mind at rest.” So they did, and he had an abscess the size of a fair-sized zucchini, all swollen up with glop from his bowel and less than a day away from erupting. He spent a couple more weeks in the hospital, and then they were about to send him home and he was well enough by then to tell me he wasn’t happy about that, so Karen popped her head out again. Once again they did a “probably unnecessary test” to “set everyone’s mind at rest” and found leakage where no leakage should be. At last in April he came home, fully restored to his annoying, cantankerous self, to my profound relief.

Meanwhile I’d developed a pain in my knee so severe some days I could barely walk. None of my remedies worked – neither ice nor heat, not an anti-inflammatory diet or fasting, not exercises or stretching or rest or powering through. But there was a huge bag of grain that the Hubbit and the Formerly Cool Dude had dumped in a random location, where cattle and horses kept breaking into it every time they bust out of their pasture (which tends to happen a lot when steers get to a certain age. I think it’s Mother Nature’s way of ensuring that we won’t be too sad when we kill and eat them.) So because I was hurting too much to lift it unaided, and the Hubbit was too feeble and floppy to help, I asked the FCD to move it to where they couldn’t get at it, because gorging on grain is a pretty sure way for grass-eaters to kill themselves. Well, somehow that request for help went sideways and the FCD launched into a vicious tirade that comprehensively covered everything he disliked about me – which turned out to be pretty much everything.

In the overall context of the general shittitude of the year, the booze-fueled ravings of a depressed, self-loathing misogynist is a relatively small matter. But … this was someone I’d known for a quarter of a century – since I arrived in this country. Back in the day, if he and the Hubbit went hunting together I never worried about potential accidents. I liked him, respected him, and trusted him. Even as I’d watched him deteriorate during the eight or so years he lived in his motorhome on our property, I’d wished him well and hoped he’d manage to turn himself around. So the implosion of that relationship, the Hubbit’s ambivalent response to his behavior, the FCD’s continued presence for months before he suddenly just up and left without saying goodbye or even leaving a forwarding address, all combined to taint what little peace and happiness the year had to offer. And now I’m sorry the Hubbit has lost his friend and git-her-done partner. But for myself I’m relieved that he’s gone. And that’s all I have to say about that.

My heart sister … I gave her such a hard time for joining the Red Hat Society!

I continued recording messages to send to Twiglet. They weren’t profound … Her husband said she enjoyed news from the Outside World, so mainly I bitched about my sore knee and yattered on about fence-smashing cows and too many dogs and gardenly frustrations. My prayers were also neither profound nor articulate. When you’ve been praying for a long time for something you really desperately want, after a while you run out of words, and all that’s left is an agonized, wordless “Please!” But when the infection flared up for the umpteenth time in June, her doctors were ready to quit fighting it. The only way to save her, they said, was to amputate her leg. “She’s strong enough,” they said, “But she might not be for much longer.”

Of course the people who loved her immediately rallied with intense prayer – not to save the leg, but for the doctors to have wisdom, and for this terrible journey at last to be done. I made up my mind that, come what may, I would go to be with her after she got back home, just for a week or two to help her recover. I imagined the koeksisters we would eat, and the conversations we would have, and how raucously we would laugh, sitting on her stoep overlooking their beautiful garden. I may have sent her a message mocking her for taking such extreme measures to lose weight … Or maybe I saved that joke for when I would see her. I don’t remember.

A few days later the doctors opened up the wound site just to check on the status of the infection. (This was something they had done often. The infection was deep in her bone, so blood tests weren’t reliable.) And in light of all our prayers – because I’ve had experience of miracles, and she had she – it wasn’t all that surprising to learn that the infection was clear. The surgeon who had proposed amputation told her husband, “I can’t justify removing a healthy limb.” At last it was over!

But…

That little surgery was one cut too many. Over the next few days, system by system, her body shut down.

On the Fourth of July I was out – I forget why – and en route home I connected briefly with her husband. He was at the hospital with her, and she wasn’t doing well. I asked if I could talk to her on his phone, since he was right there, but he said she couldn’t speak. He told me to record a message that he could play for her. I wanted to argue, to ask him please just to let me talk to her, even if she couldn’t respond – same as I did with my Marmeee … but he was so tired, and you don’t argue with someone who is sitting at his wife’s deathbed – not even when you both are convinced that she’ll be fine. When I got home I sat on my veranda, and as the fireworks started going off all around me I recorded a series of messages just to tell her I loved her, and that she had done well with her life, and that everything was going to be okay.

The next morning I woke to the news that she was gone. And then I took my knee to the doctor, who diagnosed bursitis and injected a steroid and made it better. Easy peasy.

While I was with the doctor I asked him if I could stop taking the blood thinners I’d been on since my pulmonary embolism last August. He approved, and a few weeks later (it was Twiglet’s birthday – her family gathered on a beach she loved and sent her ashes out to sea) I was back in ER, once again unable to breathe, followed by several days in the hospital, and so now I’m on blood thinners for the rest of my life.

Around about then Cujo moved to Idaho, depriving me of my rescue partner and most reliable venting buddy. We’d already decided – way back in January or February – that it was time to get out of rescue … and I’m almost there. But after she left I contacted the shelter and offered to take an old dog, because they tend not to do well in shelters and Cujo’s and my rescue has always done a pretty good job of finding wonderful homes for seniors. So Chief, a sweet old guy, moved in. After a few days I took him for a vet check, as we always do with seniors, and learned that he had advanced lymphoma, so the Hubbit and I decided he would just spend his last few months here on our little farm. Only not long after, for no clear reason (it’s possible the cancer had metastasized to his brain), he walked under the moving tractor, so he didn’t even get that.

