We had a scare.
Audi, our smallest, youngest and most user-friendly dog, stopped acting like her lively self. Last Sunday she balked on the evening stroll and crouched in the road. We thought it might be that her harness was too tight, so we took it off and I carried her for a bit, and when I put her down she walked with us back home. She was shivering, so we put her in a chair and draped an afghan over her. We fed her by hand; she licked water from my fingers but wouldn't drink.
We left her in the chair, dull-eyed. And we weren't too surprised when she didn't tiptoe down the hall and join us in bed that night. It was obvious she didn't feel well, and I thought I could take her to the vet the next day if she hadn't recovered. We all feel off sometimes, and we have made a few too many trips to the emergency vet at midnight.
In the morning she seemed a little better. I let her sleep in when I took the other girls out, and when we got home she went out and did whatever dogs do in the yard. She was walking gingerly, but she was a little more engaged. She wagged her stub of a tail. She shook.
I put her down beside Paris on the chair, and covered them both with the blanket before I left for work. She seemed marginally better. I hadn't slept.
We left her alone that afternoon when we took Paris and Dublin out, for she was still in a fugue state. Audi seemed not to remember who she was, but she was eating (Karen fed her cherry pie) and drinking a little. It disturbed me that she seemed uninterested in us, that there was no joy in her. Still, she was moving about a little, not jumping on the furniture (we have no discipline in our house) but ambulating. Before we went to bed I picked her up and sat her down outside and she trotted with her sisters to the far reaches of the yard.
"She's coming around," I think I told Karen. I think I could hear the wishfulness in my own voice.
A few minutes later, the dog door had flapped twice. Paris and Dublin were in for the evening. But Audi was still out there. I called her, then I picked up a flashlight and went to look for her. Soon Karen joined me.
We found her huddled, shivering fiercely, under a corner of the deck, in a place we couldn't reach by crawling. I got a pry bar and started to pull up the boards, and the noise startled her and caused her to bolt. Karen didn't see where. I checked the yard and crawled under the deck. A neighbor heard the commotion and came to help. Paris and Dublin darted in and out--"find your sister," we told them. They both went in the house.
A few minutes later, Karen did too--to get a warmer coat and some gloves. And she found Audi inside, shivering. I vowed to take her to the vet the next day. We put her in the chair in our bedroom, swaddled in a Mexican blanket. We listened to her breathing all night long.
In the morning she again seemed a little better. For the first time in two days she put her paw on my hand. She crunched some dry food. She went out on her own. Her eyes weren't quite as dull. I felt OK when I once again left her behind while Paris and Dublin went out.
Karen made an appointment for her and took half a day off work to stay with her. I left early so I could go with them to the vet, and 30 minutes before our appointment we almost canceled because our Audi was back. She was engaged and playful, delighting in her squeaky toys. But we took her anyway.
The news was not bad, and Audi's problem was obvious to the professionals. She'd hurt her back, and was masking what must have been considerable pain. As the doctor probed her, she moaned a little but did not cry, and he pronounced her "a stoic little girl." We went home with $80 worth of pills and professional care and our Audi restored. I slept that night.
But I wonder why it is we love them so, why we leave ourselves so vulnerable to such pain.
It was silly of me to worry so much about her--my mind reeled with thoughts of tumors and strokes and shaking dog syndromes. We read about canine flu on the Internet (no cases in Arkansas yet). It wasn't anything really; she'd probably twisted her back when she leaped off the bed. I hurt myself in analogous ways every week. You live a certain way for so long and you expect a certain baseline of pain, humming on a frequency you're mostly able to ignore.
My little family is provisional; we will not be together for long, much less forever. At least that's what I believe, the bone-deep truth I can't deny: We live with the knowledge that everyone, every creature, we love is eventually going to die.
This is not a comforting thought.
When someone famous dies like a David Bowie or an Alan Rickman or a Glenn Frey it can affect us in any number of ways. If you admire their work, you might feel like you've lost the opportunity for future enjoyment. If you are capable of empathy you might feel sad for the pain they experienced or for the friends and family they left bereft. But when we grieve for people we don't know--and maybe when we grieve for people we do know--at least some of what we feel is sorry for ourselves.
So I understand some things that maybe Audi and Paris and Dublin do not. And maybe they understand things that I don't, like the moment is all we really have. The past is just an intellectual concept, a way we explain how we arrived at now. We eat the future as it arrives, our headlights creeping out a bare few feet into the dark unsettledness. It is nothing to worry about.
Like Epicurious said, "If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not."
But more and more I understand what Ted Williams meant when he told the writer S.L. Price that he hoped he died before his dog did.
That's the one damn song that can make me break down and cry.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Read more at
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 01/24/2016