Lately I’ve been so tired and busy that I don’t have time to think.
On the one hand, this is good because it keeps me from breaking down and realizing that I will never hold Mina or see her chase her chickie again. On the other hand, I have been feeling peculiar lately, and maybe that’s because I am unused to not thinking through my feelings.
Tonight I went climbing with David. I felt out of sync the whole night. I didn’t see that he’d tied into the rope incorrectly during one climb, and I had trouble belaying. I also had a lot of trouble just starting most of the routes.
Granted, there are other factors that may have contributed to this. I hadn’t gone climbing with him or at this particular gym in more than a month because I had a temporary membership at a different gym. I hadn’t gone climbing at all for almost two weeks. I may have been partially dehydrated (the water fountain at this gym is very interested in sending most of its water onto the floor rather than into your mouth). David also seemed tired, independently of me.
But on the drive home, I felt odd and uncomfortable. And I started thinking — mostly about how I haven’t had time to think.
My new job is going fine so far. The work is varied enough that I don’t get bored, and there’s plenty to learn. The people are also really nice, and I know I’m very lucky to have found a job with a company that values its employees so highly. Hell, I’m lucky to have found a job at all, especially right when the hours at my first job started diminishing.
But getting up every day at the same hour, never sleeping well, and not being able to spend time with my own thoughts are slowly draining me. I’m so busy that I’m forgetting about my goals and dreams. I don’t have time to write, and I don’t have time to even recognize funny stuff that happens or interesting things I want to explore in my writing. Like with everything else you do, writing has to be done regularly to maintain your muscle, and my writing muscle is starting to weaken. Life just sort of passes while I try to keep up with the basics: working, cooking, exercising, grocery shopping, doing the laundry, not being late for work, paying my bills.
Staying so busy means you don’t have time to think about your life and where it’s going and what you want. You just keep going on and on, pushing down your feelings and emotions, until one day everything explodes, and you go home and tell your wife you want a divorce.
I don’t want to be that person. I don’t like not thinking. I have a strange place inside me that doesn’t feel right, and feels empty, when I just don’t think. But I’m not sure how to find the time to think about everything going on, to process Mina’s death, to cry long and hard. Part of me is afraid to do it, and the other part is afraid of what I’ll become if I don’t.
I once wrote that David is the kind of person who makes decisions by circling around them, considering the options carefully, and only acting once he has determined the proper course of action. I finally realized today that I am the opposite kind of person; a person who tackles problems head-on, sometimes before I even know what the hell it is I’m trying to achieve.
For a good 6-8 months after Chris left, I was obsessed with trying to figure out what had gone wrong. I kept reviewing our marriage in my head, trying to find the evidence he’d seen that it was not worth fighting for, and failing miserably. He had no real explanation he could offer me for why he’d left, and I was determined to find an explanation. The one I settled on, for many months, was one that he had given me in couples’ therapy: I was not good enough.
After much therapy of my own, I have realized that perhaps there really is no good explanation for why he left. At least, there isn’t one that I’ll ever get. But I only came to this conclusion after repeatedly throwing myself at the problem from all different angles, and not caring that I came out battered and hurt each time. As my therapist said, “Why do you keep walking into the propeller?”
I walk into the propeller because I don’t see a way around it. I have never been good at denial, or blaming other people for things that have gone wrong. I always take full responsibility (even when I don’t deserve it) for anything bad that has happened in my life. And if there is something I cannot figure out, I keep trying to figure it out, even if I feel bad in the process.
You know how I can tell someone is an experienced rock climber? They know what moves they’re going to make before they make them, and they move smoothly in all directions. They go sideways, up, sometimes down again, because they know that they need to be open to taking any direction that will eventually help them reach their goal of getting to the top.
I climb just the way I think about problems: almost immediately, I launch myself at the wall, sometimes before I’ve even planned my first move. I climb straight up, arms and legs held at stiff angles to the wall, grabbing on to anything within reach above me. There is no fluidity in my movements, only dogged determination.