I think that’s the last horrible thing that’s happened this year – except that I’ve been getting slower and sadder and more and more useless, and eventually a few days ago I paid my doctor another visit and it turns out I’m severely anemic. I kind of think that’s good news, though … I mean, it isn’t, of course. But at least this enemy has a face and it’s not the Black Dog, and I have a strategy for getting better. So that’s good, right?

But.

I am so, so tired. I’m sad. I feel old, fat, itchy and achy. Despite my best (currently feeble) efforts to be Holly Homemaker the house won’t stop throwing up all over itself, and – just to help that process along – we have two more dogs that needed somewhere to be and somehow this was the only spot available, and the cold hit before I could finish my end-of-growing-season chores, and there’s frozen snow everywhere just waiting to turn mucky and then freeze again. The pickup is still wrecked. The book is still not written. I’m still breathless.

The best friend I ever had and ever will have is still gone and always will be.

Sometimes I think how much easier it would be if I just stopped. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t actually want to die. In fact, when the doc got a bit vehement because he felt I wasn’t taking the whole anemia thing seriously enough (he wants more tests to figure it out, and that’s fine) I did feel a twinge of ehhh … I hope it’s nothing bad. (I don’t think it is. For quite a long time I’ve been pretty much living on cheese and tomato sandwiches, which aren’t generally a great source of iron.) But my body kind of has a use-by date now, and it would be so easy just to stop taking the dang blood thinners and let my blood do whatever it wants to do. It would be so easy peasy.

It’s time to draw that line – but how to do it?

Life is nothing at all like a game of Sudoku. There is no one perfect solution. There is no single sure way to make the squares in a row line up and act orderly.

It’s nothing like a column of numbers – there’s no way to calculate the sum because the answer keeps changing.

You can’t even draw a line in the sand and say, “Okay, Life, I dare ya – step over that and see what I do to you!” Because sometimes life laughs and runs away, and sometimes it plants you square in the nose, and sometimes a wave billows in from the side and washes the line away.

Sometimes the line isn’t even yours to draw, and the best you can do is take note, and move on.

Photo by Daryl Han on Unsplash

WTF just happened???

Usually when people ask me what breed Argos is, I feel a frisson of pride as I tell them, “He’s a Belgian Malinois.” It’s hard to escape that feeling that if I have something exceptional in my life (and Maligators truly are exceptional) then I must be exceptional too, right? Yeah, I know it’s not logical – but go ask any guy with a Ferrari about his Ferrari, ask any kid about their new shoes with sparkles, and you’ll see they feel exactly the same way. We display the things we love in part to tell the world who we are.

Sometimes – but less and less often, thanks mainly to that damn movie – I have to explain what a Malinois is. That they’re completely amazing, but not really pets. That the dog who jumped out of a helicopter to help take down Bin Laden was a Malinois. That the only reason I have him, because this is not an ideal breed for a slow-moving fat girl, is that he was a rescue and I meant to rehome him, but we fell in love.

Bumpy or calm, he’s my shipmate on life’s ocean

More often, these days, the response goes, “Ooh, I so want one! And look – people say they’re dangerous, but he’s such a sweetheart!” Because he is. Argos is a total schmooze. When we’re out and about – and he goes everywhere with me – his reward for good behavior is to get to “say hello” to whatever random stranger asks, “May I pet your dog?” He walks up close to them and stretches his neck so that his nose is pointing up against their body, and he leans in for loving as though he never gets any at home. And I have to explain that this is not typical behavior for a Mal; they can be unpredictable, even dangerous. That they tend to be too hyper-focused on whatever stimulating smell-sound-spook captures their attention to be much interested in casually benevolent strangers. That they’re not family dogs, and you’d better not try to live with one unless you have a lot of time and energy, and are willing to spend almost all of it on training and just keeping them occupied.

Whatever the project, he’s always available to help.

Somehow all this makes me look like something special, as opposed to merely a slave to my dog.

Only not today.

Today, when the emergency room tech asked, “What kind of dog was it?” I flinched away from the question. “Malinois,” I muttered, adding defensively, “But he’s not typical of the breed! He’s never done anything like this! And he adores her!”

These statements can be rated True As Far As It Goes, Somewhat True, and Totally True.

He is typical in some ways. I mean, his real name isn’t Argos. I named him for Ulysses’ faithful hound, because that’s what I wanted him to be. I gave him that name because, when he came into my life, I was in burnout after about six years of 24/7 dog rescue. And in fact he and Destra did faithfully haul me through the flames – one driving away the Black Dog that wanted to see me burn, while the other dragged me out into the fresh air. Nonetheless, his real name is GODDAMMIT YOU ASSHOLE (always written in full caps), because he’s a Malinois, and – full disclosure – with rescue I’ve been too busy dealing with other people’s canine catastrophes to give my own dogs all the attention and training they need.

What’s not typical is how much he loves making friends with new humans. Just one example of many: one hot evening last summer the Hubbit and I were sitting at a table outside an ice cream shop, slurping coolness and feeding a small vanilla ice cream cone to Argos. This enchanted a not-well-socialized, possibly “challenged” small boy. I describe him this way because he squealed a lot and moved in a jerky, uncoordinated manner, which is relevant only because most dogs would have found it disturbing. Argos allowed the child to tickle his ears and tug on his tail, and planted a vanilla smooch on his cheek … and ever since then I’ve been playing with the idea of training him as a therapy dog and taking him to cheer up kids in hospitals.

