Part II, Day 72: Good Grief

It's been five weeks and two days since Zoe died.  I bought a book about pet bereavement, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet.  In a culture that still doesn't quite know how to talk about death, entering this landscape of grief is another new place for me, another new country, although a lot of friends have given me advice.

And not one person has implied I should get over it, and move on, even though I heard recently that grief is going to be listed as a pathology in the new DSM-5 coming out in 2013, that is, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  Apparently grief becomes pathological when it goes on a little too long.  I think you're allowed six months to a year to mourn, and then you get cut off.  After that, you need counseling, or drugs, or both.  I don't know the limit for pet bereavement.  If dogs live a seventh of our lifespans, does that mean we can only give them a seventh of the time we're granted for human family members?  If that's the case, I'm already close to tapped out. 

So here is my question:  How is healthy, non-pathological grief for one's dog supposed to look and feel?  I don't know.  All I can say is that the best advice I got from friends who have lost their beloved pups this year was to cry whenever I felt like it, for however long, and not to stop myself, not to judge myself, but to just let things be what they are.

It was the same advice I got when my mother died five years ago and when my best friend died suddenly when we were both only twenty-four.  The essence is: have your experience, and don't judge it.  Just be present.  Let what is come inside the house; abide with it without fear.  Grief delayed or repressed comes back later to haunt you anyway, so it's better to let it flow.  And so I've had to give up wearing mascara for a while.  It's liberating to live free of restraint, so open and unguarded, but I never know what to expect. 

Which is kind of what this dog has taught me ever since I brought her home, with one major difference.  In the 10 months after her diagnosis, I tried to be present with her always, to seize every day, to embrace the unexpected just as we made our routines feel new, but I also did my best not to cry in front of her or let her know when I was sad.  Now, I just move from laughter to tears to calm conversation to my eyes filling mid-word.  Living so fluidly--literally--is my new normal.  There were entire years in my life before this when I never cried once, not even at sad movies, and I would never cry in front of anyone, not even my loved ones.  It's hard to imagine now what that life was like.  It feels like it happened to someone else.

photo by Suzan McDermott, Bravura Photography

So if you ask me to describe how things are going around here, I can only tell you this: I am terribly sad sometimes, but I'm not despondent, and definitely not depressed.  And I can't really say I'm unhappy.  I sleep and eat, I exercise regularly, I'm back in yoga class, I water the plants, and I come as close to balancing my checkbook as I ever have.  I am still inspired by my work, extremely focused about it, and more in love than ever with my husband, family, friends.  I often feel great inexplicable surges of joy.  I hug my colleagues when I see them shopping at the farmer's market or checking on their book orders at the campus bookstore.  Sometimes my heart feels so full it almost hurts.  I feel gratitude for every sweet thing in my life, including the kindness of the gentle readers who followed this blog.  But I really miss my dog.  I miss my dog more as time goes on, not less, because at first it didn't seem so final, even though I saw her take her last breath. 

At first I thought I could be a Miss Havisham if I totally let myself go.  Instead of being the jilted bride who lives in her torn, stained wedding gown, with mold and cobwebs the only organic matter left in that room where the wedding feast would have occurred, I just thought I'd creep around with a lot of black Zoe hairballs in the corner.  I didn't want to vacuum up her fur, and when I did, I didn't want to throw it out, but I did anyway.  There's still a clump of it in our bedroom on the floor beneath all our sweaters.  Her toys are still in a box by the wood stove.  Our TV in the bedroom is still balanced on her crate, although my husband is making a new wooden stand and when that happens, the crate will get broken down and will live in the room where we keep our suitcases.  I also have a little portable Zoe shrine I bring to the deck sometimes when I meditate.  It has her collar with the purple heart for bravery that was given to her by her oncologist, a sand dollar I found when we were walking on the beach at Topsail Island this past March, and a completely disemboweled red fleece bow she got under the tree one year that she used to balance on her nose and still smells like her.

I sit out on the deck with this odd collection and imagine her looking at me as she did in this photo on an ordinary morning in the last couple weeks of her extraordinary life.

Maybe she would think Mommy was acting a bit strange if she saw me sniffing her eviscerated toy or jangling her collar, trying to recreate the sound of her running up to me.

I did this every day from the day she died until about two weeks ago.

Now I do it about once a week.

I wish I could see her, even just out of the corner of my eye, but my mind refuses to play tricks on me.  This is what frustrates me the most.  Being with Zoe for nine years grounded me, made me more present in the here and now, more planted on this earth, less likely to retreat to my space girl imagination.  But sometimes I wish my imagination would help me out.  I used to be a lot more other-worldly.  If I could believe now in another dimension, that a spirit world was right around us, I would allow myself to think she was still with me here, sitting on my left, as friends of mine who think that way promise me she is. 

