Anna and Troy’s Weblog

Saturday July 11, 2009

Dear Booda:

This morning we woke up to a thunderstorm and pelting rain, which we needed badly. I am sure that you remember; the back yard has been horribly dry and brown for the last couple of weeks. But I am so grateful that your last days were sunny days.

I have to look up all the “phases of grieving” because I think that there might be something to it all. I have definitely felt sadness, denial, anger, bargaining…..is hysteria one of the phases? I am not sure how many phases there are, which order they are supposed to come in, or what it is all supposed to mean. After time, I think that you are supposed to finally come to “acceptance.”

Well I can tell you, we aren’t there yet.

My goal for today is to not cry quite as much as I cried yesterday. That seems like a good goal.

The grief of your loss is overwhelming. I suppose I can feel lucky that I have not had much experience in grief. Perhaps that is why the weight of this grief seems so monumental – just my lack of experience. On the other hand, it is likely that just IS that monumental. Daddy feels the crippling weight of it too, and he has experienced more death and loss in his life than I have. In fact, I am a little worried about Daddy. He is in a lot of pain, and processing it in his typical quiet way. He said yesterday that he isn’t sure he remembers EVER being “sucker punched” like this.

I suppose that is the risk in truly loving an animal. You are so unconditional, and the complete unabashed adoration of your love gives your people permission to love you back in that same way. The walls come down, and the love has a pure holistic innocence that is often not seen in human to human love stories. That naked emotion leaves us unwittingly vulnerable. I don’t think that we, especially Troy, were conscious of or prepared for the ramifications of that vulnerability.

One of the things that I feel very strongly right now is a great frustration – I want everyone to understand what a BIG DEAL this is, what a BIG DEAL you are. It makes me frustrated and angry that very few people will really understand the incredible impact your loss is having on this family. That they don’t understand what a special and wonderful spirit you were, and what a monumental and tragic wound your death is to us – not just to us, to the cosmic order of things. It is just SO WRONG, and there aren’t capital letters big enough or words eloquent enough for me to appropriately convey the measure of the wrong-ness, the intensity of the impact.

We have several friends, fellow dog/animal Lovers (love with the capital “L”), whose words and deep empathy have been of great comfort to us – they GET IT. When I called Grandma to tell her, she immediately started to sob. The Rosases represent a long line of dog lovers. I felt bad that I had made her cry and I felt bad that she felt bad that she didn’t know what to say – really there is nothing to say, but she understood, and she cried with me. We cried for ourselves and we cried for you. Maybe that is how hearts start to heal.

I write to you for myself, as part of my grieving process. I write to you for Troy and for Emerson, so that our family’s memories are preserved. I write to you because maybe, just maybe – just in case, if I actively throw our love for you out into the cosmos, you will somehow feel just a little bit of it. And you will know that for this brief life, you were in exactly the right place, at the exactly right time – that you were born into this family. I write to you because my greatest fear is forgetting – forgetting some small, but ever important idiosyncrasy or nuance of you, something that will eventually become the impetus of a funny story or a cherished memory. I want to write down all of the things that we can remember, so we can always remember them.

One night last winter, when I was really pregnant with Emerson, you and Max got out of the back yard. Daddy and I were watching TV in the living room and you two were playing outside. When we realized that we hadn’t heard the appropriate amount of racket from you, we went outside and realized you were gone. Panic ensued. Daddy ran around the neighborhood like a mad man for several hours looking for you. Lesley and Jody came to help track you down. It was dark and the first really really cold snowy night of the winter. A lady two subdivisions down eventually called us about Max. She found him playing with her dogs in her invisible fenced in yard, but you came back ON YOUR OWN.

I was standing outside in the driveway, freezing my big pregnant butt off, and all of a sudden, there you were, a couple blocks down, your little black doggy silhouette trotting down the sidewalk towards the house. I screamed, “BOODA!” Daddy heard me, and by the tone in my voice knew that we had found you, or more accurately, that you had found us. I ran towards you, and for a moment you froze, like “Oh my God. I am in BIIIIIIGGGGG trouble.” Then when you realized that I was not angry at you, you started running towards me full tilt boogie. By the time we got to each other your Daddy was rounding the corner behind me. After greeting me with relief and enthusiasm, you barreled past me, sprinting the last half a block towards him, almost knocking him down in your excitement. “Thank GOD, I found my way home!” you seemed to say.

That night was one of the WORST nights. We were so worried, so completely panicked, so unbelievably grateful that it all turned out alright, that we got both of you back. But that image of you, running towards me at full throttle through the snow – so happy, so relieved, is one of my FAVORITE memories. It comes to me often, any time that I am pulling out of our driveway in the car and driving down that little stretch of road. Now I think about it all the time, that picture I have in my mind of you – of the three of us, reunited on the sidewalk.

(As a side note: You found your way home first, before the nice lady called about Max. When we brought you inside, you paced and paced the house – wondering where Max was. When we finally brought him home, maybe an hour later, you were ecstatic to see him and immediately stopped your nervous pacing.)

So I will keep writing, until I feel better, and I until I am sure that I haven’t missed anything important.

Love,

Mommy (Daddy, Emerson, & Max too)

I just wrote the title to this post, and already I am crying.

Yesterday morning, Thursday July 9th, 2009, our sweet happy little puppy died.

