Part II: Day 65: Sun, Wind, Clouds, Birds

I have so many feelings swimming inside as I sit on the balcony on this Sunday morning.  Zoe just tucked into a huge breakfast of Sojo's (a nod to the hippie/organic-fight-cancer-with full-vigor era) gussied up with leftover roast lamb and asparagus (the palliative care-inspired, make-your-dog-feel-like-a queen diet).  For half an hour this morning, she joined the gentlemen's walk for the first time in a week.  David was back from conferences in Botswana and France and Zoe got to see him and Maya, his golden retriever, the closest thing Zoe has had to a litter mate these past nine years.  Kerry didn't want to push it, didn't want to give her lungs and that sore hind leg too much to do, but she was a normal dog this morning crossing the field with a beagle and a golden and pushing her snout into the pocket of one of her favorite human friends saying, "More please.  Can I please have some more?"  My husband says it was more of an amble than a walk, but hey.

We used to have a flock of turkey vultures who nested a couple houses down from us.  They would send their young to flight camp, and you'd see them running drills above our yard, doing laps, crazy eights, letting an air current carry them up before they practiced the dive-bomb.  Zoe, as a puppy, would see them up there and look at me, her face a grimace of doggy worry.  "Can those big birds get me?" she wanted to know.  "No way will I let them get you," I always told her, but until she weighed about thirty pounds or so, too heavy for a raptor's talons, I would take her in the house when they got close.

My neighbor Betsy thinks the vultures now have moved a few blocks over, to Cleveland Street.  Her friend has woods behind his house that the big birds prefer to our block.  Cleveland: the name also of the town I grew up in.  At the Chautauqua Writers Festival a lot of the writers attending were from Cleveland.  One woman asked me to sign my memoir, and she asked if it was true, the sad epiphany I come to in an end chapter, that Cleveland holds too much pain and sorrow for me and I'll never go back.  I told her that as soon as I left the conference I'd be getting together with the girls I grew up with in Cleveland, for a reunion we call Camp Baker, and that I would have been heading to the city itself as well for my third trip there in three years but I couldn't prolong the vacation because Zoe wasn't feeling her best.

Trouble flies by our houses like a big black bird.  If you peer into those glistening obsidian wings you can always see the reflection of your own face.  Best not to look too closely.

There's a lot of sickness suffering and death around us these days.

A close friend, a breast cancer survivor, has, since I began writing this blog, undergone surgery and radiation to remove a small tumor from her brain, and she's now contemplating chemo as the cancer claims a toehold in her lungs.  But she meditates for an hour each morning, tends to her garden, and finds ways to know peace.  She is, in fact, a very steady, calming presence.

A colleague known for her fierceness and fearlessness and tough mama love died of brain cancer last week.  I still can't quite believe that she's gone.  I didn't know her well, but I will remember her as a fiery spirit: the sun in the solar system of her family and circle of friends.

Wednesday night a close friend's mother-in-law ended up in the ICU when her heart stopped beating.  The family is reeling while they wait to see if she'll pull through.

We all want to draw some kind of wisdom from these illnesses and losses and shocks but when trouble like this looms large, flapping its big dark wings at us, language usually fails us.  Fails me, anyway.  For me, it's best to be soft and tender around grief.  This morning I'm looking around here and I see that my plants need watering.  I'll do that in a minute.  Add some walnuts and goat cheese feta to the beet salad I made last night.  Put the clothes in the dryer.   Find some Miracle-gro for the pansies and snapdragons, which are looking more dessicated by the minute.  Pet the dog.

Pet the dog!  Honestly, when I went to bed Monday night I did not think she would live to share another Sunday morning with me.  And here she is, watching the river, turning now and then to gaze at me.  At acupuncture yesterday Amy Thompson said that Zoe's pulses were twice as strong as they were on Tuesday.  Last night Danielle told me she thought Zoe seemed like her old self, and even her coat was shinier than it was when the week began.

But I know this is just a reprieve.  Zoe pants harder now.

Today, on this warm but cloudy Sunday morning, there are so many things I'm grateful for.  I'm glad, for one, that an insistent wind showed up on Friday and Saturday when the temperature rose.  When we began doggy hospice week it was cool and rainy, Zoe's kind of summer weather, and when I heard that it was going to hit 86 degrees on Friday, my heart sank.  I thought, my dog will be doubly miserable.  Most days this week, we watched the wind.  It rocked the willow tree, sent flower petals adrift as at a wedding, and it cooled us down when we sat in the grass.

I'm grateful for my friend Pam who told me not to try to do anything ambitious right now.  To just sit with Zoe and breathe.  Normally at this point in a project I would be working around the clock.  The novel will be my solace in grief.  Discipline and hard work are not difficult for me to manufacture.  What's always come hardest to me--and what my zen-master with a tail has taught me--is to simply be present.  To sit and be still.  To notice the small things happening around me, like the robin that has claimed a spot in the grass near the hammock.

Zoe is moving around up here on the deck, looking for a spot to get comfortable.  She needs something from me, and I wouldn't be here to help her if I was hidden away in my corner with my pile of books.

Yesterday our neighbor, Betsy, was out in her yard and Zoe barked hello.  In my normal working-around-the-clock point of a project, I would have seen my neighbor and only waved.  Instead I invited her to come up the balcony for a cup of tea.  She's leaving soon for a trip to see her family.  She loves Zoe and would not have had the chance to say good-bye to her.

On Friday when the local Reiki master watched Zoe's gaze drift to our neighbor's yard and then the river, she thought at first that Zoe was seeing entities that we couldn't see, like doggy ghosts.  I said, "Well, there was a little dog Zoe used to play with.  A cute Chihuahua who who was hit by a car when Zoe was still a young dog."  I told Betsy that story, and she talked about how much she had loved that cute little dog.  We shared a moment of missing him and I could picture him again, that cute little brown pup half the size of Zoe's head jumping on her and asking to be chased.

And we talked for a long time about the power of this week's wind.  Zoe's and my solace this week was not such a great friend to Betsy.  She had decided to de-clutter her house and she'd piled up some things of her daughter's that she wants her to take to her own home, or chuck.  And then she took out archives from her own life: the photograph in the newspaper in North Carolina announcing her wedding engagement.  The clipping of the photo from the wedding itself.  She even had a clipping from O: The Oprah Magazine of something I wrote and published in 2001 about being a stepmother.  She remembered my older stepson from a school group she led.  At any rate, after she'd gathered up her life-in-clippings, and took out her daughter's box of mementos, she left to go on an errand, and when she came back she found out that all of these documents from her life had scattered to the wind.  She found the engagement photo in her neighbor's shrub.  She patrolled the nearby yards and salvaged what she could find.  And then she had a good long laugh at herself.  This is as an object lesson, she thought, but she wasn't sure what the lesson was, exactly.

My friend whose mother-in-law is gravely ill--as is her dad, and maybe her sister too--found a minute to read my blog this week.  She's like that: no matter how hard things are in her life, she thinks of others.  She wrote me an e-mail to say that she finds it moving to watch me try, with Zoe, both to hang on for dear life, and to let go.

I'm wondering if that's how we're supposed to live all the time.  To hang on by loving fiercely, and not holding anything back.  And to be ready at any moment to let everything go.