But even though I don't believe she's here, I talk to her.  When I get in the car, I tell Zoe she's a good girl and I'll picture her smudging up the window with her nose.  (I have cleaned my car twice since she died, and vacuumed up her fur, but have yet to wash off those doggy nose smears.)

I talk to her a lot in my studio, since she spent so much time here with me and I wrote almost all of my posts here with her looking right at me.  I'll just say that she's a great girl, a beautiful dog, that she's so good, that she's so good, so very good.

And sometimes I just smile and say, Hi, baby dog, and I'm flooded with the memory of her essence, and I feel peace.  I see her grinning at me just like she did in this picture below:

Kelly Prime took this photo of Zoe looking at me, May of 2012.  The poop bag got in the picture too.

My former student took this photo of Zoe and me on an ordinary day, the kind of ordinary day I tried to make memorable when all our days were numbered.  We walked around the track on our campus and Kelly told me how she wanted to be a writer.  Zoe plopped down on the grass to rest when we were halfway through, and Kelly and I took turns with the camera.  I cropped this one so that you won't see my weird brown sweatpants that look like fake suede, or the black leather money belt I used on dog walks for carrying treats and poop bags that my husband teased me about, or the extra five or so pounds I put on from all those amazing Sundays lunches we had this year, post-diagnosis.  There was a time--maybe this was back when I couldn't cry--when my vanity would not have allowed me to keep a photo like that around.  But I love the way Zoe looks here, and I like the way I'm looking at her, in the part of the picture you can't see, and the photo, in its entirety, is one I will always treasure.

I didn't dream about her for the first ten days.  This made me get very mad at my superego, my hyper-vigilant sleeping self.  Couldn't my superego/sleeping self stop being so damn literal and just take a little break from reality?  In all of our nine years together, Zoe would appear in my dreams even if she didn't make an appearance until late in the game.  At some point I would remember: Hey, you, sleeping Natalia person, you have a dog!  Where's your dog?  And then she'd sneak in, as though she'd been there all along.  She was never on a lead, never had on her collar.  We'd just walk together or run wherever I happened to have been in the dream when I remembered she was my companion.  Often we were in city traffic, but she never got in harm's way.  In this way Zoe and I traveled to New York City and London together, through crowds in the middle of Delhi, through mountains and deserts and lots of other complicated futuristic dreamscapes that have no name.

Photo by Suzan McDermott

So I thought she would stay in my dreams forever, that we would be reunited whenever I slept.  But she was gone.  And then, ten days after she died, ten nights of dog-less dreams later, she finally showed up.  She was both a young dog, maybe a year old, looking very collie-like, with more white markings than in real life, and she was a nine-year-old little girl, with long, silky black hair and the nutmeg skin of a Cherokee.  The two were both Zoe, both gorgeous, and both doing what my friends and I playing at recess used to call around-the-worlds on the monkey bars, twirling and twirling nonstop.

Finally I got the puppy version of Zoe to stop moving and I held her head in my hands.  I wanted her to listen.  I said, "Zoe, thank you for letting me be your person.  Being with you made me happier than I've ever been in my life."

And when I woke up I realized that was true.  And this came to me as a shock.  That of all the sources of five-star happiness on my list, the pure joy I felt in the company of my beloved dog was like nothing I'd ever known.

My husband says he doesn't mind.  I love him so much for that.  But here's the thing: that happiness I felt with Zoe leaked out, over everything.  Over everyone.  And it hasn't gone anywhere.

Zoe taught me to inhabit every moment with everything in my arsenal: brain, heart, soft belly, fierce animal hunger, compassion, annoyance, fear, the whole lot.  So how do I sit with my grief, which takes me to the past, and still live thoroughly in the present?

photo by Suzan McDermott

I wake up each day and do the things on the to-do list.  Work on the novel for 3 to 12 hours.  Draft syllabi for the new semester.   Get aerobic exercise.  Do yoga and lift weights.  See friends, read, cook meals, relax with my husband, make plans for coming trips.  I like doing all these things.   I like being productive.  I always have.

But I also look at old photos of her and I'm there, in those memories, and I'm grateful to have them, grateful even for the flood of tears.  I have about five or six old movies consisting mainly of my sister and me provoking her dog and mine to roll around and nip at each other and grunt, our version of pup pile-up, and I think, Thank goodness we were wise enough to know we needed documentary proof of our supreme immaturity, thank dog we knew we needed to record for all time these three minutes of sublime happiness.   Honestly: the first two weeks I think I went through every single photograph of Zoe I had every single day and if you've been in this corner a while, you know that's a lot of pictures.  Ditto, movies.  Ditto, old journals that never became posts.  That was pretty much how I spent my afternoons.

What I haven't done yet, though, gentle reader, is re-read all the posts of this blog.  I will, when I feel like I can.

I miss her when I eat.  I can't break the habit of picking out the bits of egg or meat that I know she'll like when she licks the plates.  Now they just sit there.

under the deck

I miss her when I walk up the steps to the deck of our house, where she kept watch.

