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| photo by Tim Barker |
For a writer everything is material, including (I suppose) the death of a dog. Our Norwegian elkhound, Mishka, died two days ago. I’m not ready to write about his death yet, but I’ve written about the death of our previous dog, Maya, in a novella that I’m planning to call The Truth About Death. In this passage Olive, a black-lab mix like Maya, has just been diagnosed with liver cancer:
That
night, on the way back from our walk, Olive stumbled again on the stairs. Just
a little stumble, as if she’d misjudged a step. It was hard to be sure, but I
was sure, and it broke my heart. That night I talked to her and we made a list
of all the things we were going to do in the next couple of months. I hadn’t
been planning on going to Lake Michigan again, but I changed my mind. I looked
into her eyes and she looked into mine. I thought she was trying to explain to
me why things were the way they were, how they were all tied together.
Put
my face in her thick ruff and then kept my hand on her head while I made
arrangements about the cottage. We’d never been there except in the summer. I
asked about the heat. There was electric baseboard heating. Not a problem in
November. A fireplace too, which we’d never used. Didn’t think Olive would be
able to walk down the sixty steps to the beach, but there was another way down,
from the park down to the public beach.
That
was on a Monday. On Thursday, coming back from the park by the depot, she
stumbled badly, but made it up the stairs. She ate her supper. Half an hour
later she threw it up. I cleaned it up and sat with her in the living room.
About
nine o’clock she got up to go to bed. Walking down the hall she had a seizure.
Frothing. Flailing around. Banging into the walls, then falling down. I called
Dr. King at home. He said to meet her at the hospital right away. Olive was
able to walk. Went down in the elevator. Gilbert went with me. But then she had
another seizure in the garage. When it was over we managed to get her up into
the back of my Mazda hatchback.
Dr.
King and his assistant were waiting for us Animal Hospital on Freemont Street.
He said that the medication to control the seizures would feed right into the
tumor and kill her. We decided to put her down. I kept my arms around her while
the doctor inserted the needle into her shoulder–acepronaciner and ketamine.
She kept her eyes open for a bit, but she didn’t look at me. She was looking
past me. Then the eyes closed. Olive was dead. And that was about as close to
the truth about death as I ever got. Not something you can ‘tell’ anyone. You
have to experience it.
Death
is like life. Like poetry. Like great art. Like the blues. It doesn’t mean anything. It just is. This is what Olive was trying to
tell me. Maybe. Or, any ‘meanings’ you assign to it–like the meanings we assign
to life, to poetry, to great art, to music–are trivial compared to the
experience itself.
As
I said before, I’ve never rejected the conventional wisdom about grief, but
Olive’s death pushed me to the limit. brought me to my knees, not to pray, but
because I couldn’t stand up. Maybe it’s that we can’t explain death to a dog.
Not that we can ever ‘explain’ death. But at least you can talk it over, the
way Simon and I did. You can… I don’t know what you can do.
I
didn’t call anyone that night. Knew I wouldn’t be able to talk. But I sat in
the tower. I was lonely, but not exactly lonely. Not the way I was lonely when
I first went to college and was homesick… but in some other way.
I’m
aware of the limits of great art. You can’t eat
it or drink it. You can’t curl up on it and go to sleep. It won’t keep you dry
if it’s raining or warm if it’s snowing. It won’t keep you afloat if you’re
drowning. It won’t clean your blood or set a fractured bone. But… Well, you
can’t explain great art either.
I
was waiting for something to happen. I didn’t know what it was. I was still
waiting when I drifted off to sleep in the big chair-and-a-half in our bedroom.
When I woke up in the middle of the night, I reached down for Olive, but she
wasn’t there.