Blue

After a long, grim winter that refused to quit, it’s finally spring. Robin’s egg blue sky, fluffy clouds, a gorgeous breeze, and all the birdsong you could hope for on such a perfect day. I sit out on my back porch and watch the leaves dancing in that soft breeze with an even softer Husky by my feet. Hento lifts his snoot and gently sniffs what the wind brings to him, radiating contentment. We’ve done this, almost exactly this, many times together; it’s one of his favorite ways to spend a fine afternoon.

It’s impossible to believe that right now, in this perfect spring moment, my dog is dying.

He doesn’t even look sick. A little tired maybe, but he has always taken things at a slower pace than most other dogs. Shortly after my thyroid crisis in 2020, he was diagnosed with hypothyroidism too, which had explained a lot about why he wasn’t the ball of energy and mischief that people always expect from a Husky. That could be why it took us a while to notice the first signs when the lymphoma hit him.

I don’t know. I don’t know. My vision blurs as I look down at my sweet Hento by my feet and I just don’t know. Could we have bought him more time if we’d caught it sooner? Were there any signs he would have let us see? For the four years he’s lived with us, Hento has always remained something of an enigma, past trauma turning him inward to guard his feelings. I get it, but I’ve always wished he would let me in, now more than ever.

But even if he had, would I have noticed? Jon and I have been wrapped up in our stupid human bullshit all year as we’ve handled the passing of his father in February and the resulting estate chaos. We keep saying we’ll take Hento someplace nice for a long weekend when we’re done managing the estate.

We keep apologizing to him for the time we have to spend away from home, cleaning out the old house to sell. It’s a crumbling disaster and the toll the work takes on us is as brutal emotionally as it is physically. We come home drained, to a dog who doesn’t even seem to miss us because he’s so angry at us for being gone. Another emotional blow.

When this is over, we promise him. We’ll take you someplace nice and relax together when this is over.

Except there is no together now when it’s over. He is leaving us and there isn’t enough time to say goodbye. He doesn’t even look sick, not today, but it won’t be long they say. They say they can’t believe he walked into the hospital on his own, as sick a boy as he is. They say we can try treatment, but it’s a matter of buying him days, weeks, months at the optimistic most, and we need to think about whether he needs that or whether we’re being selfish. They say a lot of things I don’t really hear because there’s just a deafening roar inside my head.

My dog is dying. He can’t be dying. We didn’t have enough time. We just wanted more time.

It’s ten days later and another picturesque April afternoon. My dog is dying, dying, dead. We didn’t have enough time.

How can the sky be so blue while my heart shatters inside my chest? The universe doesn’t care that he saved my life and it was my turn to save his. Entropy is pitiless and absolute. Hento was alive, and soft, and sweet, and kind, and now he’s gone.

He’s gone and it’s a beautiful day and we didn’t have enough time.

Hento enjoying one of his final spring afternoons.
11/21/13 – 04/29/22

our trauma. our vast national grief.

I just finished watching the national memorial service for our Covid dead, arranged by President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris. I thought it was important to participate because through all of this, we have never collectively been allowed to mourn the grave injury that we are all suffering. In fact, half of the country is actively denying the injury, trying to gaslight us into believing there is not in fact this gaping hole in the nation and in our hearts where nearly half a million of our friends, co-workers, and loved ones were just a year ago.

That our incoming president felt the necessity of acknowledging the ache of this national wound — simply, humbly, without bravado, but with solemn sincerity — and inviting all of us to join him briefly in sharing the burden of that grief before turning toward the celebration of his inauguration, is so decent. So human. So normal. Almost as soon as the service began, I started sobbing uncontrollably for the stark contrast between this decency and the grotesque inhumanity of the monster who has been subjecting all of us to the whims of his diseased psyche for the past five years.

Now that the destructive T**** regime is coming to an end and the weight is beginning to lift, I’m starting to realize just how constantly triggering it has been as an abuse survivor to live under the national thumb of an abuser whose name and face and relentless indignities have been centered so prominently in the daily business of our lives. Having escaped abuse before, I know that the period after you get free is when you collapse under the weight of everything you’ve been carrying for so long. It’s no surprise that I would find myself suddenly heaving with sobs just because an average Joe and his Vice President addressed the nation for a few quiet minutes to recognize the collective trauma we’ve been unable to process because it is ongoing. Because it is in dispute by those who would gaslight us and traumatize is further. Because we’re supposed to be focusing on going to our jobs and doing our work and “supporting the economy.” Because to truly admit to the vastness of this loss, this grief, would mean having to admit that we are in real trouble and it is our neighbors, friends, and family who got us here by uncritically swallowing the lies of a sociopath.

This grief, this vast national grief, is too big for any one of us to bear. As I watched the memorial lights serenely reflect into the pool of the National Mall while our incoming leaders joined us in a moment of silence, it hit home that we don’t have to bear it alone anymore.

It’s going to be a while before I’m okay. Trauma does a number on you in so many ways, and you never know how it’ll pop back up or when. If you’re also not okay, that’s fine. We’re all in this together and we’ve all been through a lot.

But for now, it’s good to be reminded that it’s possible to expect and see decency in our leaders. The last administration was a four-year stress dream. Let’s wake up, wash off the funk, and remember that no matter what our abuser tried to tell us, we do all have inherent worth, there are people who love us and want us to succeed, and selfish cruelty is not normal or tolerable.

There’s humanity in the White House again.

Full circle, and there’s a song about that

My Grandpa Bethancourt died when I was twelve years old.  At the funeral, I spotted a tall, bearded fellow dressed in a distinctive (peculiar, to me) manner.  He looked familiar, but I was also certain I’d know it if I’d ever seen such an odd character before.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“That’s Cousin Joe,” I was told.  “We don’t speak to him.”  The tone implied that the reasons were of an unsavory nature best not explained to a child, that he was one of those weirdies.