I miss her on the balcony when I sit or water the plants.  I think of how amazing it was to behold her there, rapt, staring for hours on end at the river and wildlife and wind, how she taught me stillness and steadiness and wonder.

I miss our morning love.  She would thump her tail, roll on her back and grunt, and it was a new day, a marvelous new day.

I miss nighttime cuddles.  After I brushed my teeth I would find where she had made her nest for the night and I'd talk to her, review the highlights of the day, scratch her back, and tell her again how wonderful she was.

Every part of town probably still has her DNA.  She has peed on every bush.  Every walk we've taken is still happening in some other dimension as I make my way around on foot from village to woods to town green.

One of my friends who lost both her beloved cat and best friend in the same year had their ashes mixed and fired into jewelry.  Another friend who lost her dog this spring went out and got a tattoo of the dog's paw print on her ankle.  Another friend wants to salvage all her dog's fur that she's vacuumed and knit a scarf to wear in winter.  These are people who are very even-tempered, whose grief would not be the first thing you would notice about them if they walked into a room.  I understand the need to wear the beloved companion around one's neck or to scarify oneself with his memory.  You want something against your skin that says, This love has seared me, and that love is here to stay.  You want to say, This creature I mourn was my heart.

What I'm going to do is plant some of Zoe's ashes beneath the willow bush my friend Cathy gave us to honor Zoe's life.  This bush will live and grow in front of the deck where Zoe used to guard the house.  I'll also put some of her ashes in her favorite other places in the yard, and on my balcony.  And I'll let some of her ashes float away in the river that flows past our house and when I do I'll think of the Tibetan Buddhist sand mandala I once saw, and I'll remember the wonder I felt as it was being made--which was exactly the same wonder I felt as it was released to the universe.

Her remains came home in a lovely wooden box.  I expected something tacky made of cardboard.  I expected something cheap and flimsy that would make me weep.  Instead I cried because of the kindness and courtesy being shown to us by our vet, who chose to take our beloved girl to a place that returns the ashes of our animal companions back to our family hearths in a treasure box.  It looks like it's made of walnut or stained mahogany and some delicate vines are carved into the top of it.  It's the kind of box I would buy for storing nice stuff.

It's in our dining room now.  I haven't opened it.

Coming home after work or an evening with friends is the hardest, even five weeks on.  Knowing that she won't be rushing to the door to greet us, to put on her own one-dog parade of welcome: that's sad for us.  Our house is quieter now, and Zoe was already a very quiet dog.

photo by Suzan McDermott

I get a little restless at the part of the day when we did our walks, and I've been trying to use that time to do yoga instead of just work. I am also on the lookout for some dogs to borrow, short-term.

In fact, even though I'm really busy now, I try to spend as much time as I can with other people's dogs.  Last weekend I picked up my friend Cathy's dog from her house and brought him to our house while she finished a project at the library, and I can't begin to describe how much it filled my heart to see him in my rear view mirror grinning at me from the back seat, and stepping up on the divider now and then to take a whiff of my savory arm pits (it was 95 degrees) and look out the window at the North Country landscape of maple trees and pines whizzing past, a sight that always made Zoe so content.  I can't tell you how happy it made me to know that for the next few hours while my friend and I made dinner and caught up on each other's news there would be a sweet dog to pat after every other sentence.  It sent me back to memories of the two dogs playing together.

But that didn't stop me from missing Zoe.  It made me miss her more.

And you see, that's the thing.  A kind and helpful part of myself wants to console the grieving part of me and say, Hey, your memories are beautiful and they give you peace.  Aren't you lucky to have them?

I am.  I'm grateful.  But I can't touch those memories.  Not with my hands, anyway.  And that's the paradox.  Loving a dog, loving this dog, made me more physical, more connected to all things palpable and three-dimensional and real.  And there's no replacement for the physicality of that experience.  For the feeling of my hand against her fur, her rough tongue, her bad breath, the thump of her tail.

Milo, the King Charles Spaniel who thinks he's a Greyhound, came by last week with his people.  When he's over these days he looks all through the house for Zoe.  He still smells her everywhere.  I hope if he ever sees her he'll tell me where to look.

So I am getting to know this place called grief.  It's like another room in the house.  I go there and look out the window and see what the sky looks like from this new angle: the maple tree rocking in a sudden wind without a dog to track its motion, the emboldened groundhogs and bunnies and now a baby skunk all playing hacky sack in a dog-free yard like teens in the house when the adults are gone.  And always, always, the river flowing past, never stopping, never changing direction, gleaming white and gray like the ashes we'll send down it soon, when we are ready to let some of them go.

