The First Warm Day

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 Today we learned that our 17 year old dog, Mr. Bill, dog of my divorce, J.'s double, is nearing the end of his days, and we need to decide soon when he will compassionately exit this life. I sobbed for an hour, called J., picked him up from his dorm, sobbed some more. Mr. Bill can barely walk, can't stand up on his own anymore without assistance or a rug, has lost enough weight that his bones are traced beneath his thin fur. But he still eagerly eats the cat's food, can magically hear when I open a can of dog food (though he cannot hear much else, nor see, nor understand where he is or why most of the time.) I have always hoped he would die peacefully in his sleep and I would not have to make this decision, having made it traumatically for numerous animals before him. But. I do not think that will be the case.

This week is our birthdays, J. and me. He'll be 19, I'll be 47. Both feel impossibly old and young at the same time. We have had Mr. BIll since I was 30 and newly divorced and a single mother of a toddler. I'd just gotten tenure, and had begun writing the poems that would be in my first book. And then too, i felt impossibly old and impossibly young. I was not prepared for any of it, but I did it anyway. It feels a lifetime away.

I have also recently been diagnosed with severe hypertension. This was mostly a shock: I am a runner, a vegetarian, have never smoked in my life, and drink in moderation. My father died of heart disease at 72; I don't think he acknowledged his heart disease until his 60s, after the first or second heart attack. I thought I could escape it.

But I am also like my father, though neither a drinker nor a smoker, I am someone who feels responsible for ALL of it. For the past ten years, I (and J.) have simply kept our heads down, flown across country hundreds of times, bifurcated our lives; I've been to court a dozen or more times, have been called every version of bitch and whore and bad mother that exists; I've become the primary wage earner and carrier of our insurance. I run a non-profit, I do not know how to stay no to anything, i feel responsible for everyone--at work, at the opera, at home.  I thought it would get easier when the traveling stopped, but this year has been a crucible. J.'s first attempt at college was a catastrophe and I had my first full blown, catastrophic panic attack and then stayed at that level of terror for months. 

If you had asked me three weeks ago if I felt in good health, I would have said yes, whatever good health is. I was fine. But two weeks on hypertension drugs and I feel like a different person. I feel like I might be able to live.

I am in my garden, which I have spent years building from a vacant, shit-strewn lot. There are hummingbirds and robins calling down the dusk. They say we might see the northern lights this weekend. I am grieving my not-yet-dead dog, grieving all the years we had to white-knuckle it to survive and the fact that I didn't understand it came with a cost, that carrying all of it would eventually attempt to bury me.

J. took a nap in his bedroom, ate dinner, and has gone to the river with his friends. I do not know how to trust that the worst possible scenario won't happen. I don't know how to trust in good things. That everything might be okay. That we will be okay.

God I hope we will be okay. 

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