Pema Chodron talks about living in uncertainty.  She says it's like being at sea on a raft, and then the raft disappears.  The local Reiki master who has now worked on Zoe twice visualized Zoe's voyage from the earth as a ride on a raft down the swift-moving Grass river, the river she gazes at for most of every day.

Above us, the clouds are clumped into a quilt that says nothing, that makes no particular shape I can read things into as I'm often inclined to do, but is doing its job by keeping us cooler than we would be otherwise.  Zoe is panting anyway, and I need to check her out to see if something new is wrong, or if this is just her new normal.  Love binds us now, as we breathe together, and will bind us still when she's gone.  I feel the sun and wind and look above at the clouds and beside me, to this dog I love so much, and I feel so thankful to be part of all of this.  All of it.  Even the things that scare me, the things that I continue to hope will skip the house and fly by on big wings toward the clouds.

Part II: Day 43: Sweet Things

After hearing bad news on Friday about Zoe's lung x-rays, I have made it a point to make note of something sweet or unexpected or lovely that happens every day.  I just don't want to miss the good stuff because in many ways, this is a very rich time.  So this is my version of a gratitude journal, an inventory of the little things that can buoy up a gal's spirits--this dog's person's spirits anyway--in a time of difficulty and change and impending loss. 

Saturday, May 19:

As I mentioned in "The God of Dirt," this is the day I planted flower boxes for Zoe's balcony.  And even though the sweat bees did not want to give up their dirt and moss for these pink snapdragons and purple pansies, when I woke up the next day, they were gone.

I’d read that to expel the bees I would need to dowse their dirt with three treatments of some poison that I don’t want around these parts at this time.  These guys just took the hint and took off.  I guess they weren't attracted to the smell of my sweat. I don't take it personally. 

Now Zoe and I start every morning out on this balcony together.  I've moved from my meditation corner inside to a spot beside her overlooking the river.   

Sunday, May 20:

Graduation.  One year it was so cold at this time of year that it snowed.  There we all were, outside in our folding chairs, the outgoing president of the board of trustees was speaking, and down came the white stuff on our mortar boards and laps.  The graduating women still had the pretty sundresses, bare legs, strappy sandals and new pedicures under their gowns that they'd planned on wearing in February: why change the plan?  The faculty were wearing sweaters and long johns.  The families had raided the bookstore for sweatshirts and hoodies and fleece jackets and when I looked out at them it felt less like a graduation ceremony than a hockey game, minus the ice, the athletes, and the jeering: go Saints.  A few days later it was summer.  The fact that the year’s honorary degree recipient, Bill McKibben, is an expert on climate change wasn’t lost on us. 

This year it's so soupy-hot under those robes I am dripping sweat through my underwear.  And before I walked here, I forgot to put on sunscreen.  But it's one of the best commencements we have ever had.  In addition to the cheering thoughts of one of my favorite students, Mike Petroni, who guest-posted here a week ago, I especially like the speeches by Garry Trudeau, who talks about the importance of really seeing, not what we agreed or expected to see beforehand, but what is right before us right now, and Martha Swan, an area teacher who hosted a lecture series a few years ago called John Brown Lives! who speaks about bearing witness to both the beauty and pain in this exquisite, broken world.

I was/am very close to many students in this graduating class.  Some I met in 2008 in the course I co-taught with Jon Rosales about Thoreau.  Others I taught in France.  Others came on the study trip to India.  Others have walked with Zoe and me many times through the woods on campus.  So the good-byes take a bit more time this year.  Former students and I linger in the sweltering sun posing for picture after picture, and no one seems to mind the way we all smell. 

The best part of the day, though, is what happens after the good-byes: coming home to the house and running through the yard with Zoe down to the river.  The best part of going anywhere is coming home to the sight of her.  I want to savor every single homecoming because I know that not so long from now, returning to an empty house will be one of the hardest parts of the day.

Cooper

Later we walk through the woods and run into Zoe’s best friends Maya, Harry Beagle Bailey, and Cooper.  While we fan ourselves and avoid mosquito clouds, we four women talk about nothing much more serious than the heat, and it could be any summer day from the past nine years.  How lovely it is sometimes just to move along, try not to get bitten, and talk about which of the dogs has the muddiest feet.  Sometimes the ho-hum normal is the sweetest thing there is.

Monday, May 21:

vanilla soft serve for dogs: what's not to like?

We decide to have our usual three-course Sunday lunch on Monday because we are free for the summer, because we can.  Is this legal?  It feels so decadent and summer vacationy.   I work on the novel all morning while Kerry cooks up a pot of rabbit with bacon and white beans and mustard sauce with local, farm-grown Swiss chard, and Zoe licks our plates.  We polish off the better part of a bottle of wine before 3 o'clock.  Afterwards we take Zoe to Morgan’s for ice cream—her third trip for ice cream in one week, but since we aren’t trying to preserve her girlish figure, why the hell not?

Then, Monday night, still a little full, I toddle into Sara’s kick-ass ashtanga vinyasa yoga class.  Tonight there are only four of us students here and I know all of them, so it feels like a few friends doing some pretty intense yoga together: a gymnastic girls' night out.  I love these women.  There’s mega-limber Linda, whose son went to school with our boys.  Then Val, who has been my massage therapist for over fifteen years, and before that, when she was a farmer who made her own yogurt, my students and I would interview her for class projects on the back-to-the-land movement and homesteading.  And then there's lovely Jane, an art historian-in-training who sparkles with vivacity and wit and kindness. 

At one point Sara has us do a dog down chain.  Trust me, it's both the loveliest and funniest thing, ever.  One person assumes the position, the next goes into a kind of handstand and rests her feet on the original person’s lower back, and on we go.  When we finally have all five of us joined and down doggified in a row, something gives way and I hop off, breaking the chain, taking everybody down with me, and we collapse in a pile of laughter.

In yoga sometimes, when I think about Zoe, I cry.  But I do it really quietly with my eye pillow on while we're supine in relaxation pose, and no one knows.  With all the laughing going on tonight, no one suspects a thing.

And sometimes laughing and crying within the same 90 minutes, along with all that marvelous strengthening and limbering and breathing, is a great workout for the heart.  It's all a matter of balance, isn't it?

Tuesday, May 22:

I wake up profoundly sad about Zoe.  This morning, nothing we put in her bowl tempts her.  Not even bacon.  When bacon doesn't appeal to my dog, the world has shifted on its axis.

If she won’t eat, we can’t feed her the Chinese herbs and the Poly-MVA which we hope will keep up her vitality and energy and immune system while she handles both the cancer and the hard-core drugs.  And of course she needs to keep up her strength.

We're scared about how she's reacting to this new medicine, Kinavet.  I'm still waiting for the oncologist to call or write me back with answers to all my questions.

But then Kerry remembers something.  On Sunday, Zoe disappeared for a little while in the woods.  This is what happens to Zoe when she eats a dead old maggoty critter: she's very pleased with herself at first after she lands this prize, and she struts around in pride.  But then for 48 hours she is like someone hungover after a binge who says never again.

You don't want to hear about what she poops the day after one of her "snacks."

