Zoe the Dog


On Tuesday morning at 7:15, just a little bit before my daughter's school bus comes to pick her up, Zoe and I said good-bye to each other, ending our 13 year partnership in this world. Her death ended a three month battle of me against her death. I fought like crazy, turning my back on two suggestions by her vet that we "do it now" and compiling an array of medicines, holistic and non-. Antioxidants, vitamins, drops, iron, vitamin E, prednisone, nausea pills, painkillers. . . and I was feeding her "dogsure" with a syringe. Death has been living in my house, pacing. And now it's gone.
The way she died mystifies me. I was holding her as I have done so many times, my arms wrapped around her neck (by now so skinny) and my face buried in her fur. I had never visualized how she would go. I only feared it and wept for it since the vet told me in November he'd found cancer in her liver. But when the moment came, when her breathing changed, I talked her through it. I did it unconsciously--and my voice was calm and strong. I was saying all her favorite sentences and words--ride in the car, go to the cottage, get in the boat, go for a walk, have a treat. . . and her breathing grew heavier, and for the first time in her life she growled as she released her last breath.
And then I brushed my daughter's hair, zipped up her coat and walked with her to the end of the driveway where bus 181 picked her up and took her to school.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC: A POEM MADE OF 90 ABBA SONG TITLES

Image
THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC A POEM WITH 90 TITLES OF ABBA SONGS It's because now my life's as good as an ABBA song. --Muriel’s Wedding Because Love is all there is in this SUMMER NIGHT CITY , Because no one is CASSANDRA on THE DAY BEFORE YOU CAME , Because If it wasn't for the nights, we think that we could take it, Because we expect HAPPY HAWAII and get a MUSICIAN with FUNKY FEET ,  Because THAT’S ME , in the car where the ABBA CD blares strobe light satisfaction, rearview mirror turns mirror ball.  Because I enter a WINNER-TAKES-IT-ALL as the low bass line of ABBA subverts my bottom line, Because  my history falls from the shelf because it's WATERLOO , I couldn't escape if I wanted to, Because we DANCE WHILE THE MUSIC GOES ON in the heart's dopamine disco, Because CHIQUITITA , I’ll tell you what’s wrong, Because I turn that music on and I forget  everything. Because I am 8 again, arms out spinning Disco innocence in
Read more

Teaching Creative Nonfiction in Pandemic

Three weeks into my own, two week's into my daughter's isolation, I am teaching a class on Creative Nonfiction. We are nine weeks into the semester. Over Spring Break, everything in the world changed. The students "returned" tonight. I have been teaching in class in Zoom basically since I was told about Zoom. For me, it was the perfect solution to what then were my life's problems. I hated traffic. Zoom. I am deaf and require hearing aids, and listening in rooms of people is impossible. Zoom. I like to teach without interruptions. Zoom. Also, because I live in the mountains of Western North Carolina, often some students can't make it to class. They would Zoom. Some nights, none of us could come to class. We Zoomed. All of us. And that was the end of teaching in a classroom. I still carried the slight stigma of being an "online professor." It held a similar stink that "online dating" used to before everybody did it. It wasn't a "
Read more

Emailing Mother Theresa: On Losing the Art of Gazing

Image
I sent my first email in 1996. My boyfriend at the time had a computer, and the computer had internet. He sent emails all the time. When I was working on a project with PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) to develop a salivary ferning microscope that was cost-efficient enough to be distributed to impoverished women in India and Africa, I was asked for my email address. My boyfriend said I could use his.  One afternoon, my colleague at PATH forwarded an email from Mother Theresa. She was giving PATH her approval of the device. Once you get an email from Mother Theresa, there isn't much else to anticipate (Note to the 20000 senders of emails I've received since: you understand). The project got tanked along the way, despite my patchwork re-design that involved a cardboard kaleidescope from a child's birthday party and a 50x magnifying glass. I waited another two years to get my own email address, and another two passed before I started to actually &qu
Read more