Day Eleven: To See Just a Dog and Nothing More.

I think Scoob is dying, He’s not moving, hardly at all.

Our golden-doodle Scooby is very, very sick. I don’t know if he will make it this time. In early October he was also ill. He had lost fifteen pounds from an internal staph infection in the neck region: he wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t get out of his designated chair, and was very despondent.

Today is a little different, the weight is still on him, but he appears boney, as if a part of him, a part I can’t readily see, at least in spirit, has been chiseled away. He can barely stand. He has a fever of 103.8, and black tarry stools keep appearing from the internal bleeding.

I can’t stand it when someone is in pain, especially animals. It tears me up inside, and I can’t focus. It’s not that he’s my dog, he could be anyone’s dog (and in actuality he doesn’t belong to anyone anyhow) it’s that he is experiencing suffering and pain.

And I question what he is feeling, what he thinks is happening as he loses capacity to function—to even raise his little paw to ask, in his darling manner, to be petted. I wonder if he knows that when we took him to the vet yesterday evening, and he had all those tests, and the emergency shots, that we were trying to help him. I wonder if he can feel my own worry. No, that’s not exactly correct: I worry that he does in fact feel my concern, and that makes him sadder. I question if he understands this concept of mortality and the afterlife. People say dogs, and animals in general, don’t, but how can we possibly know? Maybe they are heavenly spirits sent down to save us from isolation: to connect us back to instinctual unconditional love. Maybe he can see his life force dissipating and slipping into another place.

I feel guilty, too, because, I haven’t been the best master. I could have taken him on more walks. It’s just his size—that of a stocky standard poodle—is hard on me, and he’s such a people and dog lover, that he pulls and pulls in order to reach out to others. He only wants to share his being and love; he doesn’t mean to hurt my shoulder in the process. He doesn’t know why I haven’t taken him on more walks, of late. And he just stares me down with the big dark and very, very sad brown eyes, as if asking why? Only, I don’t know what the why is now. Is it why the pain? Why the hurt? Why me? Or is he simply him naturally and effortlessly releasing and letting go, as humans struggle so much to do, and surrendering to the lifecycle.

I wonder if I did something wrong. Months ago Scooby stood on his hind legs, like a circus bear, and stole his pack of doggy vitamins from the top counter. Though I guess stole isn’t the accurate word—as they were his doggy vitamins. And sweet Scoob didn’t know not to eat the entire bottle of liver-flavored treats—he hadn’t known they could hurt him. Why would his human friends live anything around to hurt him? And I wonder if this overdose, in someway, might have damage him internally. And there was the freak snowstorm and the three-day power outage this year, when I was so obsessed with saving our freezer food by stuffing as much perishables as I could in the snow, that I forgot that Scoob would want some. As it was there, right in his domain, all this meat and dairy, all the yummy intense and enticing smells. Had I not felt obligated to share some, to give a few tidbits of our people- food, maybe his stomach, or whatever is bleeding, would be healthy now.

There is an agonizing twist in my stomach—the recognition of potential loss—this black wisp of nothingness that reaches up from the depths of me, beneath the physical layer, from some oblique existence, and nips at the tender parts of my being.  In the pain, I am reminded of all the loses before, all the animals that were once here and now gone, all the people who were part of my life and slipped away, rather through life circumstance or through the veil of death. They are all somewhere else now, whether on this plane or on another celestial plane, it doesn’t matter. They are no longer here. And thus I question this here. I question the here and now. The element of time—the element-less-ness of time—how time isn’t an element at all, and perpetually reminding us of his nonexistence.

Beyond my worry and wonder, and the deep pondering, my brain begins to jump, like those mysterious Mexican jumping beans that were so very popular in my youth—splattering about, these synapses of my mind, leaping to one fear to the next. The hypochondriac-state settling itself in for a stay. I feel the presence, the familiar presence of this unwanted visitor. I won’t even give it a gender, a he or a she it does not deserve. It comes every few weeks, giving me reprieve only for a short, short while, lets my brain rest and not focus on death for a wee stretch of time, before it returns to mock me with its ways. And mocking this entity of fear has done since I could form memories. It’s made me afraid of everything that is unexplainable to the physical form. It’s made me fear my own body, my own presence. I’ve died a thousand deaths, in a thousand different ways. As a child death took me from the killer bees, from rabies, from the cancer-causing blow dryer, from swallowing a scrap of tinfoil, from the crusted scab on my knee. Death took me later from AIDS, Hepatitis C, colon cancer, uterine cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer. Death even took me from toe fungus and a tiny zit. It is clever this entity, draping a black mask over my eyes, so everything light becomes dark, everything nonthreatening: a potential end mark to my breathing.

And in having dear Scooby sick, my precious boy, this death entity has bypassed the doors to my reasoning and entered my premises unannounced and unwelcomed. It laughs, because it tells I knew of the coming, because I could feel the rupturing of my own eternal woes, the familiar angst of what was to be: the mind bending and turning, the piercing of the present and bringing back of every fear.

It laughs because I let it in; it so claims, I allowed it to sneak through the cracks of my illogical reasoning. And so I am made victim twice: once for my lacking and once for my believing. Oh, to have a simple mind, that only sees the sick dog, that only feels the potential loss, and not the intense wonderings and aches of a seemingly limitless field of pain.

And now I worry for myself, my own health—this transference of my dogs pain into mine. Yet, another time the world has centered upon me. And I question my innocence and being. Have I a right to exist when my focus is continually led back to my own self, my own sufferings? How I pull the leash that is wrapped around another back to me, pulling the attention my direction. Am I not a failure for taking the pain and making it mine? Am I not a failure for yet again making the experience about me? And if it is not to be about me, to not come from my own eyes that see and mind that reasons; if I am to make this experience about that which is outside of self. Then how? How do I take the first step, when my mind has been prewired and programmed to function as an anomaly? Can’t I just be this so called normal for once, and see in front of me, this separateness of life. To see just a dog and nothing more.