This is why I am so perplexed by how I am behaving about Mina’s death. For the first time I can remember, I am actively avoiding thinking about something that troubles me, something about which I have unresolved feelings. I can’t even go back and read what I wrote about her death, because it hurts so much.
I admitted my feelings, almost shamefacedly, to my friend who had gone through some losses of his own. He told me that people had different ways of dealing with loss.
“Some people completely avoid thinking about it,” he said, “and other people think about it a lot.”
“But it seems wrong to avoid thinking about it,” I said. “Like I won’t really get over it unless I think about it.”
“That’s true,” he said, “but maybe you’re just not ready yet. When you’re ready, you’ll think about it. But right now, it’s ok not to.”
So right now, all I’m doing is standing at the bottom of the rock wall. I’m not thinking about how I’m going to get to the top, where Mina is. I’m not throwing myself at the wall to grab whatever I can, to see how far I get before I fall and have to start over.
All I’m doing is standing, because it still hurts too much to even look at the wall.
Up until now, I loved living alone.
Even when I had just moved and was dealing with the loss of my home, my dogs, and my husband, I still enjoyed the solitude. I was busy setting up my apartment and trying to make it a home. And after ten years of living with another person, I was finally experiencing the incredible, possibly-understandable-only-to-formerly-married-women, pleasure of being able to make a mess and clean it up on my own schedule.
Ladies, think about this: No more waiting to see if your husband will notice the mess he made and clean it up on his own. No more asking, then nagging, for him to clean it up, and no more silent resentment when you ultimately just clean it up yourself because it’s faster.
Cleaning schedules aside, the lack of dogs in my apartment was also freeing. Though I loved the dogs, the novelty of being without them — again, for the first time in ten years — was lovely. I could go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Not that I ever went many places, but just being able to work out at the gym, for example, without feeling guilty about depriving the dogs of attention made me really like living alone.
Now, after Mina’s death, I hate living alone.
The dogs never stayed in my apartment, though they visited once for a few hours. So I don’t have the painful memories that Chris undoubtedly has, the ones we both had when we lost Pedro, of seeing all the empty spaces where there should have been a Mina. Yet somehow, my apartment still feels suddenly too-large and emptier.
I wander the short hallway between my bedroom and the dining room, forgetting where I was going and why. I eat leftovers so old I can’t remember when I cooked them, not caring that they will probably make my already-delicate stomach sick. I lie in bed with my single pillow, remaining on “my” side of the bed from habit, and wonder if the other side will ever be permanently filled.
Not long after I moved into this apartment, I came to a surprising realization. Although I wasn’t sure I would ever want to re-marry, I knew I wanted to be in a long-term, committed relationship. All relationships require work, and I was willing to do it in exchange for the comfort and stability of coming home to someone who loved and supported me.
But after a year of being alone, I had forgotten what it felt like to be in a relationship with someone who was there when you got home from work. So when Mina died, I was confused that I kept feeling like I needed someone to physically hold me or I would not get through this. Yes, I knew I needed emotional support. Yes, I knew it was normal to grieve for my dog. But what I wanted, more than an explanation, more than time I didn’t get with Mina, was someone to hold me, and this I did not understand.
I’m not a touchy-feely person in general. I don’t hug people unless they hug me first. Chris used to complain that I didn’t need physical affection the way he did, and I’m not talking just about sex. I’m talking about hand-holding, a kiss hello, a quick touch on your shoulder as your partner walks past you. I never needed any of that.
Then a friend reminded me that for ten years, I’d had someone who was there to physically and emotionally support me in times of distress, and that my body, out of habit, remembered this. Now I don’t have someone to be here, and I feel the loss. Now that I have no one, I am needy and crave touch in a way I didn’t before.
I know someday I’ll be happy again, that I’ll find the right person with whom to share my life; someone who’s also willing to put in the work to get the rewards of the relationship. But selfishly, I wish I didn’t have to wait to meet him. Because I need him now, to help me repair this gaping hole in my heart from the memory of Mina’s eyes winking out.