That idea pretty much blew up today. From here on out he’ll be wearing a muzzle when he’s around other people, and he won’t be hearing me tell him to “Say hello”, and when people ask if they can pet him I’ll say, “Yeah … better not. I’m sorry.”

Actually, I’m more than sorry. I’m heartbroken. I have so loved watching him loving to schmooze, and it’s just going to hurt to not let him do that anymore.

He’s never even hinted that he might bite a human – apart from a few occasions when he’s suggested via a lifted lip that I should back off and let him do what he wants, and I’ve explained that things don’t work that way around here, and then he’s put his lip back in place and that’s been the end of it. He’s always been a tad unpredictable with the other dogs – not that he damages them; after eight years of constantly biting down on bones and tractor tires, and carrying large pieces of lumber from one area of our property to another, his teeth are worn down to nubs. But he snarls and grabs hold and scares them, and when I yell and banish him he sulks and refuses to be sorry.

Today, when I screamed at him, “For fucksake what have you done?” he seemed as shocked and upset as I was. When I left him alone in the car to rush Nikkola into the ER he was scared. After I left her with a nurse and went back out to park my car properly, he was worried and tentative, needing reassurance.

Nikkola is one of his favorite people in the whole world. She doesn’t drive and she’s currently needing to visit a lot of doctors, so Argos and I pick her up often. He starts his happy dance as we turn into the parking lot at her apartment complex, and when she gets into the car it’s all I can do to keep him in the backseat and out of her lap. He shoves his big old head over her shoulder, and she pets him and he kisses her neck and cheek, and they carry on like a couple of teenagers for the first few blocks of our drive.

That’s basically what they were doing this afternoon. Argos and I had swung by a coffee shop drive-thru after dropping her off at the doctor, to pick up my usual 16-ounce single-shot hot soy latte and his usual puppy whip. Then we’d returned to the doctor’s rooms and hung out in the parking lot, Argos chewing on something in the backseat while I sipped my latte and listened to a This American Life podcast about how covid has killed school as we used to know it. Then Nikkola texted that she was done and we picked her up, and Argos tried to climb into her lap but I stuck out my arm and blocked him. I found a shady spot and opened the calendar on my phone to enter the dates of her next appointments, while she giggled and petted him and he smooched up and down her neck.

And then he snarled and BIT and she screamed and clutched her face, and humans have thin skin, unprotected by fur, that even blunt teeth can pierce.

Blood was running through her fingers, drenching the crocheted shawl she was wearing and the blouse beneath it. I thought he’d taken out her eye.

“What have you done?” I screamed at him, and he leapt away, cowering against the backseat.

We were just two blocks from the ER. I slammed up to the curb, rushed around the car to open her door. The blood continued to pour, dripping onto the sidewalk. I remembered the hoard of tissues and napkins the Hubbit keeps in the console, grabbed a handful, and told her to hold them against the wound. She staggered as I helped her to the entrance, and I yanked a wheelchair out of the array set out there and pushed her into it.

They didn’t make us wait – not even to test for covid.

I filled out a form and left her with a nurse and hurried out to park the car across the road. I sat for a few minutes with Argos, just crying into the thick, soft fur on his neck. Then I stuck my finger into his ears, first one and then the other, and he flinched and whined.

Could he have earache? Maybe a broken tooth, way back? There has to be a reason for this! He hasn’t acted as though he was hurting … but I’ve been distracted lately. Did he tell me and I didn’t get it? Or has he just been too busy being a Malinois, and he didn’t bother to notice something hurt until Nikkola tweaked it in mid-snuggle?

I went back into the ER. They’d moved Nikkola to a room and cleaned her up. Her eyes were swollen from crying, but whole. She had one puncture wound and some abrasions up above her hairline, and a bruised graze on her cheek. She had to get one staple, a hefty dose of Tylenol, and precautionary antibiotics. I had to fill out a Health & Human Services form about the Bite Incident.

I called the vet and made an appointment to have Argos checked out tomorrow. He’ll be muzzled until he’s sedated.

I called a friend who is an animal control officer, to ask how I can protect him from a most horrible possible consequence. She reassured me, but I’m still afraid.

Back in the car he kept trying to love on Nikkola. He sniffed her hair, wanting to clean away the blood. I made him lie down. We stopped at a pizzeria to pick up dinner for her, and there we hit a snag. Legally, based on the paper I’d signed at the hospital, he wasn’t supposed to be out without both a leash and a muzzle, but he couldn’t come into the pizzeria, and Nikkola is afraid of him now so he couldn’t wait in the car with her, and she was too sick and shaky to fetch the pizza herself. I put him in a sit-stay and made him wait outside the door, and he was just so good, so calm and polite. All the people passing him to come inside smiled at him and at me, and many complimented me on what a good dog he was.

He is a good dog. I mean, sure, he’s an asshole. But he really is a good boy.

He’s never found a stick that he didn’t want to bring home.

Errands

I didn’t get a whole lot done today. I’d planned to spend the day working on a project – I’m designing a website for a friend. This is a new challenge for me, and I’m loving the way it stretches my brain, even though I feel useless and pitiful and old for finding it so dang hard!

But first I had to bitch at my doctor’s office over a prescription snafu, and that led – by a convoluted trail – to a fight over who in the practice was actually my doctor, and then I had to write an impassioned email to the practice manager insisting that they assign me to the doctor I actually like and trust instead of the one who, on the one occasion I saw her, clearly considered me an imbecile who doesn’t know my own body. I wrote it on my phone, held two inches from my nose with one eye screwed shut because all this erupted while I was still in bed and before I’d put my contact lenses in, and then for some reason it was necessary to read the email, compulsively, over and over again, until they called me back and said it was okay, I could have the doctor I wanted.

