Death of a Lady
Grief isn’t what I expected. It doesn’t cast a shadow over everything like I thought it would. Rather, it lifted a blind and let in some much needed light to see where in my life I’ve overlooked. I’m starting to see things clearer, hear things clearer, as if all the extraneous voices have been shut up. It isn’t a long, overwhelming sadness - sadness comes, but much like any other emotion, it’s a lens, shifting the focus of what seemed important yesterday to what cannot be ignored today. When your heart is broken, it becomes very apparent what adds to its load, and what mends it.
Death was impersonal to Lady. Sickness was also impersonal to her. She lived like she had chosen it, without complaint, only an unflappable conviction that hers was the best life. We watched her slow throughout the years. She watched us do the same. In the last year of Lady’s life, there was a sense of peace about her that radiated throughout the household. A sense of acceptance, of something resembling laziness, but maybe really just a savoring of each second, the wisdom of knowing that to rush is a fool’s errand.
Lady’s health had been declining, with increasing rapidity, over the last couple years. On each occasion that she’d come close to the brink of death, Noah had without question elected for surgery. I was not in the same camp of unquestioning. I’d try to make peace with the fact that it was her time. And I know this was my rush to resolution, to gain some semblance of control over a situation that I had no control over. To see an end to her suffering finitely rather than be tossed into more months of uncertainty. To ask for some kind of finality, rather than this intermittent lashing of hope and prolonging that I feared would be just more pain for her, and for us.
Noah wanted to know he did all he could for Lady, that if there was still something to be done, then it was not the end, we could not call it quits in the effort to protect our hearts. There was never doubt in his mind. His unquestioning faith and loyalty still leaves me in awe. I’ve never felt my love for him more acute. He resolutely took over all of Lady’s caretaking, from vet visits to changing bandages to washing wounds, all while maintaining an unshakeable positivity (cue singing to Lady while bathing her and reapplying ointment and wrapping her back up with gauze). He did what I didn’t have the mental fortitude to do, day after day, without faltering, without complaint. He sat up all night with her on her last night. I woke up to find them passed out next to each other, blood and towels all around them, and a notebook filled with all the things he’d miss most about her. It’s seemingly impossible to describe the full weight of my heart in that moment, both swelling and breaking with love simultaneously.
There’s no way to predict grief to make it better. There’s no shortcut to recovery. All there is is the next moment, and how we choose to receive it. And if I’m rushing for something definitive, then I’m missing these in-between moments of tenderness, these seemingly small, quiet, but ultimately grand acts of love, these seconds of life, however complex, however bittersweet, asking to be felt, experienced and lived. Life is not definitive, it cannot be, because the very idea of control is the opposite of the inexplicable ways life unfolds. We can control the environment in which a plant grows, but we have no idea what that next leaf is going to look like. I cannot stop the flow of pain by attempting to stop the flow of love. That would be really fucking stupid. And that is something that I can control.
Lady’s final parting gift to us was reminding us of both the brevity and levity of life. Noah’s been trying to compile all the photos and videos we’d ever taken of or with Lady in the last ten years. She did a lot of funny shit lol. The infamous chomping of the jaws. All the stuff in the house she tore to shreds we’d forgotten about had it not been for the photographic evidence: an ottoman, countless cushions - a trick she also taught Loona (“here, bite this end while I bite this end, now shake!”), a remote, a kindle, painting supplies, her nail clippers (and the two replacements after - she really hated those things), a portion of the couch, and an entire deer skull. How we used to have a cat, that Lady tried really hard to play with. How the house has changed over the years - the colour of the walls, the furniture, the layout. How we’ve changed. Incremental shifts that tell a much bigger story, a story I wish I’d started writing long ago. It’s so hard now to try to recall everything.
How to sum up ten years in a paragraph? I think at best I can recall the feeling. The feeling of enthusiasm, nervousness, and responsibility of being a new dog parent. The feeling of fear, doubt, and failure when it seemed her reactivity and aggression would never get better. The feeling of hope, pride and triumph as it did. The feeling of panic, excitement and exhaustion in the first few months of adding Loona into the mix. The feeling of optimism, contentment and joy when everyone settled into being a family of four. The feeling of comfort and peace that routine brings as the years went by, as if it had always been like this, would always be like this. The feeling of denial, despair and powerlessness as Lady got sick. The feeling of sorrow, longing, and acceptance as we process her death.
There’s all the favorite stories we like to tell (Noah’s is famously the first time he met Lady) and so many more that won’t ever be recorded or heard again, except in the cells and marrow of our bodies. The memory falters, and that’s okay too. Because it’s enough to know that she was here with us. It’s enough to feel her presence within the changes that have taken place in our mind, and soul, and heart. While the moment of seeing her finally drift away felt impossibly hard, in these days after, it’s starting to feel less like a goodbye, and more like a see you later - like a favorite song that brings you back to the exact era in which you lived as a different person, and all the things that version of you did, saw and felt, every time you hear it. A song that makes you say, “Remember when we used to…?” And for a moment, it all comes flooding back, even if it’s just for those few minutes that the song plays. It’s a song that you’ll put on sometimes because you wake up hearing it in your mind's dream, the first few chords seeping through you like a warm drink after a long walk in the snow. It’s a song that comes up on some previous decade’s playlist, that makes you pause as the pattern of your breath shifts ever so.
Grief arrived and brought with it little gifts as offerings to make its visit more welcome, I suppose. Exhaustion, to help with sleep, as if like with a flu, the body knows only rest will hasten the healing. Anger, with its short little bursts of power supercharged by grief to make the changes necessary to facilitate peace. Sadness, setting into the body like winter, demanding dormancy, rolling out like steady rain and sometimes torrential storms, running its course until the clouds were spent, letting some light peek through. And clarity. Only in the face of immense loss can we see what truly needs to stay, and all the things accumulated over the years that no longer have a place here, in the life that’s still yet to be lived.