At about 4:50am today, we put Mina down.
She had multiple blood clots and was having bloody diarrhea and bloody vomit. The vet said she had a 5% chance of making it because her kidney levels were not improving, she couldn’t regulate her body temperature any more, and she was already so tiny. They thought it was time.
Chris called me at 2:30am to give me the news. He said the hospital would wait to hear back from us about what to do, and that if I wanted to see her one last time, it had to be now. We agreed she needed to be put down, and Chris said he couldn’t bring himself to see her again and that it had been hard enough with Pedro.
“I don’t want to see her like that,” he said.
He offered to go if I needed him, but it was clear he preferred not to, so I said I would try to find someone else to go with me.
Nearly everyone I know locally has a family, or isn’t close enough to me that I could call them at 3am. Because I had no one else, and because I didn’t want anyone else with me, I called David.
I had already deleted his phone number from my cell phone, but it was in my list of recently-dialed numbers. David turns off his phone every night and sometimes forgets to turn it back on, so I knew as I dialed that it was pretty pointless to call him. Even if his phone had somehow been accidentally left on, I wasn’t sure he’d be willing to go with me, given how uncomfortable he was with emotion even when I’d been his girlfriend. And now I wasn’t even that.
As I’d expected, his phone was off. I left him a garbled voicemail, and at 3am, I left to go to the hospital.
I have never felt so alone as I did on that drive.
Once at the hospital, I sat with Mina for a while. She was alert, and occasionally struggled to sit up. She still couldn’t move her back legs and was leaking blood from her butt. She seemed calm, but confused.
I sang her a little song I made up.
Miss Mina Beana, Miss Mina Bean
You’re a good girl
Yes, you are.
We’ll miss you barking at us
asking us to feed you.
You’re a good girl.
Miss Mina Bean, you’re a good girl,
and it’s ok to leave.
Because she wasn’t barking, or in obvious pain, I had a hard time getting ready to put her down. I called Chris, and asked if he was sure he didn’t want to see her.
“I think she’ll feel better seeing you,” I said.
The only thing I want when I die is to have a familiar face nearby. I know dogs are not humans, and that Mina might not even be alert enough to know what was going on, but I wanted her to see a familiar face before she died, even if that face couldn’t be with her at the exact time of death. And truthfully, I wasn’t sure how much Mina remembered me. It had been five months since I’d seen her.
As much as I hate Chris for what he did to me, I wanted Mina to have him there, if there was even the slightest chance she would be comforted by his presence.
Chris agreed to come, although he said he wasn’t sure he could stay in the room during the actual euthanasia. We sat with Mina for another half an hour. Then she started shaking. It was time.
Chris said he would stay, and I asked him if it would be okay for Mina to look at him when they put her to sleep. While I held Mina, her body tilted so that her face was directly aimed at Chris, the vet injected her with a heavy sedative.
Mina fell asleep quickly; her eyes still open, but with all the light gone from them.
I hadn’t cried much while sitting with Mina because I didn’t want to upset her, but now I was bawling.
The vet injected a syringe of saline. And then the anesthetic that would kill her, and then one more syringe of saline.
Mina didn’t stir at all.
The vet checked for a heartbeat, and said she was gone.
As I drove home, alone again, the sun was coming up. I just felt cold.
Goodbye, Mina Beana, Miss de Mina. You were the best $90 we ever spent.
Mina has a blood clot. Barely any blood is getting past it. The vets made Chris pick up a blood thinner at CVS and deliver it to them, and said it would be better than the Heparin they stocked. At any rate, they were not optimistic that it was going to work to dissolve the clot. They will know in about 24 hours if the medication is doing anything. If it doesn’t work, we could amputate her legs before they die, or we would have to put her down.
If it does work, she is still likely to get more blood clots in the future because of her longstanding kidney issues.
