October12
My mind is swimming and my heart feels like a flood. It seems as though tears are flowing from every cell of my body. All I can think to say is, he’s gone. I think it over and over and over. He’s-gone-he’s-gone-he’s-gone-he’s-gone-he’s-gone. My oldest companion will not try to barrel past me as I walk out the backdoor tomorrow. I will not have to retrieve him from the backyard because he’s lost his barrings and is barking incessantly. I won’t hear his claws tap, tap, taping on the wood floors as he paces the house or the thud of his bones when he gives into gravity and drops like a shoe in the middle of the doorway or kitchen or bathroom. I won’t hear him sigh as he rolls onto his side or watch his chest rise and fall with his living breath, and his snoring won’t keep me up tonight. But the silence may. He was a true, true friend.
October11
Tonight we took a long walk to Central Market and ate dinner on blanket under a tree and the moon. Bean is on a sleep strike, or I guess a better description is a sleep diet, since she does sleep but not much. (Her sleep diet started on Tuesday, the after we came back from California.) On the walk home she gave into her fatigue, pressed her face against my chest and let the sling cradle her to sleep. Ben and I strategised about the best way to put her down without waking her up too much when we got home. We decided that he would wait in the front yard with Lily while I went around the back and let the dogs out. It was a good plan, and it might have worked if I hadn’t walked into the house and found Dexter standing in front of the water bowl, his head circling to the right with the rest of him teetering on his legs, vomit and poop all around him.
He is an old dog, fifteen, and he’s had diabetes for the past five years. Earlier this year, he lost the remaining bit of his eyesight. After his eyesight went his health tumbled faster. I wish that all of this didn’t coincide with my pregnancy and Lily’s arrival. I feel like I haven’t been able to give him the proper attention that he deserves at this stage in his life after being my loyal companion all these years, but these things have a timing all their own. Now It seems as though he’s had a stroke or possibly a seizure, which also caused his blood sugar to drop.
So now we wait. We wait to see how he is in the morning, to see if he can walk on his own, if he can eat. He’s basically on hospice care. We’re not going to put him through a trip to the emergency room or the vet unless he seems to be in pain. We’re just going to let him be. He can be old and be sick and be dying and be breathing all at the same time. He can just be.