So then I got up and got dressed and fed the dogs / horses / chickens / and while I was fixing toast and eggs for myself and the Hubbit I had a call from a snotty young asshole at our mortgage company demanding a payment that we’d been told we didn’t need to make, so we’d spent the money on other stuff, like Equine Senior pellets and chemotherapy. He and I circled the conversational drain a few times before he went away and I flung myself (and my eggs and toast) at my computer and wrote my second impassioned email of the day, this time to the person at the mortgage company who had told me we were skipping the payment. (Synopsis: we refinanced. Shit happened.) There followed more obsessive/compulsive rereading, but this time at least I was dressed and able to see.

Roary. I want so much to give this dog a safe place for Christmas.

At last I yanked myself out of that vortex, determined to focus on the website, but first I detoured through my pet rescue’s email inbox, and was emotionally bludgeoned by a desperate appeal for help from someone who has a dog – a middle-aged male pit / mastiff mix – that her daughter rescued after he was left to starve in an abandoned house and then passed along to her when she (the daughter) landed in jail. This woman rescues cats – ferals, which she rehabilitates and rehomes. So far the dog has killed two of them, so the dog is now also in jail. Right now, cats are not being rescued, the dog has lost 15 pounds and has developed an array of stress-related health problems, and the woman is on the verge of a breakdown. She’s tried everyone she knows, she tells me, and no one will help. This is not a surprise; rescues are all in overload. Christmas is when people get a new puppy (and dump the old dog) or go skiing or to Hawaii (and dump the inconvenient dog), and of course this year there are all the covid-companions that are also being dumped because people are going back to work and “don’t have time to give him the attention he deserves.”

Side note: For fuck’s sake, people. If your name isn’t Musk or Bezos, never mind your dog, you’re probably not getting what you “deserve”. You’re quite possibly not even getting what you need. Suck it up, and if you have a dog, figure out how to suck that up too! The single most important thing a dog – or anyone – needs is a place to be, and if you don’t provide that, and the rescues can’t, he has to stop being. It’s that simple.

To stop being – to absorb a few CCs of blue magic and fall asleep: this might be all Roary gets, in the end. I can’t take him; I told her that a week ago, the first time she emailed me. I would if I could, but I have a kitty in my bedroom, and feral cats in the workshop, and chickens. I’m also getting too old and gimpy to cope with an unsocialized, out-of-control 100 lb dog, no matter how sweet he is deep down. And Argos is making it increasingly clear that he is over this rescue schtick of mine.

I called Cujo, who is my rescue partner, to ask if she had any ideas, and she said she couldn’t deal with it, couldn’t think of it – and of course she couldn’t. She’s grieving her sweet, bouncy, wilful, neurotic, beloved pit bull Jilly Bean. Little Bean came to us several years ago when the Animal Control director called to ask for help. She was just a baby – maybe six months old – and already broken and scary. Cujo took her home to rehabilitate her, and when that wasn’t possible she simply loved her and gave her a place to be for as long as possible. But the legacy of bad breeding, apart from behavioral problems, is bad health. She itched, all over and all the time, and after a while medication, special food and baths stopped working. And then her joints began to crumble. She was young and wanted to run and play but her body just couldn’t do it. She was stoical and joyous but life wasn’t good, and the pain began to make her dangerous. Cujo took her to the vet for the last time just a little while ago. I was there, and it was loving and peaceful and terrible, and now Cujo needs time to heal. She cannot be thinking about other people’s dogs.

So I wrote the kindest, most empathetic email I could to the woman, explaining for the second time – but in more detail – why we couldn’t help. I offered to pay for the euthanasia, since even her vet thinks that’s the route she should take if he isn’t placed in a new home soon. I offered to go with her to have him put to sleep, because I know – how well I know! – that it’s a terrible thing to face alone. It’s one thing to euthanize an animal that’s sick and suffering. It’s entirely another when the creature is eager to love and still greedy for life. And then I thought some more about it, and I wrote to our vet just in case she knew of someone who might take him, and I posted the appeal on Facebook with his picture … but I don’t expect anything to come of any of that. People will wring their hands and say how sad it is, but actually do anything? No, not too likely.

After that, I cried for a while, and by the time that was done it was too late to be thinking about websites. It was getting dark. I had errands to run, some of them urgent. I called Argos, and we took off together.

We went to the post office, where I picked up boxes to mail Christmas cakes – two to friends, and one to the guy who rescued me a few weeks ago. Dropped off a Christmas cake, newly baptized in brandy, with friends who foster a litter or two of puppies for us every year, thereby keeping our little rescue solvent. Went to the feed store, where I picked up several bags of the special old-horse-pellets we give Vos and Garcia, because Vos is now 30 years old and can’t chew enough hay to keep nourished, and Garcia is getting to the age where he needs a bit of nutritional support come winter.

From there we headed across town to Petco. I went into autopilot and turned right, to the dog toy section, and stopped for a while and stared at all the toys. Rubber ones, and fabric ones. Ones that you can tug and shake. Bouncy ones. Fluffy ones. The kind she loved best – squeaky ones.

I realized I could buy any I wanted and be confident that they’d last. Because the small, bright-eyed, prick-eared, black-and-white person who used to dismantle every fluffy or squeaky toy I ever brought home, no matter how careful I was to keep them out of her reach, isn’t here any more.

I didn’t want to cry in Petco.

Boudicca. In winter, my personal nighttime neckwarmer. In summer, the terror of small wild furry things.