Either way, there is no guarantee she will be able to walk again.
On Monday, I started my first new job in five years.
On Tuesday, I swallowed my pride and asked David if we could try again. Not because I missed having someone, but because I missed being with him. He said he wanted to climb mountains more than he wanted to be with me; that he needed the outdoors more than he’s ever needed any person, including me.
I drove home from his place crying so hard that I started hyperventilating.
And today, I went back to the emergency vet because Mina had lost all feeling in her back half and no longer had control of her bodily functions. She had a chest x-ray and was then anesthetized to undergo an MRI and will have surgery immediately afterward if the vets think it will help. The vet she saw today said that it’s a good thing Chris brought her in so quickly because now she has a 75% chance of being able to walk after surgery, whereas if he’d waited longer, her chances would be 50-50.
Too bad the vet she saw yesterday, when Chris brought her in with similar but less pronounced symptoms, decided Mina had a torn ACL despite Chris’s protestations that something was very wrong with her.
Because of Mina’s age, the chances are high that she has cancer. The chances are also high she could die from the anesthesia alone.
All I want is more than 48 hours between the major events in my life. I am slowly drowning.
I guess it’s good that I now have a job I have to get up for, because otherwise, I simply wouldn’t get up.
Stanley had his dental appointment today and appears to have come out of it fine. I went to the vet’s office right after work to see him, and also to pay the bill.
(A brief aside: I offered to pay the bill so Stanley could get his teeth done earlier, because Chris said otherwise he would have to put off getting it done for financial reasons. Yes, the appointment was expensive — $388. But how is it that the guy who makes six figures, owns a 4500 square foot house, bought a new car last year, has five computers, two TiVos, two flatscreen/widescreen TVs, and two or three gaming systems, can’t pay this bill? I’m in a freaking one-bedroom apartment with my shitty old car, no alimony, and a part-time job that may or may not end in a few weeks. Yes, I know it’s just stuff. I know I’m better off on my own. I know the divorce is done and over with, and it’s useless to bitch and moan about what I lost. But damn it, I’m human and selfish, miserable and lonely, and sometimes I have to bitch and moan, because sometimes I can’t help but just want my old life back, with all of its STUFF. And now I am done bitching and moaning, so back to my post, stuff-less.)
I had to wait about 15 minutes to pay the bill because a lot of people were waiting to check in and out, and there was only one person working at the front desk. And after I paid the bill, the vet tech at the front wasn’t sure about whether I could see Stanley.
I’d called the vet’s office earlier in the day to make sure I could visit Stan even though Chris would be picking him up later, and I’d run the idea by Chris, so when the vet tech started to say, “Well, we don’t usually let anyone go back to see — ” I cut him right off.
“Can you please bring him out to me, then?” I asked, trying to be polite. “I haven’t seen my dog in four months.” I gave him the Look. The Look which said, “Dude, I am trying to be polite, and I am trying not to cry here, but I can feel a little prickle starting in my eyes, which tells me that if I do not get to see my dog in the next few minutes, I am totally going to HAVE HYSTERICS RIGHT HERE IN YOUR OFFICE AND YOU SEE THAT BIG DOG IN THE CORNER WAITING TO BE SEEN? THAT BIG DOG IS GOING TO BE TREMBLING IN FEAR BY THE TIME I AM DONE.”
The vet tech was evidently familiar with the Look, and he said, after a pause, “Sure, I can bring him out.”
I sat down in the waiting area to do what everyone does there: wait.
The vet tech brought out Stanley in his crate and placed the crate on the bench beside me. I opened the crate door. Stan crept out and onto my lap.
Truthfully, I’m not even sure Stanley remembered me. He didn’t wildly wag his tail or attempt to lick my nose, or do any of the other behaviors he normally does to demonstrate that yes, he knows me, and yes, he is ecstatic to see me. But he didn’t try to bite me, so I suppose part of him recognized me, and admittedly, he’d just had ten (!!) teeth removed so he wasn’t really operating at full speed.