Part II, Day 69: A Photo Montage Intermission

photo by Tara Freeman, Zoe and me in my writing and meditation studio

Zoe in her favorite bunker, under the deck, watching the house

in trillium season, May of 2012, there was also phlox

Zoe and me in trillium season, photo by Kerry Grant

Zoe looking wolfy in May

Zoe at the entrance to the woods, trillium season, 2012

Zoe's meditation post

 I thought at first this photo was by Tara Freeman, but in fact I took it in early March when we were driving to do a walk with Cooper

photo by Tara Freeman of Zoe and me

I kept seeing this version of Zoe again, this exact face, in the last 10 days of her life

photo by Karen Strauss

photo by Karen Strauss

photo by Tara Freeman

photo by Tara Freeman

photo by Tara Freeman

photo by Tara Freeman

photo by Tara Freeman

Zoe and me having a chat, photo by Tara Freeman

Zoe and me in May, 2012, photo by Kelly Prime

Zoe in front of Chenonceau, the Loire Valley, France, May, 2010

Zoe at her meditation post on my balcony

resting on her funky day bed, a ripped up old sleeping bag of our kids', in my studio

We lived for these moments when she would roll on her back and let us pat her belly

Zoe in winter, her favorite season, after first major snowstorm of 2012

February 12, 2012

Zoe in the French Alps, late May, 2010

I have more posts to write, gentle reader, but today I wanted to share the photo montage I keep seeing in my head as I try to come to terms with both my grief for my beloved Zoe and my gratitude for the beautiful days we've shared together, up to the very end.  

The other day in an e-mail a friend quoted me from an early post when I said that sorrow's soft underbelly is made of the memories of the beloved that give us joy.  (I think I said this more succinctly the first time!)  These are a few of them in pictorial form.  I have more coming soon, and more stories.

Thank you so much for reading and for sharing your own stories about love, mortality, dogs, and more.

Namaste.

Day 76: On Sister Love

On this day, February 21, thirty-five years ago (plus a tad more), long before she was known to the world as Mira Bee, a baby named Myra Jean was born.

She had an older sister who was very cute and very nice and very smart, but also just a wee bit bossy.

The two little girls had a mother, who was a musical genius, and a father who was a talented painter and novelist.

Unfortunately, the father was an alcoholic and the mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.

The two sisters banded together to become their own island of girl-mightiness that could withstand the storms ahead.  They wrote stories and poems and plays.  They drew all day until their fingers grew knobby with callouses.  They climbed trees.  They read and read.  They turned snapdragons in the garden into talking creatures, and they sought out verdant places where they would time-travel back to a bucolic imaginary land and life they called Olden Times, where the older sister was always the prairie mother making them big pots of soup, and the little sister was always the dog or the horse.

Little Myra Jean grew up to be talented in too many things to list here: playing the piano, fiddle, ukulele, and harp; writing poetry, memoir, Facebook missives, radio pieces, kids' books, and short stories; speaking foreign languages (especially Italian) and giving commencement speeches, cooking all kinds of cuisine that features olive oil, gardening, keeping orchids alive, growing apple trees (the secret, she reveals, is to ignore them, but the avid orchard keepers in her community get jealous), painting, drawing, and illustration, salsa dancing, throwing a great party, making friends, being an amazing and inspiring stepmother to two lovely girls, and fixing broken stuff, including rare Italian pottery, the girls' mother's glasses, and relationships that seemed irreparable.

As a child she was an animal first--not just a horse and a dog, but the mythical beasts from Russian fairy tales and Icelandic myths, and other creatures her older sister has forgotten.  On the property of their rental in Indiana, where they lived before and during their parents' divorce, little Myra Jean found three dead rabbits and she carried them back to the yard.  Picture a small three-year-old girl like the one pictured here hauling these carcasses back to their house.  They may have been bigger than she was.  Did she want to adopt them as pets?  Or bury them?

Although she was bitten by a dog once, when she and her sister were walking to elementary school in Cleveland, she is a lifelong lover of dogs.  She would grow up to become her sister's dog's aunt.  At first she would resist referring to herself as her dog Sadie's mom, especially when Sadie's identity in the animal kingdom was unclear (some thought she was a reindeer, for example) but once she did, there was no turning back.

Like her immature older sister, she just liked watching her dog snap her head toward her in an eager way when someone said in a really sappy happy excited voice, "Where's Mommy?"

She has survived many things: her parents' divorce, poverty, her mentally ill mother's attacks, the bizarre behavior of her mother's father (hoarding, gun-worship, insults, meanness), the industrial Midwest before the Clean Air Act went into effect, the disco era, the Reagan presidency, really bad medical care that included an unnecessary lung operation and unnecessary surgery for carpel tunnel, a divorce.  She was in an airport trying to get home at the onset of the Gulf War.  She fell on the ice and suffered a concussion, then, before she had healed, she was hit by a giant truck, suffered brain trauma, had to relearn the alphabet, still has nerve pain, gets exhausted and overwhelmed, but wrote and illustrated a beautiful, heartbreaking, life-affirming memoir called The Memory Palace that is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  In the writing of that book, she helped many people face their troubled pasts.  Including her older sister.  She brought attention to the still much neglected and misunderstood plight of the mentally ill and the homeless.  She has raised money to issue journals to all the women who seek refuge in the same shelter our mother did, and her advocacy work has inspired many people to donate money and time to this shelter and probably others.  And through her blog, Mira's List, she helps people from all around the world believe in themselves as artists.

