I'm not sure when I started referring to pets as an extra heartbeat in the house, and I’m not sure where the thought came from, but it just seemed right. They are not people, for sure. I don’t harbor any such delusions, yet they are most certainly family. The heartbeat sounds out the presence of another life for which I am responsible. It is another source of warmth, a soothing rhythm, a bundle of energy, another creature with some level of thoughts and feelings who irrevocably changes the dynamic of the household. I get an absurd amount of satisfaction just from watching my dog eat and drink, or sleep in her favorite spot on the couch, knowing that I’m contributing to that continuation of a life - in every heartbeat, every breath, and every contented sigh.
When I say that Lola was the closest heartbeat to me that’s died, I'm not drawing a comparison among my levels of affection for those who have departed. I mean it literally. In many quiet moments, as she lay resting, I had put my ear to Lola’s chest and listened. It's a connection I’ve shared with a select few: Tim, my dogs, and I can only assume, my parents, although I have no clear memories of those times.
I was educated on death the classic way, starting in my childhood, via my grandparents. My dad’s father died when I was still fairly young. We saw him at my grandparents' home in Chicago fairly regularly, but not at a time in my life when I had yet formed the curiosity to get to know him. I simply remember Grandpa Ted as a nice man with a sly smile who seemed to enjoy every minute of our visits. I remember the ever-present pipe which ultimately took his life, and the breathing stoma that replaced it in his final months. I remember the night we got the phone call, and the first time I ever saw my dad cry. I understood what was happening, but I didn't feel it as deeply as my parents did.
I was in college by the time my father's mother died. Before I left home my freshman year, she had told me I could call her anytime, collect. I took her up on her offer a few times and we had some nice conversations, about our lives to that point, my activities in school, and some hopes for the future. She was the first person I had known since childhood who began to relate to me strictly as an adult, and as I got to know more of the person behind “Grandma Helen,” my perception of my family grew along with our bond. I began to see myself as simply the latest in a long line of iterations, and that the people I had descended from were really not so much different from me. The generational signifiers - the clothes, the music - were much more superficial.
And then she was gone. Admitted to the hospital in the spring of my sophomore year for an operation to replace a section of clogged jugular, she never recovered. It had recently been Mother's Day, and my card to her was by her hospital bed. I still have it.
The thing is, I don't remember crying. I may not have at all. In the year leading up to her death, I was well into the process of emotional shutdown. In high school I had carefully constructed a denial of my homosexuality, but in college, I found the truth harder to ignore. My girlfriend finally, after a year and a half tolerating my lukewarm affections, had gently cut me loose. My failed attempts to “pray the gay away” conspired with my complete lack of ability in identifying and approaching other gay men to leave me feeling entirely alone. I don't know that I ever would have confided in Grandma Helen, as fearful of reactions from my family as I was at the time; but she was still a unique influence in my life, distant enough from parental responsibility to make me feel at ease talking about myself, but more affectionate than my school friends.
Her death flipped the final switch in me to "off." I felt nothing, and I continued to feel nothing for at least another year. I was one of her pallbearers, and I felt like I was still carrying the casket around with me everywhere I went, long after she was in the ground. I sleepwalked my way through school, parties, summer jobs, and family vacations, always showing up but never really there. Reviewing that period of my life with clearer hindsight, I suspect I was clinically depressed, but that term wasn't in my vocabulary at the time. Any strategies for dealing with depression were completely outside my sphere of awareness.
There are any number of ways this could have resolved, or failed to resolve, but my flatlined mood broke unexpectedly, in a flood of emotion. I'm not sure the method would survive psychiatric scrutiny, but it's true (I'm somewhat embarrassed to say) that I have MacGyver to thank. The significant detail, however, and the one that finally links this digression back to the main subject of this story, is that it involved a dog.
In this particular episode, MacGyver was dealing with a nasty virus, designed of course by a foolhardy scientist, which caused living creatures to age very rapidly, within minutes. In the climax of the story, the virus is released accidentally in a sealed lab containing no one but the scientist and her dog. I don't know why the dog was there. I guess it was her lab and she could do what she wanted. Perhaps a little more attention to clinical procedure would have prevented the tragedies of the plot. Anyway MacGyver, trapped on the safe side of a picture window, uncharacteristically could do nothing to save them, and was forced to watch them drop slowly to the floor from exhaustion, then age and die. Her dog put his head in her lap and closed his eyes.
I just lost it. Those sweet trusting eyes betrayed by a human’s idiocy, but loyal to the end, sent me off to my room for a bout of crying that lasted at least an hour. Of course it wasn’t just this scene that I was reacting to. It was all the unspent emotional credit that had accumulated over the past year, and when it was over, I finally felt clean. A relief valve had opened, and I was no longer withholding my grief - for my grandmother, and for the "normal" life I was never going to have.
By the time my mother’s parents died, I was a different person. I didn’t know my mother’s father very well, due to divorce, and didn’t feel the depth of his passing; but Grandma Lu (short for Lucille) had been a constant presence in my life. She was a frequent babysitter when we were young, and occupied a central chair at every family gathering, the benevolent matriarch of a rapidly expanding brood of grand and great-grand children, ruled with smiles and hugs.