Thoughts of Zoe's nasty foraging habits give me peace of mind today.  How's that for a twist? Since when would realizing my dog ate a carcass give me something to ease my worry.  I plan to take her to the vet's later this week to test for parasites.  Maybe it's not just the new drugs giving her digestive system a shake-down.

But the new drug still scares us, and we don't know what to do to make her eat, or what to give her to help her feel better.

Fighting tears, I drive out to Potsdam to the dentist.  A few days before Zoe’s checkup last week, I broke off a giant chunk of a molar in a well-traveled place.  I lost so much of it and underneath it was such a huge filling that I wasn’t sure I would be able to keep the tooth.

Okay, most people would not include a dental appointment to get an expensive crown on their inventory of sweet blessings from the week.  But here’s the thing:  I have always had a terror of dentists.  This dates back to when I was eighteen and I went home to Cleveland for Christmas and my mother took me to the younger dentist who had replaced the old guy we used to see and I went from having 0 cavities to 12, just like that.  That old dude I'd been to as a kid was either going blind or else, after my first semester of college, and all the gum I chewed while I studied, I had wrecked my teeth.

Young Dentist did all dozen fillings in one appointment.  It took hours.  Every now and then he'd come back and shoot me up with more Novocain.  My mouth was so swollen I couldn’t close it.  My tongue was like a waterlogged towel.  My speech impediment lasted for so much of the day it threatened to become the new normal.  Plus, the Novocain hadn’t worked uniformly everywhere.  I kept thinking of that 1976 movie, Marathon Man, with Dustin Huffman, where the Nazi torturer has a dental drill and keeps snarling, “Is it safe?”

Then for years I went to a dentist who did excellent work, but his personality type did not mesh well with mine.  That is, he was Type A, and I was a melange of Type Scared to Death and Type Feels Shame, Due to Childhood Woes, for Having Basic Human Needs.  Basically, it went like this:  He always had four or five people he would work on at once, and I always felt bad that I was taking so much of his time.  So when we were almost done, and it was time to adjust the bite, I would let him rush off because I could see him tapping his foot, looking around, wanting to bolt.  I broke five or six different teeth over a period of three years because my bite was always off, and he prescribed root canals for most of them.  So I dreaded going in there, knowing every visit would lead to four.  I started needing laughing gas every time, even for tiny fillings.  After I put this man’s children through college I decided to switch to someone a little more relaxing to be around and I found my dentist, Dr. Carvill, in Potsdam.

This man is so nice--I actually have fun on my visits talking to him and his various assistants.  This time they complimented me on my beaded necklace from Goree Island, in Senegal, and this got us talking about the horrors of the slave trade, and a novel that all three of us absolutely loved called Someone Knows by Name, about a slave who later becomes a speaker in the abolitionist movement.  The author, Lawrence Hill, came to St. Lawrence University to read a few falls ago.  Okay, it's not like it's fun to talk about one of the single most horrific chapters of American--and world--history, especially when you're about to have your mouth clamped open for a couple hours.  But I've never had rapport with a dentist before.  I've never been to one I could talk to about literature and history.  Plus, he's a fan of Jon Stewart.  He's a big-time NPR-supporter.  Do I need to say more?

I don't clench anything when the Novocain needle goes in and the drilling starts.  Dr. Carvill and his assistant take pictures of my tooth and design it on the computer and it's made and cooked up there while I read O magazine--the one with Oprah on the cover with four puppies.  The new crown fits perfectly.  I won't have to come back until my cleaning in July.  Some problems have easy solutions: isn't that a marvel to behold?
 

When I'm leaving, Laura, who handles the billing, and I have a long talk about our dogs.  When I tell her about Zoe, she tears up.  She lost a dog this year.

To get competent health care of any kind in this era is not something I ever take for granted.  Especially when I’m so uncertain of the path we are taking for Zoe. It's so liberating to lose a fear that once bordered on phobia. 

I laugh at myself on the drive home.  Going to the dentist cheered me up?

I mean, am I just scraping the barrel here looking for things to be grateful for?  No, I don't think so.  I honestly think I've changed because of Zoe, my furry guru.  I used to set such high standards and conditions for my happiness.  If such-and-such happens, I would tell myself, I will be happy.  Achievement almost always had to be in the picture.  Now I know that yes, it's really nice to accomplish what one sets out to do, but happiness is something else entirely from, say, getting a story published, or taking a trip to a beautiful place that only a depressive couldn't find enjoyable.  Yes, those things are wonderful, but happiness, like peace of mind, doesn't have an agenda.  It just is.

Later, the person who goes with the King Spaniel Who Thinks He’s a Greyhound drops by to give me a book about a dog that comes back again in another life as a puppy to the person he was assigned to, and we both hold onto each other and cry.  Her husband had surgery today, but she took the time to bring me a little gift to cheer me up.  This is the kind of person she is. We sit down on one of my Indian rugs on the floor because every surface now is covered with books and notebooks and maps that I'm using for my novel, and time seems to stop while we catch up on all our news.

Just before she came, I had turned on the computer and was reading the most heartfelt lovely messages from a number of friends.  A former student wrote something so achingly beautiful and sad and kind that my friend and I agree that it's probably the nicest thing anyone will ever say to me anytime in any context, and I need to save it for posterity.

Then a miracle happens.  I vowed this week to try not to spend another night of Zoe's life away from her.  A trip I was supposed to take to India for work got postponed.  But I didn't think I could do anything about the four nights I'll be teaching creative nonfiction at the Chautauqua writing conference that starts three weeks from now.  Then I thought, well, there's no harm in asking.  Without having any expectations at all, without the usual tight stomach and anxiety I have when I ask for something out of the ordinary, I wrote the organizers this weekend about what is happening around here and--I couldn't believe it--they got the people who run the conference hotel to let the Z-girl come with my husband and me.   I don't think they've ever made an exception, ever.  But these women are animal lovers.  One was leaving when I wrote her to go to the memorial service her daughter-in-law was holding for her dog.  The other was in the process of finding a home for a poodle that had just appeared on her farm.  Team Zoe, as they called themselves now, had formed, had moved mountains, and now our girl has an invitation to a lovely conference center on a lake.

If she's well enough to travel in three weeks, of course.

And from there, if all is well, Zoe and I are spending a few nights at a house on Lake Findley with some girlfriends I grew up with in Cleveland, and this is a house whose owners never ever allow pets.  My friend Sandy, who runs a hospital wing for at-risk babies, performed this magic.  This shows you how much my friend is trusted and revered--that the owner made this exception as a favor to her.  And it shows what happens when you (Zoe and me) are surrounded by good people, when the pack of humans is the best it can be.

I will book Zoe to get groomed the day before we leave on this vacation so that she can put her best paw forward.

On our walk in the woods later she takes a liking to the new treats I bought for her when I was coming home from the dentist's office.  Salmon-flavored little bone-shaped wonders. Feeling her snout reaching for them as we walk through the woods is the sweetest feeling in the world.

Then in the evening, I have yoga class with Alison.  Hearing this woman's voice, alone, is like taking a bath in lavender oil.  I just walk in her presence and feel myself begin to release the tension I came with.  And by the time I get home, Zoe feels a tiny bit better and wants to lick our dinner plates.