I backed away from the toys. Took Argos to his favorite area – where the animals are. It wasn’t too interesting; the chinchilla was hiding and the ferrets were asleep, and he was kinda meh about the mice and birds, although he clacked his teeth at the parrot and the parrot snapped its beak back at him, so I guess there was some sort of inter-species communication there. Anyway, we went and got the cat litter we were there for – the clumping kind for the barn cats, and the pellets made of recycled newsprint for Boudicca.

I loaded it onto the front passenger seat, on top of the soft, bright blanket that’s been there since her last ride to the vet. I ignored the blanket, and also the box of canned dog food in the footwell in front of the seat, as I have every time I’ve used the car in the past week. We went to Yokes, a grocery store, where I picked up veggies, and a random assortment of suppery things from the deli counter, and chocolate chips so I can make a batch of brownies as a thank you for the neighbor who is coming over tomorrow with his backhoe.

I so very badly do not want to think about this! Forgive me, please, for sneaking it in under a to-do list of errands and other nonsense. I needed to bury it somehow.

But … she deserves better. So here it is: a short In Memoriam for a small dog who has left the most enormous hole.

Patchee

Patchee came to us about ten years ago. She was only a year old, if that, when the local animal control director called and asked the Hubbit and me to take her in, because the dog rescue we’d started was becoming known as a place to take dogs with behavioral issues. “There really isn’t anything wrong with this dog,” the director told us, “But legally I can’t rehome her. I have to euthanize her unless a rescue agrees to rehabilitate her. And it wouldn’t be right to put her down. She’s a perfectly normal dog, and she’s too young!”

She’d been adopted from the pound by someone who wanted a cute puppy, and who thought a heeler mix would do just fine cooped up in an apartment while the woman – a lawyer – was at work twelve hours a day. The woman was most put out when her sweet little puppy took to dismantling cushions, the couch, and anything else she could get her teeth into. Then the woman invited her friends over, and – so disconcerting – the Heeler nipped at their heels, herding them around and then out of the apartment. So the woman took her back to the pound, and in an effort to excuse herself she said the words that amounted to a death warrant: “She tries to bite my friends. I think she’s potentially dangerous.”

Well, of course we took her in, and she was with us for quite a while – at least a year. People applied to adopt her, but while other dogs came and went she stayed. She had attached herself to the Hubbit, and she disdained anyone else’s overtures. Eventually a family came to meet her – an older couple and the four teenage grandsons they were raising. To our great surprise, Patchee welcomed them. The grandsons threw balls, and she loved fetching balls, and that was really all it took. So they took her away, and as they rolled down the driveway Jim broke down and said, “I think I’ve just made a huge mistake.”

Mistake or not, we had to live with it, and so he did – but he set her picture as the wallpaper on his cell phone and carried her next to his heart, and a couple times when we were near the town she had moved to he drove past the house, hoping to see her. We never did.

Eighteen months later they called us. They told us they’d adopted another dog, from a shelter in a different town. They’d chosen that dog because it looked like Patchee and they’d thought it would be cute to have a matching pair, but they weren’t working out. Patchee had started having accidents in the house, and was scared to go outside. Frankly, it all sounded a little weird. So we told them to bring her back.

“No, no!” they said. “We love Patchee – we want to keep her. But we don’t want to take the other dog back to the shelter. We were hoping you’d take her and find her a home.”

“Nope,” I said. “Sounds like Patchee has a problem. We’re responsible for fixing it. Please bring her back.” So, reluctantly, they did. They completed paperwork to transfer her to us. Just before they signed they started to pull back and I thrust it at them. “This is the right decision,” I said, and stared them down. I was implacable. Looking back, I can’t remember why … I just knew something wasn’t okay and we needed to take our girl back. I don’t know what had really happened to her while she was with them. I don’t know what happened to the other dog. Maybe they kept her, maybe not. Maybe she was okay. They’d said she was fine.

Patchee was not fine. For several days she was utterly shut down – barely eating, barely sleeping, just curled in a tight ball, refusing to make eye contact. Then one day the Hubbit and I were sitting quietly near her and chatting, and he … I don’t know what he did. Maybe he laughed, or maybe he used a phrase that triggered a memory. I just remember that suddenly she raised her head and looked at him. Stood up, went to him, and “Oh!” she said, with her whole body. “There you are!” And she began to heal.

She started following him around the farm. Curling up close by in his study. Playing fetch. Dismantling toys to find the squeak. Sleeping between us on the bed. She changed toward me too – decided I was maybe a little more than the person who fed her and threw the ball; I began to get my small allotment of snuggles and “Good morning” rrroooo-rrahhhs. She even decided she liked a few of our friends.

And that was pretty much the sum total of her life until a few months ago. She didn’t do anything extraordinary … She rolled in cow manure in spring and turned green. She chased the ball. She went down to the river a few times, and sometimes rode along when the Hubbit went out on errands. She found the squeaker in every squeaky toy, and pulled stuffing out of anything stuffed. She hung out with the Hubbit. She was happy.

A few months ago I took her to the vet for her senior wellness exam, and after a couple of tests they diagnosed early stage kidney failure and an inoperable tumor in her bladder. This was our second case of kidney failure this year … the Hubbit’s other little princess, Ntombi, died last April barely two months after her diagnosis. And when she got sick we were sad and worried, and I turned myself inside-out trying to feed her home-cooked meals suitable for failing kidneys, and when we had to let her go because she was simply fading away we were sad – of course we were.

Ntombi – our first death row rescue. She was just a puppy in 2007, scheduled to die because there was no room at the pound.