Finished with college, out of the closet to my family and at work, and well into my relationship with Tim, I was free to feel her loss instantly and completely, and to be an active participant in honoring her life. She left us at Christmastime - not on the day itself, but while I was still visiting from DC. It seemed as though she had planned it so she could see as many of her progeny as possible, some of us scattered across the continent, but still coming home for the holidays. She slipped away in her sleep, spared a protracted and painful illness, or even a dramatic race to the hospital. If it's possible to talk about any death as ideal, this defines it for me, and if anyone deserved to go on her own terms, it was Grandma Lu.
Tim and I settled on our first house the December after we adopted Lola. We packed up the car and moved the basic necessities on Christmas Eve 1999. The new house (new to us - it was a hundred years old) was in Mount Rainier, Maryland. By this point, Lola had grown comfortable with us, and the move didn't impact her mood negatively at all. She enjoyed exploring the house, and the yard was already fenced in from front to back, giving her ample running space. The fallen leaves had been neglected while the house was under contract, so Tim and I set about raking them up while Lola zipped around the yard. Once we had a few piles together, she took them to be targets and threw herself into them full-speed, scattering the leaves again. She was having so much fun, it was tempting not to ever bag them.
She particularly loved to tear through the narrow side yard at top speed and fling herself around the corner of the house. Tim managed to snap a perfect picture of her in flight on one of these runs. All four paws off the ground, ears pointing straight up, and a look of unbridled joy on her face. It’s easy to feel successful as a dog owner when you see moments like that, considering what condition she was in when we got her. I loved to put the “rocket dog” picture, as we came to call it, side by side with her shelter photo, bathing in the glow of smug self-satisfaction, while wondering how anyone could ever have wanted anything else for her.
Photo by Tim Dolan, 2000
Of course, there were mistakes.
New Years day we cooked up a nice spiral ham, and having grown up with dogs that got fed table scraps, I thought nothing of doing the same for Lola. She got a sizable portion of ham for dinner that night, along with her normal dry food. I was not accustomed to the idea that dogs required gradual dietary changes. We went out to a movie after dinner and didn’t come home until around midnight. What had transpired in the meantime we later referred to as the great poop-splosion of 2000.
The house was a series of separate rooms chained together with doors that closed, giving us a lot of options for limiting her movement, and we had decided to keep her confined to the kitchen and back hallway, which were all tiles and hardwood. This was precipitated by a first week incident in which we came home to a giant puddle of pee on our mattress. Ever since, Lola had been crated at Donna's while we were away. We wanted to start giving her more roaming space, and the design of the house made it easy. What's more, the dining room was between the living room and the kitchen, and both doors were French (floor to ceiling glass panes) giving her an unobstructed view all the way to the front door.
Lola was clearly upset when we returned, and as we opened the last door into the kitchen, the smell was unmistakable, although the source was not yet visible. Turning the corner into the back hallway, I had my The Shining moment as the full horror was revealed. Picture the scene of the creepy twin girls in the hallway of The Overlook Hotel, the floor and walls all spattered in blood, then replace the blood with diarrhea. Yes, that's right. The walls. I had never seen anything like it.
"You will smell this forever,
and ever,
and ever."
Poor Lola had apparently been trying to hide the evidence, as some blotches looked like they had been licked up. Further piles of poop mixed with undigested food suggested she had followed up that feast with some healthy vomiting. We felt awful, realizing pretty quickly that we were to blame for giving her the ham. We got her outside, in case there was anything left, and set about cleaning up. We instituted a "no people food" rule from that point forward, which we found simpler than working to adjust her diet, and that was the last time we had to scrub our walls with bleach.
As we continued to work through our new dog jitters, Lola showed no signs of turning inside out again, so we expanded her territory to include the dining room (which was carpeted) when we weren’t home. It was a really ugly carpet anyway. Lola wasn't particularly happy with us, stuck as she was behind the French door every time we left, but she was only one small room away from the front of the house, and she could see us come and go. Dogs however, seem to clearly understand the difference between inside and outside. They know which doors are the official separation between those two, and if they eventually make peace with the idea that they can't always leave with you, they are particularly unhappy if they can't reach the door that is enforcing that separation.
After a few days of doing this we returned home one evening to find Lola peering out at us from the living room window. Inside, we saw what appeared at first to be a magic trick. The latch we had installed to keep her from pushing open the swinging door was still affixed and wouldn’t even open a crack. There was no broken glass on the floor and no other means of entering the living room was apparent, yet there she was, happy as could be, perched on the couch.
We were temporarily stumped until, while preparing dinner, I noticed that there was no reflection coming from the bottom left light in the French door. "Light" is the architect's term for window pane. A note about architects: they like to randomly rename ordinary objects so that they can make non-architects feel stupid when talking to them. So window panes are lights, lightbulbs are lamps, lamps are fixtures, and windows are glazing, or (if you’re a serious asshole) fenestration. So there you go. One light/pane was missing from the bottom of the door that we hadn’t noticed yet, and she had apparently squeezed her fifty-five pound, fluffy frame through it’s six inch by eight inch opening.
Needless to say, Lola had earned the living room.
Coming up next: "Wins and Losses"