Four years later, I was at a collegium learning about the history and the modern practice of rapier fencing.  “Hey, look,” my companion said to me.  “It’s your cousin, Joe.  Aren’t you going to say hi?”

“I’ve never met him,” I shrugged and replied, and was met with an incredulous stare.

Almost as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I was made to stand in front of the tall, bearded fellow who dressed in a distinctive manner.  He peered down his nose at me, over his spectacles in that way of his, and said, “Who is this gorgeous redhead?”

“This is your cousin,” my companion informed him smugly.

Joe’s scandalized oh was several seconds in forming.

I was sixteen years old and the subversiveness of a relationship with an older relative not on the parents’ Approved list — especially if he was a weirdie — had all the appeal necessary to ensure we’d get on splendidly.  We did.  Joe was a good friend to me in those rocky teen years when I felt like I had a lack of adult support in my life.  He even went to bat for me against my father, a rather intimidating figure.  I’m told there were raised voices.  I don’t know if I ever told Joe how much it meant to me that an adult had enough faith in me to stand up for my choices, right or wrong.  I don’t know if he ever knew how badly I needed that.  I do know that he meant his standing offer of help sincerely; I don’t suppose he knew that there were moments when it felt like the only lifeline I had.

Some time after that confrontation, Joe and my dad started spending more time talking to each other.  In the nearly twenty years since, they became quite close.  Earlier this year, Joe played a concert put on by my dad.

Joe Bethancourt was a local celebrity.  That no-good banjo player was how he liked to describe himself.  If an instrument had strings, he could play it.  If there was a joke to be made, he’d put it into song.  If a song was beloved, he could filk it to bits.

Every time I saw Joe, he greeted me as his “second favorite redhead” (first honors to his wonderful wife) and asked me the same two questions: “Is he still treating you right?  Do I get to have to kill him for you?” meaning the man I married.  Because that was part of what he’d fought with my dad about, for me, and he had an endorsement to stand behind.  But also he was the kind of man who would really have relished the excuse to take any one of his many cherished weapons out for a spin.  I think Joe had two – no, thr—make that four true loves: music, weapons, greyhounds, and redheads.  Five true loves: also bad jokes.

I last saw Joe when he played that concert for my dad, in January.  He offered the usual greeting, and asked me those same two questions.  I laughed and thanked him for playing.

And that was the last time I saw Joe.

Today I have another family funeral to attend.  There will be no tall, bearded fellow to spot across the room.

and the wheel keeps turning

He was fifteen, grumpy from puppyhood, a champion snuggler and a royal pain in the ass, had canine OCD, and outlived his nemesis by six months.

Rest in peace you beautiful, angry old bastard.

Kishu Soburi
3/21/99 — 6/14/14

 

 

mind over matter

Apparently, feeling powerless affects your perception of your physical strength/ an object’s heaviness.

I found this study interesting particularly for its potential relation to my recent experiences of physical weakness connected to bereavement grief.

One Month On

It’s been a little more than a month now since I lost my best friend, my Jiro, quite suddenly without warning one evening shortly before Christmas.  I wasn’t able to talk about it then, and I’m still not entirely certain I can, but I have observed some things about grief and bereavement in the last month that I have found interesting.  Being a writer, I feel compelled to get them down so I’ll still be able to reference them when the freshness has faded.

When your grief is public, everyone feels like they have the right (maybe even an obligation) to tell you how you should be doing it, as if we all need the same things.  As if there’s actually any way to control how it plays out.  The strangest things bring the tears, and it’s even stranger which moments you’re able to find the levity in.  Things you should easily be capable of are impossible, while more difficult tasks provide the only available relief.  Helpful suggestions hurt.  Sympathy hurts.  Apathy hurts.  Everything hurts.

But grief-pain has a unique flavor that is different from other kinds of psychic pain.  The pain of depression is one I know well.  It is (for me) a numb-aching tiredness, a heaviness, a weakness.  Sudden bereavement has caused a unique set of physiological symptoms.  Authors and poets have always described the experience of being bent double with grief, of a feeling of literal hollowness.  It was a bit of a shock to find myself actually experiencing those things.  I imagine it’s sort of like the shock of meeting a celebrity whose face you’ve been familiar with for years on the big screen as various fictional characters, and finding that they somehow, impossibly, look exactly like that in person.  It’s surreal.  Or too real.  To feel an emptiness in my middle that is not hunger, to be trying to walk along and feel myself physically incapable of standing up straight under the weight of all the sad – that’s a stereotype, a hyperbole, not a thing that could possibly happen.  Except it did.

On most days, I consider myself a highly rational person, but there is nothing rational about grief.  The more I start to feel okay, the more I want to not feel okay.  The more I want the first hard torrent back.  Because I was closer to him having been alive then?  Because it’s some kind of betrayal to be okay?  Because being okay means accepting that he is gone, moving on to a stage of my life that doesn’t have him in it?  The more moments of okayness I start having, the more I need to be anything but okay.  The part of me that is still rational would like the rest of me to stop being such a mess.  The two parts are at war.  Despite what some people who know me may think, I am a peaceful person; war doesn’t suit me.

It is also a surprise to find that, as the okay moments multiply, this doesn’t actually make any more sense of the other moments.  They still happen just as randomly and knock me down just as hard.  That doesn’t seem right.  It seems like the process of healing should include the buildup of some kind of tolerance.  I suppose it will, eventually.  I guess it’s just misleading – when you start being able to return to the regular pattern of your days, you assume that means other things are returning too.  But this process happens on its own time.

I expect I’ll be learning new things about bereavement for a while yet.