We put her on boiled chicken and rice for a while, and that grabbed her attention, but even then, she couldn't eat much. I put her on tramadol and her mood improved somewhat. Her other huge morning excitement was our session in the backyard with the tennis ball. These last days of hers she would gamely go out, pee, look at me to throw the ball, which I would, and then she would start out running, and after a few steps, slow to a hobbled walk, get the ball, and walk back with it, dropping it at my feet. We'd repeat this maybe three or four times, instead of the unlimited infinity of times she had previously preferred, until she would drop the ball at my feet and then trundle to the back door, and turn and look at me. "Let's go on in," she'd say with her cataract clouded eyes, "it's bed time."
Age 8, in my apartment in Los Angeles, so happy the carpet had been cleaned, ready for her digestive catastrophes to begin anew
Over the 13 or 14 years I had her, or she had me, she was a source of endless, and I do mean endless, nearly daily, challenges. Her shitty genes combined with having been abused as a puppy before I adopted her, combined to make her high strung, nervous, incontinent, digestively flawed and prone to explosive events from either end, with bad teeth, hyper-vigilant disposition and terrible manners. She was a jumper, a food stealer, nearly incapable of relaxing unless she had been exerted for hours, was not leash trained at all and always nearly choked herself to death while on walks, and on and on. When she was a puppy, I was in later stage alcoholism and the two of us made quite a chaotic pair. I never took the time to train her. She was in the habit of climbing up on things to get human food that was bad for her-- an entire loaf of sourdough bread, for example, that was processed by her dog body into streams of the foulest liquid feces you can imagine, in pools all over my office floor at work.
The number of times Fiona and I moved: 13. Her general attitude each time: "Hooray! An adventure!" I simply cannot understand people now who advertise their dogs or cats as available for adoption because "we are moving and just can't keep them." What the actual fuck, humans? It's especially weird because it had simply never even occurred to me to move without her.
The contortions I often had to go through to keep her and find a place to live, crazy. The first years we were together, she dealt with my alcoholism. Out late, leaving her at home. Drunk at home a lot. I wonder what it all meant to her. I know she would get extra anxious and edgy when I was drunk. She was noticeably happier after I got sober.
One of the bar hopping nights in LA when I was out until 3, she knocked a jar of hot cocoa mix off the counter and devoured it, and by the time I got home, the carpet was blessed with yet more sweet sickly slicks of rejected but delicious whatever. She loved LA walks, because there was almost always food on the street or sidewalk- gum, hot dog buns, burrito wrappers, vomit (which she had no compunction whatsoever devouring).
It took me years to figure certain things out about her that a more experienced dog owner and...less alcoholic? person would have figured out much more quickly. For example, whenever I would take her anywhere in the car, she would almost immediately start pacing and whining and nervously sticking her face right over the driver's seat next to mine, panting and drooling. I figured, for years, that she was anxious about being in a moving car, and just a terrible passenger. Somehow it occurred to me once, after years of being irritated by her behavior, to stop and take her for a walk, soon after we set out. She immediately peed a prodigious stream of anxiety pee, and when she got back in the car, lo and behold, she lay down peacefully and went to sleep for the rest of the ride. So I learned that the routine had to be: take her for a walk so she would pee, put her in the car, drive about a mile or two, stop, take her for another walk, then put her in the car and proceed. From then on, she was a model passenger. She must have thought I was pretty stupid.
As a mutant black lab, one of her fondest activities in all of life besides eating and puking, was anything involving insanely energetic activities in running or still water. For a part of her youth we lived by a pond, and she would retrieve tennis balls from that pond for hours at a time. When we lived in LA I would take her to Ventura County and she'd romp in the ocean fearlessly, although we had to curtail that because she would drink the sea water and become terribly ill. At my sister's house back east, she loved the river and spent many of the hours we visited there retrieving sticks.
In general, her fierce dedication to fetching tennis balls or sticks led to her breaking her toes many times over, since, with abandon, she would hurtle herself over rocks, gravel, whatever, to get the object of her passion. By the time she was older her toes were gnarled like old tree roots. One thing she would never let me do was touch her feet. In fact, she would snarl and threaten to bite me if I even made a move toward her feet. But a kind, empathic animal healer friend of mine worked with her for a few months, toward the end of her life, slowly gaining her trust and eventually massaging her feet at great length. "Every one of her toes is broken and rebroken several times over," this woman said to me,"what the fuck were you thinking?" Fiona looked at me with a laugh in her eyes, and I said "It wasn't my idea. She wouldn't have had it any other way."
I once left her with friends of mine in LA so I could travel back to Santa Fe for a week. I hadn't been paying attention really, and she had fleas. My friends took care of her fleas, had her teeth brushed and taken care of. "What the fuck are you thinking with this dog?" they asked me when I returned. "You have an animal, man. You have to take care of it." I was chagrined and ashamed. I have often looked back on how shitty a dog owner I was. Someday I will have another dog, and I'll do the things in detail that being a good dog owner requires. But, in spite of how terrible a dog owner I was, the thing about Fiona is that she loved me endlessly, and everything was always 100% absolutely okay with her. Dogs are so incredible that way.