Wednesday, May 23

Noon:  I take a break from my work and look down from the deck to this sight of my husband and Zoe snuggled together like this in the yard, just chillin'.

I think the fact that I only took two pictures of these cuties proves that I am capable of some restraint.

3 PM:  Is there anything sweeter than watching dogs on a meet-and-greet sniff-fest?

the turtle was digging a hole to lay her egg

I drive to Indian Creek where we meet up with the shaman poet and her two dogs, Kole, the black lab mix, and a 13-month-old golden doodle whose name is—are you ready?—Zoe. 

Actually, it’s a little confusing for two dogs with the same name on a walk.  When we call for young Zoe to come back from her hunting expedition—she’s tracking a bunny—my Zoe sits by our side waiting to be rewarded for coming, even though she never left.

Indian Creek Nature Preserve

On our walk we see: a painted turtle and later, a snapping turtle laying her eggs; a frog frozen in a game of Statues who won, big-time, but still won’t move; a beaver swimming; our dogs jumping in and out of swampy water, the kind that will make them smell like they’ve been to a hot springs or a mineral bath.

Zoe after a 90-minute walk

How lovely it is to walk with my friend, talking about the things we care about most—our animals, our book projects, her health, and how the things we’re each dealing with are opening our hearts—and to watch Zoe run and play and hold her own with a couple healthy junior dogs.

And then, in the evening, I go to meditation tune-up class that is taught by the compassionate and inspiring yogini, Rebecca Rivers.

She has given us a mantra, but I think it’s a state secret. You would have to corner me in a scary dental office with a drill to get me to divulge it to you.  That's not only because I'm now in the more advanced meditation training, and the teacher who gave my teacher this mantra has established a certain order of things one needs to learn to do first.  It's also because I can't remember how to spell it, let alone pronounce it, even though I chanted it in my mind for twenty-five minutes.

But here's something I won't ever forget: As I meditate in this lovely studio, night falls.  My spine creeks as it straightens, but the sound outside of night birds and crickets enters me and creates a kind of opening.

And the color I see as I close my eyes is the amber of my sweet dog’s eyes.

Part II, Day 35: My Friend has a Hole in her Heart Now

Dear reader,
Although the subject of mortality is part of this blog's job description, I haven't been talking about it much lately.  Of course that's partly because my object is to seize every day and not waste precious time worrying about the inevitable, but recently I was reminded that part of preparing for that day is to accept that it will come.

I used to think that if I did everything right, gave Zoe a great diet and lots of exercise and a great life and didn't let her play in traffic, she would live to at least 14.  It would be painful to witness her slow decline.  I would get a ramp to help her get in and out of the car, she'd get finicky about her food, and I'd probably have to spend a lot of time wiping her bottom.  Whenever I thought ahead to losing her, I would try to figure out how old I would be that year, what I would be doing at work, and whether or not I had a leave of some kind coming up so that I could spend three to six months in bed grieving without completely disrupting my professional life.  The big question then would be whether or not to take medication.  As someone with mental illness in the family, I think it's a miracle sometimes that I survived my tumultuous youth without anything stronger than B-vitamins and aerobic exercise and yoga and herbal tea, so it would be a tough decision as to whether or not to get a prescription for Zoloft.  My hope was that my friends and husband would do an intervention if my grief got out of hand, if things got too bad.

It was entirely in keeping with my lifestyle then that I thought I had to plan ahead to schedule a nervous breakdown.

I've grown up a lot in the past few months.  I've had to work on myself to become the person my dog deserves.

Lesson Number One: The day Zoe was diagnosed with bone cancer she missed the memo that she and her people were supposed to be sad.  As some of you know, I'd brought her into the Canton Animal Hospital in desperation after she had been limping for two months and two different vets had diagnosed mild arthritis.  (One suggested Zoe would feel much better if we gave her a daily aspirin.)  By the time Zoe was properly seen to by Dr. Amy Thompson, who is now her vet, cancer had eaten up a big part of her ankle.  She had borne the advance of this aggressive disease with grace and patience.  Bone cancer is the most painful cancer there is, I've been told, and Zoe still savored her twice daily walks and meals and still took pleasure in watching the river from the balcony and in chasing squirrels up trees.

After Dr. Thompson delivered the news, she looked at Zoe, who was still sleeping under anesthesia, and back to the ugly dark matter in her x-rayed bone and said with something like awe, "She's so strong.  She's so strong."

And here's the thing: when Zoe woke up, and Dr. Thompson took her back out to the lobby, Zoe bounded over to us, her tail thumping overtime, as though this was the best moment of her life.  She was thrilled to be reunited with us, thrilled to go home.  We had just gotten her death sentence, the worst news possible, but now we had to dry our eyes and smile because the dog would not have understood.  Why the long faces? she would have said.  She was happy to be with us, so we had to be happy too.

Zoe's contentment with the quotidian is the balm that keeps me strong.  I can't plan ahead to guard against future loss and sorrow.  I simply enjoy our days together.  That's all I can do.  As I have written before, Zoe, as all dogs are, is a zen master with a tail.  Zoe has helped me become the person I need to be to be the person she deserves.

This spring my amazing, loving, funny college roommate, C., lost her beloved dog, Harpo.  He had been suffering from leptospirosis, a disease that affects the liver.  Dogs can get it from drinking puddles of water in the woods that are contaminated with rodent urine.  If ever a dog loved the outdoors, it was Harpo.  My friend and her husband brought water and a bowl for him on their walks, but to stop him from lapping up the rain water he found himself would have deprived him of one of his great joys in life.  

He was ill for 20 months when they finally had to put him down.  He was taking 10 pills a day, near the end, but he never complained.

Harpo was the dog who introduced me to the delightful world of oodles.  One of my friend's sons was allergic to pet dander and after conducting some research he found out that dogs that are part poodle are fine if they inherit the poodle's hair qualities. I loved learning the names of the most popular hybrids.  The golden doodle, which was Harper's breed; the labradoodle, which sounded charmingly Mary Poppins the first time I heard the word; and my favorite of all, the schnoodle.  I wanted to get a schnoodle just so I could say this word daily.  A schnoodle seemed like the kind of dog you'd want by your side as you feasted on blintzs or strudel, and then you would take a nap together and canoodle.

But I digress.


I fell in love with Harpo at first sight, this big golden retriever with a perm who liked to sit on people's feet and reach up whenever possible to chew on their chins.  Every August his family took him on vacation in the Adirondacks.  He swam and hiked up mountains, and at night, as they relaxed after a long day outdoors, he would slow dance with each family member.  Once, he danced with me.  He put his big, furry paws on my shoulders and we moved about to our own music, and I said, "I want a dog."


A year later, I took Zoe home.


When I found out that they had to put Harpo down, and he was only ten, I cried and cried. 

I told C. that I was glad I didn't know about leptospirosis and how a dog can get it or I would have been utterly paranoid every time we went into the woods, which is every day of our lives.  She replied that what they learned was that their dog was a happy boy, and his happiness made them happy, and there was no way they could deprive him of his favorite thing to do in the woods.