It was a tragic freak accident. I had gone to take a shower and left Booda and Max outside to play.  Somehow, Max’s mouth got completely twisted up and stuck in Boo’s collar. I had only left them outside for maybe 20 minutes but by the time I found them, Max had stopped fighting and they were just lying together face to face in the grass. At first I thought that they were just eating something that they shouldn’t be eating (like poop or a branch from one of the trees). The collar was twisted around the bottom of Max’s mouth and one of his bottom canine teeth was caught in one of the collar rings. The whole thing was wrapped so tightly around both of them that I had to cut them apart with pruning sheers, and Max has a pretty nasty abrasion all around the lower part of his mouth. I didn’t realize that Booda was gone until I had gotten them unentwined, but looking back he never moved, and I am sure that he was already gone by the time I got to him.

I think that yesterday was the first time in my life that I have actually been hysterical. Now I feel really bad because when I called Troy at work I was so frantic and upset that he couldn’t understand anything that I was saying. Of course the first thing he thought was that something had happened to Emerson, which is such a horrible thing to do to a parent. Needless to say, Troy immediately came home.

We are all so incredibly devastated.  It has taken me several attempts to even write this post.

I think that people that have never really loved an animal as a member of their family cannot really understand what it is like to lose one, especially in such a stupid and untimely way.

And Booda was such a sweet good dog. Troy and I got him when we were brand new; he was the symbolic and physical start of our family. He was our first baby, and we were so sure that he was going to live to be an old lazy dog. In fact, it NEVER even crossed our minds that he wouldn’t get the chance to be old. We were so sure that we were going to have to have talks about the ridiculousness of spending some ungodly amount of money to get his hip replaced or some other old age dog malady; although, there is no question that we would have paid it.

When I was pregnant with Emerson multiple people warned me to be prepared for my “changed” relationship with my dogs. Once your baby is born, they warned, your dogs will just be dogs, they won’t be your babies anymore.  I didn’t find that to be the case at all. Of course, we had less time to “baby” our dogs, but they were still our babies. When Emerson was born we loved them just as much, we just loved Emerson too.

The thing I find strange about Love in general is that people seem so determined to quantify it. I suppose that is just a general trait of human nature, to quantify or rank things….. But I think that with Love (the kind of love with a capital “L”) it doesn’t really work that way.  Once you fall in Love or surrender yourself to it, it just is. Loving one person or thing can’t make you love another less. It isn’t as if there is a finite amount of Love to be passed around your life. When you REALLY Love someone or something, you just DO, there isn’t an amount attached to the feeling. You may Love differently because the objects of your Love are different, but the ideas of more or less or rank are inconsequential.

Max keeps looking all over for Boo. It is horribly heartbreakingly tragically sad. He sniffs all around the place in the yard where Booda died, and alternates between wandering all over our house and back yard and lying on the couch. Nothing anyone will ever say will ever convince me that our pets don’t have awareness and feelings. People can tell me that I am anthropomorphizing, but in my heart I know that Max is sad, confused, and depressed. I am sure that he is mourning the loss of his brother and friend.

Booda, we are so sad.

We miss you so much.

Our hearts are broken.

We Love You.

Max the wonderdog is sick.

It all started this past weekend when we noticed that he was holding up his left hind paw.  We assumed that he had just strained it a little bit while he was romping in the yard with Booda, but as the days passed it did not seem to get any better.  So on Tuesday I made a vet appointment for him.  He and Booda both needed to go in for their annual well-dog visits anyway, so Max’s injury just pushed that errand to the top of the list.

As the week progressed, Max’s leg did not seem to be getting any better.  If anything, it seemed to be bothering him more and more.  He has still been cheerful, but his overall “volume” has definitely been turned way down.

Then yesterday morning he didn’t finish his breakfast.

Now, if you have EVER met Max, not finishing his breakfast is a VERY BIG DEAL.  Max has always been an incredibly food driven dog.  In fact, we often worry about his eating habits because he has a tendency to not chew his food – he just inhales it.  It is almost like a doggie magic trick.  You know the one – the incredible vanishing food trick.  When he was a puppy he swallowed an entire rib.  Whole.  In the flash of the splittest of seconds.  I was sure that I had killed our brand new puppy.  We took him to the vet, fully expecting an expensive surgical extraction.  The vet sent us home with instructions on the emergency symptoms that might occur – NOTHING EVER HAPPENED.  It didn’t even slow him down one bit.  The days passed and turned into weeks…..and eventually we just figured that the rib was no problem for his SUPER DUPER digestive system.

Our present worry was further compounded when he wouldn’t touch last night’s dinner or this morning’s breakfast.  Something is defintely very wrong in Max-land.  Last night I coaxed him into eating some roast beef – but it was difficult, and I am not being sarcastic.  This morning, he wouldn’t eat any of the wide array of tasty treats we offered him (roast beef, peanut butter, bread).

Today we took him to the vet.  What ensued was like the very long doggie version of House.  Dr. McGee looked him over from head to toe.  He took his temperature.  He palpated his leg.  He drew blood.  He ran several blood tests, which counted his blood cells, and organ function.  He tested his urine.  So far, everything has turned up in the normal range.  Which is good because it rules out some of the really bad things that could be wrong with him, but frustrating because all of that testing and we are no closer to knowing what is wrong with him.  So Dr. McGee gave him a shot of analgesic for his leg discomfort, and one of antibiotics – just in case, pumped a couple of syringes of “doggie nutrient paste” into him, and sent him home for observation.

Poor Maxie-poo has been lying in the same spot since we came home four hours ago.  Poor puppy.

I have made some yummy boiled hamburger and rice dog food for him, and hopefully I will be able to get him to eat some of it.

Hopefully he will feel better soon.