My biggest failure as a dog owner was taking care of her teeth. By the time she was about 10, she had several dead and rotting teeth, gum disease, terrible breath that actually filled an entire house. My friend at the time paid to have several of her teeth removed and for a course of antibiotics to fight the gum disease. I had no money at all, and it had simply not even occurred to me that she needed dental care. Absolutely shameful and unacceptable to me now. For a day after she had her teeth out, she lay on her bed. the bed covered with some blotter paper to soak up the blood from her mouth, and I knew bottomless remorse and regret and asked her forgiveness repeatedly. She just thumped her tail and was like "yeah you suck, you dummy, but I love you." She was so much happier after she had those teeth out.
I miss her terribly still, in spite of how difficult she was. She has come to visit me several times since she died. Go ahead and call me loopy if you want. I know it. Once, when she visited me, she admitted she had been pretty pissed about a lot of things, but that she had completely forgiven me and that she understood, and that I should work on not feeling remorseful or guilty anymore. I told okay, I'll work on it, and off she ran.
Her death was difficult. We had arranged with a very kind veterinarian's assistant to have her euthanized in our back yard, which had become one of her favorite places in her old age. It was a warm peaceful mid-November afternoon. My partner had insisted that we schedule the euthanasia while it was still light out, so that Fiona could "see where she was going" after she died. The vet tech arrived on time, and Fiona didn't budge from her spot on the living room rug, her tail thumping a couple times. This was totally uncharacteristic for her. She usually greeted any visitor with a lunge, jump, insatiable licking, etc. I think she was probably just in the worst pain toward the end.
We coaxed her outside. She peed and then hobbled back toward the door, "let's go in huh. it's bed time again." That was a heartbreaking moment for me. No girl, we're not going in again. Come on back. She hobbled back. (I've often thought since then-- there's a moment in every life I guess where the living thing heads toward the old habit, thinking, let's just do this again, and the universe says "no, kid. You're never doing it again. Let's go.") We stroked her, kissed her head. The vet tech got the shot ready. She saw the needle and squirmed and suddenly some of her old fierce fight was back. She hated needles so much. I wish the tech had not allowed her to see it, but he didn't know. He probed and emptied the entire syringe into a vein in her left hind leg. It was as if it had no effect at all. She had a wild look in her eye. I suspect she knew what was happening, although I guess that's superstitious of me. But it was how she was acting. We had to hold her down while the tech prepared a second syringe, almost unheard of. Her heart was strong, strong as always. Under all of her skittish, obnoxious, troublesome behavioral issues, she always unreservedly loved, completely wide open and fierce. I think she may have been the only sentient being on this planet who truly, unconditionally and always loved me, no matter how skittish, obnoxious, drunk or discombobulated and indifferent to her needs I was. A fierce light always blazed in her crazy brown eyes. No matter what, she was always happy to see me, and everyone else, always.
The second syringe emptied into her. I swear she looked at me questioning why, questioning what was happening. I told her it was okay. I stroked her head and told her "It's okay Finny, you can go now, I'll be all right. Thanks for all of it. But you can go. You can go now." Her eyes dimmed, probably my face blurring, the last thing she saw other than the evening sky. Slowly, slowly, her fierce body yielded to the death cocktail. Then she was under, and soon after, she was dead. Her gigantic tongue lolled out of her wide open mouth, symbolic of how she had lived so much of her life. It was awful seeing her dead. That such an obsidian spark of life could even die seemed impossible to me. The final truth of all of these fierce lives.
The tech lifted her, her head falling completely to one side, tongue long and lifeless. "She was a strong old girl," the tech said, "I have never had to use two syringes before." He had a couple of clay slabs that he made paw imprints in and left with us. We walked him and her corpse out to the car, and he said, "her ashes will be ready in a couple days. We'll call. You guys take care of yourselves. What a girl she was."
I had been too embarrassed to show much emotion with the tech there. After he left, my partner and I were standing in the kitchen and looked at each other and collapsed into each other's arms, sobbing. "My God that was hard," I said.
She had been sick for a couple of years before we euthanized her. I pampered her those last couple years of her life. She had her own futon, for example.
Shortly before we euthanized her, with her cat friend Pyewacket, the two of them clearly up to something
After my partner and I broke up, the following summer, I took Fiona's ashes back to the pond she had loved so much as a young dog. I sat on the dock she had loved jumping off into the brackish water to retrieve the tennis ball, swim back to the bank, run to me, obnoxiously shake all of that smelly water off onto me, and get poised at the dock's edge to jump again and retrieve, over and over and over and over. No matter when I signaled it was time to go, she would be disappointed.
I said a few prayers and scattered her ashes in the pond.
What dies and what doesn't die. I wonder if I'll ever see her again. Her conspiracy with the universe may well include a fierce greeting, followed by her puking on my celestial carpet.
The pond
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