Lesson Number Two: You can't control every thing your dog does, no matter how much you try.  Sometimes when he follows his bliss, he might be hastening his decline.  It's a delicate balancing act between acting as Captain Safety and Fun Human Sidekick, and their dog was probably glad when they chose to do the latter.  Also, sometimes what makes dogs sick is the natural world itself.  How much can we do about that?


For a week after I heard about Harpo I brought Zoe water on our walks.  She refused it every time. Zoe prefers to drink river water--river water that is no doubt polluted, that other critters have peed in, that has all kinds of nasty sludge.  All the dogs around here do.  And although I try to stop her, she has been known to eat gross dead critters she finds in the woods.  I've seen her with deer legs, squirrels, fish.  And then she's sick for a day or two afterwards.  But do I want to keep her on the lead all the time?  Deprive her of the joy she takes in being a hunter or stop her from foraging for her own water?  No way.


A few weeks later I took Zoe to her oncologist in Canada for her check-up, and while I was there, a couple named Gabriela and Jerry arrived with Tucker, their sweet German shepherd, the gentle giant.  I spent the afternoon with them.  The vet techs had put us in touch with each other a couple weeks earlier because ours were the only two dogs of all their patients who had this same kind of awful cancer, osteosarcoma.


Gabriela and I were facebook messaging and e-mailing and on the phone a lot during the week leading up to us meeting in person.  Two weeks before, some very small lesions had shown up on Tucker's lungs.  Dr. Bravo sent them home with Palladia, which is given orally: the same protocol of metronomic drugs Zoe was on.  Zoe's lung lesions had appeared six months ago, but she was--and is--still doing just fine. The tumors have to become quite huge before the dog feels any discomfort.


But Tucker wasn't eating.  He had started limping more and one of his paws was so swollen and painful he couldn't put weight on it.  All he wanted to do was lie on his bed and rest.


Now, to get to the animal hospital in Ottawa we have to drive 90 minutes each way, cross an international border, and present paperwork and passports.  Sometimes, this can take longer than I'd like, especially in the winter.  I thought Zoe and I had it bad, but Gabriela and Jerry had to drive two and a half hours to get to our animal hospital, and they are Canadian.  That just shows you how few clinics there are in North America to choose from if your dog gets cancer and you want to extend his or her life.


The day I met Gabriela and Jerry, Tucker didn't have an appointment.  That morning they had brought him into their local vet, but she couldn't figure out what was wrong.


As we waited together, we tried not to speculate, but of course we did.  Maybe he had a hairline fracture in his paw from that time when the noise from the construction project next door was so loud he ran into the bathtub and claimed it as his bunker.  And wouldn't the pain of a fracture take away his appetite?  We didn't know all the things that could go wrong.  We'd been told to watch out for a cough.  We'd been told to watch out for loss of appetite.  The lesions in the dog's lungs two weeks ago had been very small.  There was no reason we knew of for him to be suffering.  But what we didn't know is that the cancer could spread like a wildfire in no time at all, and that's what happened to this sweet, noble dog.

When they left Dr. Bravo's office, Gabriela and Jerry were sobbing.  I stood with them and we all held each other up as we wept.  They had the verdict now: their sweet dog was afflicted with hypertrophic osteopathy.  The disease had run through all the tissue of his body, especially his legs, and he was in great pain.  The only thing they could do for Tucker was to give him a shot of heavy-duty, time-released painkillers, and send him home.  

Gabriela and Jerry had done everything for their dog that they could.  When Tucker lost his appetite, Gabriela served him a raw chicken from a recipe she'd read on the web.  She gave him slippery elm bark to sooth his stomach.  She tried smoothies with nutrients.  She massaged him for hours.  She called everyone she could think of who might have a cure.  I tried to imagine that two and a half hour drive: Jerry, who suffers from serious back pain from injuries he sustained in the military, drove, while Gabriela got on the phone to make arrangements for their vet to come to their home the next day to put him down.  It must have been the saddest 150 minutes of their lives.

Tucker's ashes are now in an urn in their living room.  

For a while, Gabriela and I wrote each other every day.  Their kids are grieving with them, but their friends and relatives don't understand how much they are suffering, and why.  Many well-intentioned friends told them they thought it was a big mistake to try to extend Tucker's life with chemotherapy.  "It's just a dog," people think, but are usually too polite to say.  "Why are you falling apart like this?" 

The suddenness of Tucker's decline shocked me.  I didn't know this could happen.

Lesson Number Three: Sometimes it happens fast.  And the last act of love you can do for your dog is to ease his suffering, as soon as possible.  

Then, just last week, a dear friend in Minnesota wrote me to say that her ten-year-old dog, Halley, had died suddenly.  The dog had gone on a walk with my friend's husband, come home, and a little bit later, just collapsed.  

It turned out this sturdy dog had a tumor growing right over her heart.  She showed no symptoms at all that she had anything wrong with her.  She went on walks, ate her food, wagged her tail, and loved up her people day after day.  She enjoyed every minute of her life.  And then one day she fell and couldn't get up.  Her aorta burst, and there was nothing they could do to save her.

My friend said, "My dog had a hole in her heart, and now I do too."

I must have read that sentence three times.  I sat down, closed my eyes, and cried, trying to take this in. 

Lesson Number Four: Sometimes it happens so fast that the word "fast" no longer signifies.  Sometimes you get no warning at all, and your perfectly healthy-seeming pet collapses before your eyes.

Can we live every day of our lives prepared for the catastrophic loss that happens in a nanosecond?

I think I need to start meditating for longer than 20 minutes every morning to begin to even understand the question.

Two days after my friend lost her Halley I texted my vet and asked her if we could talk about "end days."  "We need something resembling a plan," I said.  And on Sunday, when she came over to watch Zoe's acupuncture session, we agreed that when we think it's time, she'll come to the house.

Amy said, "Now that I'm learning about acupuncture, I've heard a lot of different theories about how dogs fail in the end.  If you are giving your dog acupuncture and doing everything to keep her in balance, she might just be fully functioning to the very end.  We think of human beings and how there's often--but not always--a gradual decline.  That's true for dogs sometimes too.  They gradually lose their appetites.  They start to move less.  But sometimes we hear of dogs who have lots of energy and seem completely healthy, and then they die in their sleep."

I said, "I suppose some of us would think that's the ideal death.  For a dog, or a human."

My husband was sitting beside us as we had this conversation.  He later said that he thinks a situation like the one Amy described would distress him more.  If Zoe didn't wake up one day, he would be more upset, he thinks, then if he had the chance to say good-bye.


I don't know what I think: either scenario is awful.  Mostly I try not to think about the end.  To be honest, I still live mostly in denial.  Zoe looks good, runs well, eats hearty, and has more energy lately than ever.  But I know the day will come when we will have to say good-bye.  I don't know if I'll have much warning.  And I know I'll feel like my friend above with the hole in her heart.  


One of the reasons I number the posts in this blog is to honor the fact that Zoe's days are numbered and that I don't want to miss a single one of them.  I use the model of the 108 beads of a Buddhist mala to remind me that every day, every moment, every bead is precious.