But she was an old dog, and old dogs die. It’s what you expect. One of the things that may carry them off is kidney failure. So when we got Patchee’s diagnosis I was sad, but she was eleven – not old old, but old enough. The tumor worried me, but I figured we’d just keep things going as long as we could and help her go when we had to.

The Hubbit didn’t react that way. “We need to fight this. I’m not ready to lose her,” he said. So we went back to the vet to discuss our options, and the vet suggested we take her to the oncology department at Washington State University vet school.

The thing about refinancing a mortgage is, you get a month, or occasionally two months, of grace during which you don’t have to make a payment. There’s the final payment to your original mortgage holder, and then you get whatever is left in your escrow account, and a month (or two) of no mortgage payment before payments to the new mortgage holder kick in.

The vet at WSU said a course of chemo might help her. It wouldn’t cure the cancer, she warned, but it might give her some time – quality time, with just a few tough days after each treatment. We would have to take her in every three weeks, and she’d need to have a blood test done at our local vet a week after each treatment, and sometimes other tests. She’d have to stay on the special kidney diet as well, and she’d be on daily medications. All this added up to a wild number of dollars. But … we could do it. So we did.

The first treatment was amazing. She could pee again! She’d squat and pee would come out – a bit reddish, but they told us that was a normal side-effect of the chemo – and in no time she’d be done and bouncing off to do something more interesting. Her appetite recovered a few days after the treatment, her tail went up, her rrroooo-rrahhhs came at full volume. She fetched the ball and hung out with the Hubbit and life was good.

By the time the second treatment rolled around, peeing was difficult again. It was slow, and she sometimes had to walk around a while to get herself into exactly the right position to make anything come out. We looked forward to another improvement after that treatment, but there was none, and there was no improvement after the third treatment either, and by then it was difficult to get her to eat even after she’d had time to recover from the chemo. We abandoned the special kidney diet – it was becoming clear that she wouldn’t be around long enough to die of kidney failure – and I spent hours picking at chicken breast, breaking the flesh into fragments, mashing them into rice that had been cooked in chicken broth. I bought canned dog food that smelled so yummy it drove the rest of the pack crazy with envy, and the Hubbit tempted her with bits and pieces off his plate. She developed a bladder infection and was on an antibiotic, so I loaded up a large syringe with Greek yogurt twice a day and forced her to take it. She developed diarrhea, so I made her eat canned pumpkin, pushing it far back into her mouth with my thumb and holding her muzzle so she couldn’t spit it out. The rest of the time – when she wasn’t peeing one tiny drip at a time, or grimacing at the thought of food, she was as she always had been – watching over the Hubbit out in the pasture, in his workshop, while he was at his computer. She loved him, and she loved her life.

Three weeks ago I took her for her fourth treatment. It’s a two-and-a-half hour drive to WSU, and I welcomed the respite from everyday life. I left around dawn to be there in time for her 9.00AM appointment, listening to Stephen King’s “It” on an audiobook, on time for once, no need to rush, loving the easy highway through the unfurling hills of the Palouse. I was in our new pickup, Argos on the back seat and Patchee, snug in the colorful fleece jacket Cujo made her, curled up on her blanket on the passenger seat beside me. The sun had been up for a while as I rounded a curve, loving the sparkle of the thin layer of ice on the roadway, taking it slow.

The quiet beauty of the Palouse

And then I was spinning and time shifted into slow-motion. I checked the dogs, and they were fine. I remembered not to slam the brakes because that would make the skid harder to control. I checked the road and was relieved to see no traffic. I steered into the spin. My foot hovering over the brake, I waited to regain control, but that didn’t happen. I looked at the barricade as I was carried inexorably toward it – it looked just so flimsy, and I studied the way the hillside sloped down into the valley below the road, and I wondered whether I’d be able to keep the pickup upright when we smashed through the barricade and slammed downward. I figured the truck was probably going to roll, and I thought, “Okay, so maybe this is how death happens for me. I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.” I hoped the dogs would be okay, and not run off and be lost and starve in those lonely hills. I felt the pickup slam into the barricade – a solid thump, and the barricade held and we were sliding and spinning back across into the left lane, still no oncoming traffic, and I think it was around about then that I started carefully pumping the brake, still steering into the spin as best I could, and the wheels bit into gravel at the edge of the road, and at last. We. Stopped.

I guess the whole thing took less than a minute, but it lasted half a lifetime. I guess I must have hit a puddle of black ice, not yet melted although the sun had been up for at least an hour along that stretch of roadway. I’ve since learned that because the cruise control was on, when the wheels hit ice and lost friction they automatically accelerated, and of course until I tapped the brake the cruise control kept the pickup moving. So obvious … I was waiting for it to slow down, and it couldn’t – not until I deactivated the cruise control by braking. And I hesitated to brake, because I didn’t want to make the skid worse. So … a lesson for any who don’t know: don’t use cruise control in potentially icy conditions.

It wasn’t long before a car came along and pulled over, and a young man asked if I needed help. He loaned me his cell phone to call the Hubbit (mine wasn’t picking up a signal), and then he took me and the dogs to WSU. There was another accident a little further along the highway but he said he’d grown up in the area and preferred using the more scenic back routes anyway, and took off along a dirt road that wound through the hills. It was very pretty, but I spent most of the drive thinking how ironic it would be to have survived the accident only to be done in by a serial killer, and wondering whether the Hubbit would be able to find the dogs. (Spoiler alert: I’m still here.)

