There’s a heart-clenching fear when you read things like that; a sudden realization of just how momentary the heartbeat at your side can be. It makes you want to immediately cling to your dog and whisper in their ear, “Please stay.” Deaths have hit me harder since we reached the point where most of my dogs are seniors; harder still since Ginny’s degenerative myelopathy diagnosis. The fear is more visceral; my empathy for the grief sharper and more immediate.
I was on my lunch break at work, some seven and a half hours into the fifteen-hour last shift of a grueling week, when I scrolled through Facebook and saw the name of a dog I had loved (from afar) since he was a puppy followed by the awful finality of paired dates and literally choked on grief. I felt the sudden urge to get up and leave, to tell my team, “I’m really sorry, but I really need my dog.” One might think fatigue had something to do with the tears I couldn’t hold in, but I know better; I’d have cried even more at home. I sat at that conference table, before a litter of paperwork and tupperware, and cried until I could drag air into an aching chest. That was my grief; I know it pales in comparison to his family’s.
The shock makes it worse, I think. So often we have little to no warning before they leave us. It was that way with Pickles; he was playing in the yard and half an hour later he was gone. It takes loss and twists it, makes it even more unreal and traumatic. I found myself thinking, dumbfounded, that Rutger couldn’t die--he was fine! I never saw any sign he was sick. But my disbelief didn’t made that second date go away.
That was when I got to thinking that there are many worse ways to lose your dog than degenerative myelopathy. DM is, by its nature, a gradual loss. You see it coming. The diagnosis is a shock, but you have time to adjust, time to understand, time for your grief to gentle. It’s been two months (almost to the day) since I looked at my friend and said, “I feel like she’s getting worse,” and she replied with a solemn, certain, “Yes.” Two months since we loaded her up to go to the ER. Two months since I learned not being able to ascertain back pain could be a very bad thing. Two months since she told me, as gently as possible, that the ataxia wasn’t going to get better. Two months since I realized my dog, my baby, my sweetest girl, was headed for the Bridge.
It’s been a long two months.
But that two months has been time. It’s been time to get used to the idea that our days are limited; time for so many “one more time”s. When the time comes I can know I won’t regret wasted days, because we know what’s coming, so we aren’t wasting any.
That’s not to say it’s easy. It hurts every time Ginny stumbles; I’m afraid every time she gets ahead of me and charges down the stairs like she’s healthy, still not realizing her back legs are failing her. I still whisper and cry into her fur, because not knowing if she’ll see Christmas or have another birthday is constantly there in the background of our days. But then we cuddle up and go to sleep and wake up and look, there’s another day with Ginny. Another smile. Another time she comes up behind me while I’m standing in the kitchen and rests her silky head against my thigh, asking to be stroked if I can get a hand free. I always find that I can.
Jeannette Walls wrote, “One of the hardest things you will ever have to do, my dear, is grieve the loss of a person who is still alive.” I don’t know if that’s true in this context. I know it hurts, but it doesn’t hurt more than the sharp, breathless shock of sudden loss. I don’t know if grieving now will make our eventual parting any easier. But I know that I am grateful for the time, and for the chance to find out.
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