Thinking of time in this way always makes me think of my friend who lost her husband without warning in the fall of 2010.  She kissed him good-bye to go to a meeting, and when she came home three hours later, she found him in his favorite soft chair.  He'd been eating an apple when he died.  When he went to the kitchen to get it, he must have thought he would eat every bite of that apple.  He didn't know he was spending his last morning on this earth. 

I have no words to make sense of what happened to my friend.  No words to imagine the shock to her heart, the suddenness of this inconsolable loss.  But since it happened, I have learned so much from her.  She is tender and open about her own suffering, and she reminds all of us who know and love her to appreciate everything we have, to inhabit our own lives as fully as we can.  


In yoga class she spends extra time working on the spinal stretches that open the heart.  There's a lot of scar tissue growing over that gaping hole, but she isn't afraid of the work she needs to do to feel whole again.


My friend thought she and her husband would grow old together.  When I think of my friend I remember how fortunate I am to have a husband who is my partner in this life, and how lucky we are to be taking care of Zoe together.  And sometimes I think I'm lucky, in a way, that I know our dog won't live until at least 14, at which point I'll have to be medicated or hospitalized. Which is to say that I can't behave as though time was just opening out before us like an endless long, silk scarf.  I can't squander our time.  I have to stay awake.  Whether the ending comes quickly, or gradually, I never forget that every single day the three of us have together is a miraculous gift.


The deaths of the three dogs I just told you about, gentle reader, broke their people's hearts.  C. and her family had 20 months to get used to the idea that their dog had a serious illness.  But when the time came to say good-bye, I'm sure they weren't ready.  Tucker's people thought they had several weeks or months more to share with their gentle giant.  The mean survival rate for a dog with osteosarcoma is one year after the diagnosis, and their sweet boy only got three or four months.  My friend in Minnesota had maybe a half hour to prepare herself to say good-bye to a beloved family member.  She woke up that morning in one life and went to sleep in another--in a home without a dog.


I'm not trying to compare their grief, or the grief that I am rehearsing as I write, with what my friend who has lost her husband has lived. But I'm ending up in the same place.
   
I don't like thinking about death and grief.  I never will.  When I look into my dog's wolfy eyes, when I take in that fierce, intense gaze, all that life pulsing through her, I believe that she'll outlive all of us.


But what I have to say, gentle reader, is what you already know: Nothing lasts.  No one lasts.  We forget this every day; it's one of the ways we survive.  When I posted an essay called "Bark and Soul," the day after Zoe and I met Tucker, Donna, one of our oncology vet techs, wrote me to say that she had read my post and she was concerned because I sounded so sad.  She reminded me, essentially, to read my own blog, to remember once again the message Zoe keeps teaching me: that dogs live in the moment.  That they are so happy to be with us and they like it when we're really there.  They just want us to love them, and to let them help us cherish every moment we draw breath.

In that spirit, gentle reader, I want to thank you for reading this rather long post today, and I'm asking you now to kindly go on your way.  Go love up your sweetie, kids, and critters.  Walk that dog.  Give the cat a massage.  Reveal your heart's truth to whomever needs to hear it.  Ride your horse.  Get on your bike.  Look at the sky.  Watch the wind stir up the cattails and the lilacs and feel that air on your skin.  Whatever you long to do that you've been putting off, do it now.  

And pardon me while I go do the same.

Namaste.

Part II, Day 21: Winter with Zoe

Our first full day together again, we woke up to winter.  It had been almost-80 in recent memory, and now there was snow on the ground.

I thought of a line from Winter, by Rick Bass:

Sometimes I want summer and green grass to come, but sometimes I feel like I've committed my life to winter, moving up here, and what's more, I've fallen in love with it, and have gotten used to it, and can't picture there not being snow under my feet.

When I started "Winter with Zoe" this past December, it was meant to be the title of 108 consecutive days of meditating every morning and living mindfully with my dog, whose days are numbered, but whose spirit and equanimity are remarkable.  One season: a protracted glorious wintry season.

Then the title, as I began the second set of posts this month, became aspirational.  As in, Next year in Jerusalem.  Another Winter with  Zoe.  That remains my goal, if it is possible without straining her, without compromising her quality of life.

On some days that goal seems quite attainable.  And then, when x-rays are studied, numbers compared, medical studies read: gloom descends.  But when I look at my dog and she looks at me, I see vitality and strength and endurance.

This wind and cold are welcome here; they are comforting reminders of the recent past: our very rich winter days together.  A season in which I have seen no patisserie windows or camels, attended no plays or concerts, and shopped for nothing other than dog food, dog medicines, farm food, and great books.  An exceedingly quiet winter spent at home, in a village of 6,000, in the far North in the United States, walking through snow and ice and, now and then, some unseasonably green grass, and wildflowers, and early crocuses, with Zoe.  The very best winter of my life.

When Zoe first sees snow, she pounces on it, as though it were alive.  And then she walks with her jaw dragging on the ground so that she can taste it with every step.

Not long after lunch, we crossed the river and followed the path.  We had to go soon, or the snow would disappear.  The snow was melting as we walked, and I called her my slush puppy before we were through.

We saw white buds opening above white snow: a sight I had never seen before.

The hawks' calls pierced both our silent reveries.  Zoe tipped her head up to the sky, and we watched them land high up on the scotch pine.  Some frightened gulls swooped around in a kind of crazy eight and disappeared.  Very few people were out.  Jackets that had been packed away came out, and hoods were cinched tight.  I was happy to be reunited with my ankle-length black down coat.

It was like going back in time.  Back to February.  Like giving my sabbatical and the dog's longevity another two months.

Bass also writes:

Anything I'm guilty of is forgiven when snow falls.  I feel powerful . . . [O]ut in the field, in snow, standing with my arms spread out, as if calling it down, the way it shifts and sweeps past in slants and furies all its own, the way it erases things until it is neither day nor night--that kind of light all through the day, dusk, several hours early, and lingering, lingering forever.

I am never going to grow old.  The more that comes down, the richer I am.

The snow gives me that sense of power today.  But dusk comes late, which is what we want in an April day, and the sky isn't bright.  We don't care.  We see more clouds than stars, more snow to come, or freezing rain, but I think of this weather as a reprieve, a return, a correction, a reminder not only to keep the winter clothes accessible, although that's probably a good idea, but simply not to let time move too fast, not to let these moments slip away as easily as late snow melting in spring.

The view from the kitchen window when I woke up Monday morning

Walking to the studio, I soaked my socks through my clogs.

Zoe decided to take her morning nap with me, instead of in the house.  We spent every part of the day together.

The view out my studio window as I worked on my novel.

Even with this wintry flashback, she wants to spend some time staring at the river from the balcony

I love the way she offered me her profile for this picture.  Often, she turns away just when she hears the snap.  This time, she posed.

Part II, Day Nine: Under Wild Apple Trees

In the North Country, where Zoe and I live, many public nature preserves used to be farms.  Abandoned apple trees and crumbling remnants of old walls can be found beside the newer cherry and tamarack and birch.  Under the scratchings of deer, snowshoe hare, and vole are paths along which people once carried buckets of water and hope into their homes.

Sometimes on a walk with Zoe I like to look for these wild apple trees.  When I spot them, I remember to think of time in centuries, even as I try to squeeze everything I can from each moment of each hour.