I didn’t feel as bad as I thought I would, when Stan didn’t freak out immediately upon seeing me. I wasn’t sure what I felt either. It’d been so long since I’d seen any of the dogs that I almost couldn’t remember how to hold or pet him. So there we sat: me on the bench, tentatively stroking Stanley’s head, and Stanley shivering on my lap.
After about fifteen minutes, I took Stanley outside so he could pee and poop. He didn’t seem too interested in hanging around outside, so we returned to the waiting room. He got back on my lap and I patted him while I read a copy of People Magazine.
Eventually Stanley stopped shivering, and curled up comfortably while I read, occasionally popping his head up to look at any new dogs that walked into the room. After I finished the magazine, I sat with Stanley a while longer and then took him outside on a quick walk around the vet’s office.
By now I’d sat with him for an hour and I had to get going, because I didn’t want to run into Chris picking Stan up. I put Stanley back into his crate and waited to catch the vet tech’s eye.
“I’m all set now,” I said.
A different vet tech came out to get Stanley’s crate, and that’s when my eyes started twitching and my throat closed up. I’d done well up until then, but now that I had to say goodbye, I was beginning to cry. So I whispered, “Thank you,” to the vet tech, because even in severe emotional distress, I still can’t help being polite, and I patted Stanley one last time through the bars of his crate door.
And then I walked outside and sat in my car, and cried.
When I can’t sleep late at night, I sometimes get into a bad state wherein I become more and more depressed as the night wears on, and I start imagining all sorts of horrible things happening (often to the dogs), and then I cry about it.
Which is crazy, because 1) haven’t I had enough shit happen over the last year to weep about? and 2) none of this stuff I cry about at night has actually happened.
Some background: Stanley needs to go in for a dental cleaning soon. His teeth have been very bad for a while now, and when I last brought the dogs to the vet, she said Stanley needed to get them cleaned within 3-6 months. So he should have gone back in January, but since I don’t have the dogs, I don’t really have a say in this, although I did offer to pay for the cleaning when Chris mentioned he might have to put off getting it done for financial reasons.
The problem is that getting a timely dental is more important for Stan than the other dogs because the bacteria could go to his heart, and he already has a heart condition. But the procedure is more dangerous for him because of that same heart condition.
So tonight I’m lying here in bed, hoping to get sleepy soon, and reading a book by a vet at Angell, where Pedro died. And of course, a pet has just unexpectedly died in the book (yeah, vet books are bad for me to read before bed).
I came to my senses and put the book down, but I was too late. The downward spiral had already begun, and now I was thinking about Stanley dying during the dental, which hadn’t even been scheduled yet, and then the true horror hit me — I DON’T REMEMBER STANLEY’S DIAGNOSIS.
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Yesterday I had a normal day. I got up late, I did some work, I did some writing. I went to the gym. I talked to my parents, talked to David, made plans to visit a friend the next day. All very usual.
Then I brushed my teeth before bed, and while I brushed, I thought about how I might have to start looking for a new apartment in another month or so. I love living here, but I need a place that gets more sun, and if I decide to go to grad school, I’d rather live closer to school. Because I’m the kind of person who gets stressed and worried very easily, I need to do everything I can to set myself up for success, and a short commute to school would help considerably with getting through the program while working.
So I thought about what else I needed in a future apartment, and then I wondered whether I could possibly find a place that would suit my dogs (fenced yard, no stairs, have so far found nothing in the area I want with these features even if I ignore everything else I want in an apartment) and then I suddenly began to cry because I realized, finally, that I am likely to never have my dogs back again, or any dogs, for that matter.
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New adventure that took freaking forever to upload because the nav bar was pushed underneath, so I resized all the pictures multiple times and reuploaded, only to eventually find out the problem wasn’t with the pictures at all, but because I had left out a slash mark in an html tag.
Grrr.
Here it is.
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