Never once through her many misfortunes did she feel sorry for herself.  Even after the accident, she would visit her older sister and offer to plant her flowers for the balcony on the studio: snapdragons, of course, were always in the mix.  She would focus herself completely on the task at hand, modeling mindfulness, even when her brain was in disrepair.

She has frequently been swarmed by bees.  We're talking a freakish degree here.  Like a biblical plague of locusts.  What do these bees have against our Mira Bee?  Do they object to the way she has used their name?

She has the sense of humor of an eleven-year-old boy.  Because her husband, Douggie Pee, does too, their relationship works.  But sometimes there are too many jokes about biological functions for the other people who have to watch.

If she and her sister had more time to spend together, they would go back to France and relive the vacation they shared there this past May.

They would eat more cake.  If fact, if it were possible to just fly there for the day, this is the place, in Rouen, in Normandy, where they would be sharing Mira Bee's birthday cake.

If Myra Jean/now Mira Bee could have anything in the world, it wouldn't be great fame.  She would like a little more wealth, but only so she can carry on as an artist and thinker and all of the other things listed above.  But beyond that, it would make her very happy to have her own baby echidna, the egg-laying mammal that people affectionately call a spiny anteater.  (The fact that something spiny that eats ants is described as such with affection is the key to Mira Bee's universe.)  Mira thinks she looks like one.  But she also thinks her sister looks like one.  She would also be happy with a puggle, spawn of the echidna.

To have a sister is a rare thing, a lifelong source of learning, a songbook, a source of shtick, of codes and private references and gags and secrets and dreams.  Her older sister is always dreaming that the two girls are going somewhere--last week it was on a rowboat to India--and that she has to protect the younger one from harm. And yet having a younger sister--this particular younger sister--saved the older one's life.

Happy birthday, Mira Bee, and happy sister love to all of you so lucky to have one!

Day 69: A Valentine's Day Non-Date to Remember

My first date with my husband was on a Valentine's Day.  But he didn't know it was Valentine's Day, and neither of us thought of it as a date. 

I was new to the North Country, and he was newly single.  He had been widowed the previous summer, and although he wasn't officially ready, there were already a few women circling. 

I went to his house because we were colleagues and I assumed this was one of those invitations that old-timers extend to the newbies.  Another couple, Sid and Mo, had been invited as well, and they seemed not to be aware that it was Valentine's Day either.  I brought a bottle of my favorite French red wine.  Kerry would later tell our friend Eve that his days of buying box wine were coming to an end, and he had me to blame.   He served his signature dish, steak au poivre, but I was a vegetarian so I went home hungry that night.  We talked about students we had in common, our favorite books, and movies, and the evening rolled along pleasantly.  As a first date, it was not particularly romantic or auspicious, but as a non-date, it was a success.

And then something very strange happened, something completely uncanny and unexpected.  I was in the room we like to call, for lack of a better word, the wood stove room, getting ready to leave, when his boys came home.  I had walked to the house from my apartment, which was a mile away, but it was a cold night, and Sid and Mo were about to drive me back. The kids were 11 and 13.  The younger one had just been to a hockey game on our campus with his friends.  The older one had just gone on his very first babysitting gig.  I didn't take the ride, because I wanted to talk to these young whippersnappers.  And somehow, as the four of us stood chatting around the wood stove--standing because there was no furniture in the room, only the stove and bookshelves, standing also because I was on my way out and had my coat on, and they had just come in--I found myself glued to the floor.

I am not someone who stays late at someone's house on my very first visit.  I don't like to overstay my welcome, and I like to get up early to write.  But some kind of spooky gravity took over.  It's like my feet knew the score, and the rest of me knew squat.  Soon I was overheated--the coat, the stove--but I couldn't bring myself to leave.

Like me, the boys had no inkling that I was going to start dating their dad.  I was just one of his friends from work, and they were the children in a college town in which people of both genders and of all ages are always popping in and out for dinners and parties.  I don't remember what we all talked about, but if it was hockey, I would have had no prior experience to bring to the conversation.  I do know that by the time Kerry and I were officially seeing each other, the older boy seemed to think it was his idea.  Maybe he liked what I had to say about babysitting.

It took another three weeks and six days for us to realize that we liked each other and for us to set forth into the world on our first official dinner date.  (See Day 30: Two Weddings, A Book Launch, and a Funeral.) That was 21 years ago. 

Truth be told, neither of us is all that big on Valentine's Day.  He's suspicious of all commercial holidays, and my favorite holiday is Thanksgiving, especially since I've learned how to brine.  We do have a date tonight, but we're staying home.