And then … we were at the vet school, and back inside the painful reality of regular life. A vet student came and took Patchee to have an ultrasound. Argos and I made camp in the lobby with the pile of blankets and my Kindle and other random crap that I’d thought I needed to pull from the pickup. After a while the Cool Dude, the Hubbit’s friend who lives in a motorhome parked next to our house, arrived to take us home. He’d left the Hubbit to figure out how to get the pickup back to the farm. We hung around and waited, and eventually the vet emerged and told me that Patchee’s tumor was still growing, and she wanted to try a different chemotherapy drug, and a course of radiation therapy to start in a few weeks. I said okay to the chemo, and agreed to discuss radiation with the Hubbit. At last the day was over and we loaded up in the Cool Dude’s car and drove home.

She loved when I snuggled her up into one of the jackets Cujo made her. She didn’t like being cold! But then after a few days she’d go out and scrape it off wriggling through a pasture fence, and the Hubbit would have to go looking.

We hoped, so very much, that this new chemo drug would work – that she’d at least be able to pee easy again. But … no. Mostly she leaked. She was scheduled for her fifth chemo treatment this week.

Last week, on Wednesday morning, I noticed she was passing blood – not just bloody urine, which was somewhat normal, but actual blood. I called the vet, and they said to take her in and they’d check her out in between appointments and call when they knew something. A couple hours later they called me, and I told the Hubbit he needed to go and be with her. It was time to let her go.

We don’t know for sure without a necropsy, but we think the tumor blocked her urethra, or maybe it just got too big, and her bladder ruptured. The extraordinary thing is that she still sang a song of joy to the Hubbit that morning, and she glommed down half her breakfast a few hours later, and she was … just … happy to be alive, hanging out with the Hubbit, doing her thing. She wasn’t afraid, and she didn’t complain that she was hurting.

The Hubbit brought her home in a little cardboard coffin the vet provided, still wearing the bright jacket that can no longer warm her. He put her in the big chest freezer we keep in the workshop. He insisted that he and the Cool Dude would dig her grave, but they’re both gimped up and I need her not to be in the freezer any more, so a couple days ago he agreed to ask our neighbor for help.

Tomorrow morning I’ll get up early and make him a batch of brownies. He’s coming with his backhoe at 10:00AM, and it won’t take long.

At 11.00AM a woman is arriving with a little freaked-out Mini-Aussie who needs a place to be and someone to teach her how to stop biting and be happy.

On Sunday I’m meeting with someone who needs me to do write something for her.

On Monday I’m working on that website.

Sometimes life spins out of control, and sometimes it’s in slow-mo, and sometimes both happen at once. You have to drive into the spin, tap the brake lightly, and hope the barricade will hold. Usually it does.

Gaps in the fence

The other day I was driving home when our neighbor’s wife called to say her husband had died. We didn’t know them well. I’d only ever spoken to the wife over the telephone, though I knew him to say hello or wave. He and the Hubbit were friendly; they’d call on each other for help as needed – to borrow tools or equipment, or work together on some or other repair. For a while we took care of their pasture in return for grazing our cattle there. More than once he zipped over in his golf cart to help us chase down a runaway steer.

Somehow I never got around to inviting them over to barbecue, and we had no idea that he’d been diagnosed with throat cancer in February.  When I got home I told the Hubbit the news and he was dismayed. “Well, dang!” he said. “I’ve been thinking I should go over and visit, but…”

A few weeks ago I learned that my Aunt Marietjie had died. She was in her nineties and I knew she’d become frail, but the last time I saw her – just a few years ago at Marmeee’s memorial service – she was as I’d always known her: calm, unfalteringly kind, resolute. We weren’t close; I didn’t see her that often and in the 23 years since I moved to the US we’ve never corresponded … but when I named this blog it was with her in mind, because she was someone I kinda wanted to be like – strong, unflappable, salt-of-the-earth, a woman of strong faith and stronger Scrabble skills, a quiet source of wisdom and comfort food.

My father, the Olde Buzzard, used to refer to her as a soustannie, and it was only after I named this blog that I learned that the word didn’t mean an intelligent, powerful woman with excellent culinary skills. It’s not a compliment. It means someone who is female, fat and bossy. Well, some might say that makes it a fine name for my blog …. Oh well. [Insert shrug emoji here.]

Moment of truth: the Olde Buzzard was intimidated by strong women, and that made him mean. He had uncomplimentary nicknames for me too. He died a few years ago, and … well, all I want to say is, I’m grateful that in the end I was able to do my duty, to treat him with love and kindness, and that everything needing to be said and done between us was indeed said and done.

Getting back to Marietjie … I thought of changing the name of this blog, but decided instead to stay with the image I’d originally had in mind – an image largely inspired by this aunt, whom I am not at all like, yet who was extraordinarily kind to me at random intervals throughout my life. She was the one person I could trust to love my Girl Child when she needed it and wouldn’t accept it from me. I always meant to write to her care of my cousin, but…

Some years ago I wrote a post that won a response from a different cousin, from the other side of the family. I replied, but he never commented again. But from then on, every time I wrote about dogs, a small part of me wrote for him, because I grew up hearing stories about his extraordinary ability to connect with animals.

I grew up loving him.

I have many cousins and I’ve had crushes on several of them, but Michael was special. He was so handsome, tan and blue-eyed and blonde, with ruggedly regular features and a smile that reached out and pulled you in. When he invited me up onto his lap and taught me how to tell the time on his big wristwatch, he made my four-year-old heart flutter. I was convinced I would marry him, and I was devastated when he married someone else.