Today I found a great quote from Louise Erdrich's Painted Drum:

wild apples in the North Country

Life will break you.  Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.  You have to love.  You have to feel.  It is the reason you are here on earth.  You are here to risk your heart.  You are here to be swallowed up.  And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.  Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

Sometimes in late autumn Zoe and I pick up an apple from one of these old trees on the ghosts of farms that we walk through on public land.  She doesn't really know it's food.  She'll carry it like a ball, or I'll kick a fallen, bruised one her way to see if she wants to run and chase or be chased.

Their smell sweetens the air as we walk at Indian Creek Nature Preserve.

Today, the sky is in the water, like something we could swim to, and drink.  We hear the first parties of geese, the flock's scouts, preparing to bring the whole country of them back to set up camp here in our habitat alongside beaver lodges and quivering cattails.  It's always a triumphant return like a military parade, or the rhapsodic overture from an epic film, and yet it always seems to catch me by surprise in my throat.  I'm never ready when the season's magnetic pulse grabs hold again.

Around us, buds fatten up a little more each day.  They are heart-like fists reaching upward, and I think of something Maddie said on our walk the other day: how the white patch on Zoe's chest underneath the dangling purple heart looks like a heart too.

We are on this earth to love and to feel and to risk our hearts and be swallowed up again and again.

I don't think any of that sweetness is ever really wasted.

And now I find it every day, in the most ordinary and unexpected places.

Day 93: Intelligent Optimists

Cindy just introduced me to a magazine called Ode: News for Intelligent Optimists.  The title cracked me up.  As a cautious optimist, I'd like to see what the smart hopeful set has to say.  She wanted me to read an article about Jim Cannon, the military strategist and visionary who wants the military to retool to save the planet and who inspired the comic film, The Men Who Stare at Goats.  Her son would like to join the navy when it becomes a branch of this man's First Earth Battalion and devotes itself not to war but to measuring rising ocean temperatures and melting polar ice along with policing dumping and illegal fishing in the seas. 

Cindy cultivates optimism.  She will wake up one morning and say, I haven't baked yet in 2012, and suddenly, there are scones.  As I write this post, my feet are resting near the quilt she made for Zoe from all our tossed-away bandanas from the groomers.  She is anti-gloom.  She is anti-clutter.  And she is definitely pro-beauty. (For more about Cindy, go here and there.)

For all these reasons, she didn't like the fact that we had Zoe's many medicines and herbs in a priority airmail box on the counter.  I'd written in my messy scrawl, "Do not move this" because I knew it was an ugly box to have lying next to the fruit bowl when the counter is clean and the light comes through the stained glass windows and the river glints just beyond, but I needed it to stay there so that everything would be easy to find.  She had written Zoe on it neatly in red and turned the box around, but that didn't satisfy her.  Who wants to look at an ugly airmail box day after day? 

"I have a beautiful box my sister gave me to put spa things in, in our bathroom," she said.  "You should use that."

the nice box on the left, the provisional on the right

"But don't you need it?"  I pictured a fragrant collection of herbal soaps and bath salts and oils, the smells of lavender and lemon balm, and then I glanced back at the cardboard box filled with vials of metronomic chemotherapy drugs, the Imodium and anti-nausea pills.  If I could imagine we were plying Zoe with spa treatments, it would make it all go down easier--at least for me.

Of course now I will have to scheme up something nice to give Cindy in return, something she doesn't know she needs, just like this box is for us.

"I really don't need it," she said.  "It doesn't fit in our bathroom.  And you can give it back to me, when you don't need it."

When you don't need it.  

We don't always sugar-coat things around here.  We're often quite frank.  But the family member whose medicine was going in that lovely box was currently getting her rump patted by the box donor, and we three know said family member to be one of the most intelligent of the optimists in our extended multi-species pack. 

My husband and I had just returned from Agway where we bought more dog food.  "What size, do you think?" I had asked my husband.  An innocent question, under other circumstances.

Without discussion we picked the biggest bag there was.  He had to haul it over his shoulder and he looked a little like Santa Claus.

The man behind the counter had gotten us onto this brand when the one we were using, from Canada, started playing hard to get.  So he knows what's going on with us and why we want the healthiest kind we can find.

My husband eased this heavy load near the cash register for scanning and said, "We're optimistic."

Zoe, of course, did not decipher the meaning behind the giant bag of food and the pretty new box, nor did she ponder the faith and aesthetics behind choices that would allow bulk and beauty, respectively, to replace the provisional.  She lives in the forever now.  And that's how we found her just now, on her favorite rug, waiting for another tiresome photo shoot to be over so she could get down to what matters: asking to go on a walk.

P.S.  As an intelligent optimist, I knew that my sister, Mira Bartok, was going to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Memory Palace last night, and she did!  She called me when we were having dinner to tell me.  Yea to Mira Bee!  Yea to sisters!  And Yea to the transformative power of literature to take a sad life story and make it resonant and beautiful and true and wise: a story that has touched countless lives.

Day 87: The Time Travel Meditation

I used to walk with my dog and plan the ideal schedule.  When would I teach?  When would I write?  Before she woke me from my trance I would debate Fridays off and Thursday marathons, and Thursdays off to make the weekend less onerous even though Friday would be packed.

Living this way I often had to be shown the first spring buds, the trillium march, the stealthy approach of Angry Bicyclist Man who hates jumping dogs, but eventually, I wised up some--not a lot, but a little.

So I know now that the now is the be-all-and-end-all, but still I like to mix it up the way I imagine certain physicists do and think of the past, present, and future intermingling as in some fantasy theme park where your long-dead fourth grade teacher works the fried dough booth and the friend who will gossip with you in the home is skittering by on roller skates with a rat terrier in her arms and some kind of shiny violet ribbon trailing off her hair like a kite string.

Imagine it's a century from now and you get to go back and relive a day.  You're a ghost, but no one knows it.  The characters of this story are the people from your ordinary life now.  You don't return to a sunset clam bake, a wedding, a falling-in-love or spying-a-lion endorphin high.  It's a coffee, toast, drive, work kind of day, full of mundane conversations with people you don't pay complete attention to now, and prickly little problems that can sometimes be solved, just like that.

Just think, first, how happy you would be to see your old self.  Hello, feet.  Hello, hands.  Hello, soft belly.  It was nice to be in there, wasn't it?  We had a good run.  Thanks for the good work.

Then there's the person who used to bug you if you hadn't slept enough because of a few unconscious tics, hair tugging, maybe, or the repetition of the word "relatable," which you could never bring yourself to say isn't really a word.  Imagine this is the first person you run into.  You've been dead for a long time.  Here's someone you sort of knew.  You're beyond delighted.  Hello, you!

And maybe there's this person who said no to every great idea you ever had.  Your gate-keeper/cop who moonlights as the accountant.

Maybe that person was you.

There she is, lumbering along, keeping the peace, and you understand now that it isn't easy to do this work, bringing gravity to the world when everyone wants to fly, and this person is just another mortal who likes a hot bath at the end of the day and a good book and maybe some green Thai curry shrimp on jasmine rice.  The burden of carrying the weight of all those dumbass dreams has made knots form beneath each scapula, her stricken wings.  You are so moved by the sight of her you want to give her a back rub.