We're having roast salmon, risotto with leeks and mushrooms, arugula, and the lemon tart with raspberries my husband made last night.  I bought the flowers.  Zoe will be stationed near us, hoping for bits of fish to fall.  And then we'll watch Downton Abbey on my laptop, which we never see on Sunday night because I can't stay up late enough.  (See Day 64 Hooked on Downton Abbey: In Love with Love.) I can't wait.

The thing about having a non-date or a real date at home with the person you are married to is, well, that you have to both enjoy being together at home.  This winter, more than ever, we both do.

It's so nice to set the table, put out the candles, the flowers, and open the non-box wine.  We hardly ever think about the years that have passed, and we don't speculate much about the future.  So instead, each date, or non-date, is just another evening.  We're in it for the food and the company. And we're sharing it with the dog.

When I retell the story here, my first dinner in this house sounds like a date with destiny.  But on that long-ago night, I had no glimmer that love was on its way, or the desire to have a family and settle down in one place, this house on the river.  But my feet knew what the rest of me didn't.  What they were saying was, this feels like peace.

Wishing you all a lovely Valentine's Day, gentle reader: dates, non-dates, and everything in between.

Day 64: Hooked on Downton Abbey, In Love with Love

Last winter when I taught in France, and I got homesick for my husband, who has a slight but charming English accent, and for our dog, I found a distraction in TV form, Downton Abbey.  I had no inkling how much this show would take over my life.

The show is a great outlet for the Anglophile in all of us.  Last winter, in addition to missing my husband, I had family in England I wanted to visit, but our group had visa problems and were not able to leave France.  The year before, when my husband and I were in France together with our dog, we'd each gone on our own separate getaways to London while the other stayed behind with Zoe.  I went over in May, just in time to see the flowers in full bloom in Green Park with my friend, Jennifer.

Green Park, London

I can't even say why I bought Downton Abbey, on I-Tunes.  I hadn't seen it, and I had never bought any show on I-Tunes before.  All I can say is that it was love at first sight, and from the very first episode, when we saw the wire come into the grand estate that the Titanic had sunk, I was hooked.  From then on, all I had to do was hear that rhapsodic opening music and watch the cute yellow lab scamper across the property and I was transported.

My internet connection was unreliable in my apartment, and when I look back on that time I can track my moods on those nights alone as to whether or not I got to see a whole episode.  I had a big TV in the living room, but I never turned it on (I wish I had--my French would have improved much more quickly) so my only couch potato activity was to watch this show on my laptop, and one other.  (Madmen might be a subject for another post.)  I saw each episode three times, and then, when my sister, Mira, came to visit in May, I got her hooked on the show too.  We could not believe we would have to wait until the winter of 2012 to pick up the storyline again.  How could the writers and producers do this to us?  How would we wait?

The show has everything: history, class struggle, war, scandal, schemers, love, thwarted love, wealth, new inventions, beautiful clothes, architecture, and manners.  Perhaps most exciting is the wild ride of witnessing the Western world at the cusp of dramatic change that will affect everyone's lives, both private and public.  An old world order is breaking down, and as some fortunes rise and others fall, it's impossible not to hope that some of these star-crossed lovers will finally end up together.

But I'm starting to think that wanting love to prevail somewhere, anywhere, on the estate of Downton Abbey might be too much to ask for.  Why can't poor Edith finally have a man?  Does she really have to resort to the married farmer, or now, this mysterious burn victim from Canada who says he had amnesia and he's really the heir?  Will Sybil give up everything and run off to fight for Irish independence with the chauffeur, Tom Branson?

And then there's our so-called happy couple who preside over all, the Earl and Countess of Grantham, who at first seemed to demonstrate, in defiance of Western romantic tradition, that marriage and passion might possibly be found in the same place.  But then Cora was suddenly too busy making herself useful in the war to join her man at table for every meal.  Can their marriage function if she joins the twentieth century?  Will he seek comfort with the new maid? 

That leads us to the two primary couples.  In the downstairs realm, will Mr. Bates and Anna ever be able to wed?  It looks now like the murder of Mr. Bates' nasty, blackmailing ex, Vera, might be pinned on him.  Will he and Anna ever get a break?  And has there ever been a valet in the history of the aristocracy who had so many brushes with the law and scandal, and was always forgiven and taken back by his lord and master?

And finally, Lady Mary and Matthew Crawley.  They had their games, their differences in class and upbringing, their colossal egos, and they blew it.  Now they each have someone in the picture: Lavinia for Matthew, who wants to be with him despite his war injuries, and Sir Richard for Mary, who will ruin her if she tries to break it off because of what he knows now (thanks to her own confession, thanks to Vera Bates) about her deadly dalliance with the handsome Turk.  That would all make things difficult enough, but then the writers had to give him a war injury that would make it impossible for him to "sire" heirs?

This might be taking the classic Western love plot too far--or perhaps it's just a very literal interpretation of the genre?