The Old Buzzard had adored my cousin – they were close in age – and he disliked the wife, and now I realize that she’s probably strong and intelligent as well as being “a damn liberal who thinks we aren’t good enough”. Back then, viewing her through the distorted lens of his resentment, I couldn’t warm to her. But I spent a month with them, while I was a university student with a vacation job in their city, and I remember she was kind, and their home was beautiful, and they seemed happy. (Who wouldn’t be happy with Michael?) I remember that she collected silver, so at the end of the visit I spent almost everything I’d earned on some too large and probably tacky addition to her collection because I needed to prove that I’d been raised right. I remember I fell and sprained my ankle getting off the bus, and Michael – who was a successful vet by then – bound it up. When I complained that he hurt me, he laughed at me for making more fuss than a dog with far worse injuries. But I forgave him because he still made my teenage heart flutter.

After I got that message from him on my long-ago blog post, whenever I wrote about dogs and hoped for another message I thought about making contact. I imagined going to see him on my next trip to South Africa. And then a couple months ago I heard that he’d died. Hoping for more detail I looked at his sister Midge’s Facebook page – and that’s when I learned that her daughter had just died – a beautiful, bright, happy woman that I’d never met, barely knew existed, just gone. There are wedding photos on Midge’s Facebook page, and she shines. I wept over them for several days – I don’t know why the loss felt so agonizing; I didn’t know her! And then I tried to write to Midge, but…

Then I got a message on my last post, from Michael’s wife, reaching out, and that’s when I learned that he’d actually died long before I heard about it – last January, of covid – such a horrible, horrible way to go! And I wanted to write to her, but what to say? Where to send it? We’re not even connected through Facebook – which I rarely visit anyway. It’s not that I can’t figure this out – and I will – but…

But I want a do-over. I want a neighborhood barbecue, and after that maybe conversations and coffee with a few new friends.

I want to talk to Michael and his wife, and see her with my own clear eyes. I don’t know what we’d talk about … dogs, probably, but what else? I want to know!

I want another game of Scrabble with Marietjie, with a plate of koeksisters and big mugs of rooibos tea. And I want to walk on the beach and then loll about comfortably and talk about cats with my cousin, her daughter, who is still this side of the dirt but on the far side of the planet.

I want to hug Midge, and meet her daughter, and maybe be invited to the wedding, or at least send a gift. And I want to meet her niece, my goddaughter, whose parents thought it would be cute to make 12-year-old me a godmother, since they didn’t take such things seriously, only I wish I had. And actually I’d like to see her parents again too.

And then there’s the other cousin who used to look so hot in his SA Airforce uniform, and his brother who was in a quite popular band and then became a DJ. They used to tease me, and one time I played in their mother’s cactus garden and ended up sprawled over my mother’s lap, butt exposed to the sunshine and their gleeful mockery, while I shrieked my outrage and she picked out tiny needles with a pair of tweezers. Those cousins are still alive, as far as I know, round the other side of the planet, and one day it’ll be too late for a do-over, but right now I have no idea what to do about that. We had a friendship – the DJ cousin and I did, anyway – and then it fizzled and we drifted and … truth be told, there’s probably no way back. None on my map, anyway.

I have cousins scattered all over the world, and others – nieces and a nephew, second cousins – so many people that I love or have loved or wish I’d loved. And although I know I don’t have the capacity to reconnect deeply with all of them – or even with more than a very few – being strangers just feels wrong.

And then there are friends. Like Deej. I want to sit with Deej and lay out all my questions about God and ask him how he, one of the finest and fiercest champions of Christ I ever knew, could possibly think well of Donald Trump. I actually tried to ask him that, via WhatsApp, but he didn’t answer, and over time he ghosted me. That stung, because he was my pastor more than anyone else ever was or will be, and I want to look him in the eye and ask why he wounded me. But I can’t, because he’s gone, and there are no do-overs. He died last December, a week shy of his eightieth birthday, leaving me still burdened with so many questions and no one else I’d entrust them to.

I ache every day to go on a road trip with Twiglet, the sister my heart gave me. Talking on WhatsApp doesn’t cut it, especially as her connection is so bad that usually I just listen to her voice; it’s impossible really to follow what she’s saying. I want a cream tea with Luscious. I want to talk about God and poetry with Fair Bianca. I am homesick for the friends of my young womanhood!

I want to kick back and laugh with the Kat, and talk deep talks with the Egg and Homeboy, and argue face-to-face with the Girl Child instead of getting mad and frustrated over WhatsApp. I want to laugh and talk and eat with my foster kids, and watch the granddaughters they gave me grow up, and be there to love them through it when their mothers make them angry, and go to their weddings and cuddle their babies – or not, if they choose a different road. But they’re all, all on the wrong side of the planet.

I want to find a way back to the Stranger, but I don’t think there is one, and the meeting place where I’d hope to find him might not even exist.

I remember my blessings. Here I have friends, a few anyway, some quite elderly, and a Hubbit ditto, that I love as best I can – although never enough. I have neighbors that I may invite to barbecue next summer.

I’ve been thinking that the people we touch are like fenceposts. They enclose the fields where we grow our lives.

I look at my fence, and there are gaps in it. It’s been standing a while and has reached that stage in the life of a fence that gaps form more and more frequently. Some of the timbers are broken, others are weathered and warped and working loose, and many are out of my reach. Beyond the fence I see the wilderness pressing in.

I’m not afraid of the wilderness. Often I’m drawn to it … I stand next to the fence and imagine what it would be like to push through and see what’s out there. Then I remember that I have work still to do on this side and I turn back.

But it troubles me sometimes to think that one day the gate in the fence may open, and it won’t matter because the fence itself will be down. I’ll walk through, as one must, but I wonder who will know.

Photos by Denise Karis and Foto Maak on Unsplash