How sad for all these people who don't know that they're all so ten-decades-ago, that they will dissolve, as you did, and their preoccupations will fade, and all that will linger is the love--I have started to believe this is really true--and a few glimmers of images from the quotidian that fly up into collective memory: violet ribbon, trillium, toast crumbs, the dog jumping to greet the man on the bike.

When students come to me about big decisions, a choice between this or that, I ask them two questions.  Imagine you chose this.  Live with that for a while.  Do you feel peace?  Then do the same exercise for choosing that.  And finally: what's the kindest thing you can do for your self of thirty years from now, a middle-aged person who would prefer not to have regrets.  And what about the deathbed you?

Maybe that's more than two questions.

Outside right now what looked like a foot of snow, ample enough to stop flights going out and mess with many people's plans, is starting to melt a little.  Things that insisted fiercely give way today.  It's so nice to wake up to beauty, even ordinary beauty: coffee, toast, snow, and pages like fields of snow waiting for the dog to run all over them.

Namaste, gentle reader, Namaste.

Hello 2012 self.  It's nice to be back!  Nice necklace.

Day 73: On Resisting Sentimentality, Part Two

Zoe received a valentine last week from Sadie, my sister, Mira's, saucy little black dog.  It was a card of three adorable golden retriever puppies singing "I'm a believer" by the Monkees, except they replaced the word, "believer" with "retriever."  The pups thought love was only true in fairy tales, until they/Sadie had been converted after meeting Zoe. 

I still have the card on display in our living room.

Mira's birthday is coming up next week and I need to get her the perfect dog card today.  If I were a cartoonist, or knew my way around photo shop, I would make her one.  In anticipation of Mira's upcoming trip to New York City it would have Mira and Sadie in smocks painting at an easel a copy of a masterpiece from the Met.  I just found one on Google by Gustave Courbet, "Hunting Dogs with Dead Hare,"which would do nicely.  Or else the card would have Sadie and Mira on roller skates in Central Park, or riding a bicycle built for two, or taking in a Broadway show.

Instead, she'll have to settle for a pug eating a cake, or maybe a beagle with a party hat blowing out candles.

I might also have to buy Mira another dog book to add to her collection.  I just saw that there's an art book called The Artful Canine of dog paintings at the Met, so writing this post gave me some great gift ideas.

My favorite dog book is a memoir by Mark Doty called Dog Years.  It isn't funny, and it isn't cute, and it's the most moving and literary book I have read about what it means to adopt a pet and watch it become part of your family.  He takes us through several years of his life, including the days in New York just after 9/11, and we watch his two dogs, Arden and Beau, grow old, survive illnesses, and eventually die.  It's a beautiful, heartbreaking, groundbreaking book: meditative, philosophical, lyrical, smart, brave, and anything but sentimental.

In between his main chapters he has little italicized mini-essays he calls "entr'actse."  I am going to reproduce one of them,  "On Sentimentality," in entirety because I think it's insightful and scary-honest and provocative.

The oversweetened surface of the sentimental exists in order to protects its maker, as well as the audience, from anger.

 At the beautiful image refusing to hold, at the tenderness we bring to the objects of the world--our eagerness to love, make home, build connection, trust the other--how all of that's so readily swept away.  Sentimental images of children and of animals, sappy representations of love--they are fueled, in truth, by their opposites, by a terrible human rage that nothing stays.  The greeting card verse, the airbrushed rainbow, the sweet puppy face on the fleecy pink sweatshirt--these images do not honor the world as it is, in its complexity and individuality, but distort things in apparent service of a warm embrace.  They feel empty because they will not acknowledge the inherent anger that things are not as shown; the world, in their terms, is not a universe of individuals but a series of interchangeable instances of charm.  It is necessary to assert the insignificance of individuality to make mortality bearable.

 In this way, the sentimental represents a rage against individuality, the singular, the irreplaceable.  (Why don't you just get another dog?)

 The anger that lies beneath the sentimental accounts for its weird hollowness.  But it is, I suppose, easier to feel than what lies beneath rage: the terror of emptiness, of waste, of the absence of meaning or value; the empty space of our own death, neither comprehensible nor representable.  Not a grinning death's head but something worse: the lifeless blank, a zero no one steps around, though we try; repress it and it returns, more hungry, more negating, with more suck and pull.

 Despair, I think, is the fruit of a refusal to accept our mortal situation.  Perhaps it's less passive than it may seem; is despair a deep assertion of will?  The stubborn self saying, I will not have it, I do not accept it.

Fine, says the world, don't accept it.

The collective continues; the whole goes on, while each part slips away.  To attach, to attach passionately to the individual, which is always doomed to vanish--does that make one wise, or make one a fool?

When I read this for the first time, I swallowed hard.  I always assumed that what inspires generic cuteness and Hallmark smarminess is the same social conservatism that made Norman Rockwell paintings so popular: a fear of (or perhaps lack of training in appreciating) idiosyncratic images and original forms of expression.  In other words, sappiness and art are natural enemies.

But anger?  Rage?  Against individual mortality, including our own?  

The more I think about this, the more I think he nailed it.  The sensibility that goes for cheesy cutesy with all joking aside is one that wants to blot out pain and suffering and make everything airbrushed sweet.

I'm not sure how Mark Doty would characterize the dog humor cards my friends and sister and I send to one another.   We are generally making fun of ourselves for the excessive love we pour into our individual, irreplaceable dogs, but those cards are certainly excessively cute.

And now that my dog is fighting a grave illness and every occasion for a greeting card--a birthday, a holiday--is marked for me by the sadness that it might be the last time I get to spend that particular day of the year with her, these cards have an added poignancy for me.

My friend Rebecca's husband died suddenly in the fall of 2010, and she knows more about grief than anyone I spend time with these days.  After she read my post from yesterday she wrote:

"I think you have to be lighthearted in the face of such a serious situation. I joke about things Skip used to do all the time. It's not denial; it's a coping strategy. Equal measures of laughter and tears can be a great help when dealing with issues of life and death."

I will end again with Mark Doty's resonant ending to his short chapter:

To attach, to attach passionately to the individual, which is always doomed to vanish--does that make one wise, or make one a fool?

Is the humor in silly dog cards and pet trick videos a way of acknowledging that we, indeed, are fools for love?  And that we simply can't help it?  That to just surrender and be, as my husband likes to say with his slight English accent, "hopelessly besotted" with an individual dog, knowing I will lose her, knowing she will break my heart, knowing we are all going to lose loved ones and grieve: is this a form of masochism?  What drives this appetite and capacity for love that refuses to put on the brakes, even though sorrow is on its way too?

(She's a dog, not a person, someone somewhere is saying.  Yes, she's a dog.  And maybe that's part of what makes this love so tender.)

I know one thing for sure.  I used to not keep all of them, but every single dumb dog card I get from now on is going into my box of treasures.  They all make me smile, or snort, or guffaw, and I need that now more than ever.  A day might come in the future when I'll go to the box and look at them all again, including the valentine of the singing retriever pups from Sadie.  When I see them again, I'll cry.  But I'll be glad I have every last one of them.

photo by Tara Freeman