My addiction to the show made me want to go back to my trusty, Denis de Rougement, who, in Love and the Western World, explains the age-old conflict between passion and marriage as the conflict between those two kinds of love, eros and agape.  He tracks the basic Western romance plot back to the troubadour poets writing in the 12th century in Languedoc, who were perhaps influenced by the Cathars, the heretics that believed that God was love, but the world was evil, including all institutions, among them, marriage.  While the Cathars tried to be chaste (especially their perfects, their version of priests), their believers struggled in their bodies to follow the path with varying success.  (See Day 51: The World on the Page: On Keeping a Journal, Part Two, for a little more about the Cathars, especially one French reader's comments.)  The troubadour poets, some of whom may have been heretics, de Rougement proposes, celebrate "faraway love."  Falling for someone unattainable has its roots in these medieval poems.

In the legend of Tristan and Isolde, the basic romantic love plot solidifies to become the form we now know so well, even eight centuries later.  Boy (Tristan) meets girl (Iseult) on a boat.  Girl isn't available. (She's engaged to be married to the king.)  But they drink love potion and fall into each other's arms.  Later, King Mark suspects the duo of adultery, sends her off to be swarmed by lepers, and sentences Tristan to the stake.  They escape into a forest, and when King Mark finds them one night, Tristan's sword is lying between them.  The king assumes that this is a sword of chastity keeping them pure.  All is forgiven, but things still don't end well.  To review the rest, I suggest going to see the Wagner opera.

Unconsummated passion is one of the features of the Western love story.  And the classic delay of fulfillment, all those obstacles, provide opportunities for the characters to become better humans, and far more spiritual.

Or not.

So Matthew's war-induced impotency is the sword of chastity.  And given the show's emphasis on their distinguished line carrying on, and not dying out with the Earl, this plot development fits a little too perfectly into both the Western romantic tradition and this particular story.  But, seriously?  It's clear that Matthew still loves Lavinia, and that Richard won't let Mary go without ruining her, but is his injury to his vitals going to be the ultimate obstacle that keeps the lovers from being together?

How can the writers do this to us?

Well, at least at the end of the last show, Matthew was feeling a curious "tingle."  So there's hope for him, for them, and for the romantic fools among us who are still holding out hope that this story will end well for some of them, at least.  (But not Thomas or O'Brien, and don't get me started.  Why did they have to make the male villain gay, and the female villain a lady's maid with an Irish name?)

When the love potion does its magic, Tristan is in love with love.  Maybe that's our problem too, eight centuries on.

For those of us who are hooked but wish the formula were different, perhaps we are like Lysander, in Midsummer Night's Dream:

Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth;
But, either it was different in blood,-

It's hopeless.  Until this story ends, and even thereafter, I will continue to be smitten.  Unconsummated passion, lovely countryside, beauty, history, revolutionary change:  Downton Abbey has it all.  Now, if they would just give that cute dog more to do, the show would be perfect.

Day 57: The Purple Heart Meditation

Yesterday morning before I took Zoe to Alta Vista hospital in Ottawa for another session and consultation, we went for a short walk along the river on the campus near our house.  As I watched her find a place to pee, I studied her profile, noting again the purple heart the oncologist and vet techs gave her in September when she started chemotherapy for bone cancer.  To my astonishment, she was crouching near another purple heart.  Someone had painted it on the trunk of a tree.  Perhaps some romantic soul was honoring the place where he or she had been kissed, or maybe a student was near this tree when the text came that her brother or sister was shipping out to Afghanistan or had been wounded there or in Iraq.

Or maybe the painter just liked purple and wanted to see how it looked against the charcoal gray bark.

photo by Karen Strauss

Just before I'd left the house I'd put up the day's post and found a Facebook message from my student who served two tours of duty in Iraq.  He wished us well at the oncologist's.  As I looked at the purple heart on the tree, I remembered when he had visited me not long before he shipped out for the first time.  He wanted my husband and me to meet his new girlfriend.  I had thought for sure I would love her, but early in the conversation she said, "It would be nice if he brought home a purple heart" and I stared at her with what must have been visible contempt.  It took great restraint not to throw her out of our house.  How could this woman care more about the prestige attached to dating someone who had earned a medal for courage under fire than for his actual safety?  I was secretly glad when they broke up, although the circumstances were heartbreaking.  (He asked her to attend the funeral of his lieutenant in his place because he was still in Iraq, and she took up with another soldier that she met at the slain man's grave.)  I thought he deserved someone with depth and integrity who would love him with a brave, true heart.

But I digress.

