Preparing for the worst
Some weeks back, I was on the phone with my veterinarian, discussing my 10-year-old Shih Tzu’s condition, which has worsened significantly in recent weeks. She has congestive heart failure, and while she’s on several heart medications, I can see that she’s struggling. Her heart is enlarged beyond anything he’s ever seen in a dog her size. The irony that my dogter will die of heart disease, just as my sweetheart did, is not lost on me. It’s a little too present, in fact. I have already let him know that she will be his soon to take care of until I join them. They were pals.
I don’t discuss my personal life with my vet, so as he explains these things to me, he is unaware that I have educated myself a great deal about heart disease since last July, and am more well-versed than I would like to be on the worst-case scenario.
I shared with him that I was clear that things were not good, and that she could go at anytime, and made the comment that “Each day I wake up and don’t find her dead, I consider myself lucky.”
He said, “Well, if your standards are that low, I guess things are good then,” he said a bit sardonically. He seemed taken aback, and so I answered, “My standards aren’t low; just realistic.”
When someone you love dies, reality becomes your new unwanted chum, a pest you cannot ignore. All the comforting delusions you held throughout your life that tragedy doesn’t happen to you, and that only the very old and very ready die, and that when people died young, it is an aberration, are stripped away. When you lose someone you love before what you think is their time, you look around the world and realize that people are dying constantly, every day, at all ages, and it hits you with a shock of recognition every time. I don’t know about other people, but I was never more aware of how true this was until I lost someone I loved. And now I feel everyone’s loss. 3200 American service men and women dead in Iraq. An 18-year-old boy shot by the jealous husband of his teacher lover. A 5-year-old girl killed at the local rodeo parade when she fell from her spooked horse. A 33-year-old country music up-and-comer hit by a drunk driver on the side of the road as he searched for a mile marker to guide roadside assistance to him. Every page of the news reads like the obituary page, and you realize that death is nothing special. The fact that it happened to you is not an aberration in the grand scheme, despite the fact that it leveled your world down to rubble and you’re still trying, slowly, to rebuild.
I know that I’m doing everything I can to help my dog. And I know that eventually, and perhaps sooner rather than later, it is not going to be enough. And while I hate it, there’s nothing I can do about it. Appreciating every day that she’s still here is not “low standards”; it is, I think, the way we have to approach life. All we have is now. Those who do not see that have not been given the reason to that I have, that so many of us have. Lucky them. There are people who, when you ask how they are, say “Every day above ground is a good one.” I always thought that was a little too morbid to be funny, just like my vet probably thought I was being morbidly flip. But I get it now. And they’re right.
Those of us who have faced death, even as a mourner, become, I think, very matter-of-fact about it, and this disconcerts those who have not yet undergone that conversion of viewpoint. Reality is what it is; sugar-coating it doesn’t save anyone any pain. Not talking about death doesn’t keep anyone alive. Death does not scare us anymore, at least our own. We no longer think of it as an aberration, but rather a constant companion. We walk along holding its bony hand in our own, while everyone else looks on in horror at our dinner date. And inside, we just smile knowingly, thinking, “Just wait ‘til you get to know him; then you’ll understand.”