Zoe did not ask for this purple heart.  All she has ever asked for are her two bowls of dog food a day, supplemented by her favorite treats, and the bits of meat we slip her under the table.   Plus, of course, the dinner dishes she cleans with her tongue before they go in the dishwasher.  She likes her beef marrow bones.  She wants some snuggling and attention, but not too much: she is a dog who needs her space.  She loves her routines, her two long walks a day, and her meditation on the balcony and in the yard facing the river.

photo by Tara Freeman

Zoe never asked to travel in France.  (See Posts 44-46, An American Dog in France, An American Dog in the City of Light, and American Dog in the City of Light, Part II.)  She did not want to gawk at the Eiffel Tower lit up at night, or to ride the metro.  She did not ask to roam the hexagon for seven months, but she adapted so beautifully, loved her Carrefour food and the trails through Corsica and the Alps, that it took all the self-restraint I had not to buy her a beret.

And of course, she did not ask to get osteosarcoma at age eight and a half: this dog who has walked two hours every day and has not a lick of arthritis in her bones, not a trace of hip dysplasia, whose perfect ligaments and skeletal structure astonished her vet in Canton when she first x-rayed her to see why Zoe was limping.  This dog who was born to herd sheep, who can do figure eights as she chases her charges, is nimble enough to turn and stop on a dime: she didn't ask to herd students into the woods instead, although she fell in love with all of them, and walks with at least one of them and her person every week.

She definitely didn't ask to lose one of those lovely, nimble legs, and to spend a night in an animal hospital across the border, high on hard drugs, and to have to learn to walk again.  But once she recovered and regained her strength, she awed her person day after day as the two explored winter together as though it were a new country for them, negotiating steps and hills and ice and snow drifts and slush without hesitation.

And she definitely didn't ask for chemotherapy, of having to miss her food and her walks on Alta Vista days to ride 90 minutes each way to Canada and back to be put under so that the vet can see what's happening in her lungs and bronchial tubes, the signs of cancer migrating there, enemies crossing the green zone and settling in not far from the heart of this gorgeous, occupied country.  She did not ask to become a fighter, not just a lover.  She did not ask to summon inside herself so much courage and stoicism and patience.

She is a dog who, like most dogs, loves her routines.  She does her happy dog dance in the morning just before her walk, making the stuffed fox and beaver squeak, or flipping her human brother's teddy bear around until it's on her head.  She likes to run to the back yard and find a beef marrow bone she buried under snow.  She likes to lean against the people she loves and trusts absolutely.  She likes to pose with her head on its side on the floor, half-covering her eyes with outstretched paws.  It's her, I know I'm cute pose.  Reward me please.  She is half cute dog commercial, half Princess Di.

photo by Karen Strauss

photo by Tara Freeman

photo by Tara Freeman

Like all creatures on this earth, including the enemy invaders in her body, she wants to live.  She loves her life.  And except for those moments before the diagnosis when she limped around in pain, she has been energetic, hungry, playful, regal, happy, and entirely herself all these months we have lived in this way.

I wrote all of the above in the coffee shop yesterday while I waited for Dr. Bravo's call.

I returned to Alta Vista and talked to her, then to Donna and Willow, the vet techs who have been working with Zoe since September.

"It's really remarkable," they all said.  "We haven't seen anything like this, really."

Once the cancer hits the lungs, usually the nodules just "blow up," as Donna said.  "They grow so fast."

But Zoe continues to fight.  Tiny nodules first showed up in her lungs in early December, but the drug she's been taking, doxorubicon, is working.  It won't cure her, but it keeps everything in check.  Three weeks ago the three "little guys" we'd seen for two visits running looked like trouble.  Now they are gone.  But another spot showed up somewhere else.

"She's doing so well, we think we should continue with this drug," Dr. Bravo said.

But normally, after four treatments of this drug, a cardiologist has to be consulted.  It's not common, but the drug can weaken the muscles around her heart.

"The cardiologist isn't here on Wednesdays," she explained.  "So it's complicated."

I could have taken a chance and just gone ahead with another chemo.  She's doing so well.  She's strong.  The drug is helping.

But I decided to book in with the cardiologist on Friday and return.  And then we'll see if she's robust enough to continue this treatment one or two more times, before we start her on an oral cocktail of drugs that treats the lungs, specifically, as well as blood vessels to stop cancer cell migration.

Donna never sugar-coats anything.  She has been known to say things like, "this is the worst cancer there is," and "it's a nasty, nasty disease."  She has never once allowed me to leave the hospital with false hope.  But she told me when we were heading out that Zoe's health, and the pictures we are seeing of her lungs, are truly "remarkable."  She has never seen a dog do this well.

Donna

Zoe and Willow

Zoe was just happy because she got to leave Alta Vista early yesterday.  We had a long walk in the woods and revisited the purple heart in the trees.

So I'll go back with her tomorrow, and we'll take a picture of Zoe's heart.  That brave heart.  I'll post about what happens this weekend.

photo by Tara Freeman

I trust that I'll know when it's time to stop.  When the purple heart Zoe carries has earned its weight and its shimmer, and then some.  I will never let her suffer, and I know that she will tell me what I need to know.  And until then, we will walk together every day at the edge of the river, two beings linked by love and by time to this small corner of the earth.