Letting Go

It still feels like I need to do something drastic.  I could shave my head or cut off a finger or something…maybe get Maynard’s face tattooed over mine or join a church or a gang.  I don’t suppose that will change anything, but pretending to be normal sure hasn’t worked thus far.  The amazing outpouring of condolence and encouragement has been overwhelming and comforting more so than I ever thought it could be.  I appreciate it more than anyone will ever know.  He’s still dead though and I have had a hard time dealing with that inconvenient fact.  The finality of that reality is tripping me up – I keep thinking he will be there when I open the front door.  As it turns out, I’m ill-equipped to process this level of grief.

Sylvia Plath once said, “Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.”  That’s probably as true as anything I’ve ever read about writing in a general sense and certainly applies to what I’m attempting to write.  I don’t know what else to do though – I can’t very well go get a Maynard tattoo on my face now can I?  Everyone deals in a different way; this is what I do.  Forgive me if I ramble. 

Had I known the mark he would leave on me, I’m not sure I would have ever accepted him into my life.  No one wants to ever be made aware of their shortcomings and I was / am no different.  I’m not sure when the switch flipped for me about Maynard.  It was probably long before I wrote this blog post  but it was about then that I became acutely aware of what he did really mean to me.  Without dredging up the past, a significant relationship was ending for me at that time.  His and of course Belle’s care were foremost in my thoughts and if I’m honest I suspect that my dedication to those two was a surrogate, especially at first for the commitment I couldn’t, for whatever reason, give their Mom.  (Yes, I speak about my dogs as if they were my children – they are my children.)  It was not only comforting to know that they were waiting on me to come home from the office but that they genuinely wanted me to be there, they needed me there.  Maynard especially became the confidant I didn’t have in human form throughout that winter.  I’ve always said that I’m more of a dog person than a person person and he got that.  He embraced it.  I remember vividly, sitting on the front porch with him one night and having the talk.  I made a promise to him that night late in 2011 that I would never leave him.  I verbally and emotionally committed myself to this old ass wiener dog more so than I ever have had the balls to do the same to an actual human being.  (The folly of that should be dealt with at some point, but not tonight.)  It was me and him against the world from that point on.

A friend of mine suggested recently that I should write a children’s book about Maynard; the lessons he taught me, the long shadow he cast.  That’s a wonderful idea but this is still raw. There is a splendid irony that’s not lost on me though in the concept of me endeavoring to write a children’s book of all things.  For now, I just want to talk about my old friend.

There was nothing more perfect in Maynard’s life than his cheeseburger, an obnoxious squeaky chew toy.  This was his favorite since he was a pup and he brought it into my life with him.  So as not to lose my mind, I extracted the squeaker.  He still loved it.  “Where’s your cheeseburger, Maynard?” and he would dart off into wherever and bring it back shaking the shit out of it, triumphantly.  After years of love, we had to retire the cheeseburger but replaced it with the doughnut.  It wasn’t a doughnut at all…just another obnoxious squeaky chew toy.  It took him a minute but he quickly loved that one the same way.  The day before he died, I asked him, “Where’s your doughnut?” and he hobbled off after it as best he could having never lost his affection for that dumb thing.  He understood the simple and pure child-like joy of nonsense.  What a lesson, right?   

After he was diagnosed with heartworm, the docs put him on among other meds, Prednisone.  It’s a steroid that made him epically thirsty and have to pee all the time.  It helped open up the passageways in his lungs though so whatever.  Maynard was a runner for most of his life and he was out the back door and down the steps every time the door opened.  As he got older, it became harder and harder for him to get down the steps – eventually impossible for him to get down or up.  I can assure you that the last thing I ever wanted to do was cart the little man up and down the steps to pee every (30) minutes but that’s what I did.  When his appetite started to go, I would just wait him out.  I bought him multiple varieties of food over the last few weeks and he hated them all.  I mixed them together, threw in a little peanut butter sometimes and he would usually eat, but he was stubborn (as he had always been).  I don’t remember the last day I got to work on time as a result – my priorities had shifted without me even knowing they had.  I am a deadline, time constraint; get it done on a schedule guy by nature.  There’s value in that, yes but there’s no point in always rushing and there is no timetable for how actual life should happen.  I’ve never been a patient person, but I quickly became one in order to care for Maynard this summer.  That was a good thing for me and it has translated into my everyday life. 

To say that I was committed to Maynard would be the understatement of all time.  But I don’t know if I ever truly understood the meaning of the word before I met him.  It was hard at times this summer to see it all the way through, I admit that.  It would have been easy, I suppose for some if not most people to let him go in May when we learned of the heartworms.  It should have been even easier to let him go when we found out he also was diabetic. And still easier with the pancreatitis and liver disease and finally Addison’s.  It would have maybe been easier to put him down at any one of those hurdles, but I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t because I was committed to his life in a way that I’ve never committed to anything else.  If he had to have a special diet and I had to give him insulin shots twice a day, so be it.  If I had to monitor and adjust his glucose levels every day, so be it.  None of it mattered.  I stayed committed.  I think I’ve always thought of commitment as a one-sided affair until Maynard.  He saw that I was devoted to keeping him alive at nearly any financial or emotional cost and he reciprocated by staying alive, no matter how bad it hurt him to do so.  We postponed the unavoidable as long as we could by being so blindingly loyal to each other.

I could go on, but I won’t.  No matter how adeptly I write this, it will never capture the profound impact his life and ultimately his death has had on my life, on me as a person.  Empathy, compassion, peace, honesty, commitment, responsibility, pride, accomplishment – these are all concepts I thought I knew but never internalized fully on a personal level until Maynard.  Yeah, it sucks that it took a dog to make me a better man, but that’s what is.

Last Monday started like every other recent morning with my trying to bribe Maynard into eating his bites.  A couple spoonfuls of last night’s soup and a finger of peanut butter were about all that he would take.  He was in good spirits though, so I didn’t think much of it.  The docs had said as long as he didn’t miss (2) insulin shots in a row he’d be fine so he toddled off back to his bed and I left for work. 

He was at the front door when I got home Monday afternoon, excited as ever and ready for dinner.  Belle inhaled her food as usual and ran out the back door.  I put out Maynard’s (3) choices and went to the fridge to prep his insulin.  Before he could walk over to the bowls he began to vomit and as I reached down to comfort him, he collapsed onto his side and convulsed violently for what seemed like eternity but was only a few seconds.  It quickly passed and he stood up and stumbled to the water bowl.  I called Belle up, wrapped Maynard in a towel and went immediately to GVS.  I can’t describe how it felt to see him lying in a pool of his own vomit, his body being rocked by a seizure.  This had never happened and I knew but couldn’t admit right then, that it was the beginning of the end.

Another late evening in the ICU and another sleepless night later, I got up anxious to hear how he was doing Tuesday morning.  Monday night’s episode had been caused by an abnormally low production of glucocorticoids by his adrenal glands combined with off-the-charts potassium levels in his blood, or Addison’s Disease.  The treatment would be to first get him eating regularly again.  Without that, we couldn’t get his blood glucose level under control and until that happened we couldn’t attack the other.  If that was successful, we’d then start him on a battery of additional medications, including Prednisone which made him miserable, twice monthly visits to the vet to monitor his adrenal hormone production and monthly deep tissue hormone injections.  All of this would be for the rest of his life and would be in addition to his twice daily insulin shots and Slidenafil and doesn’t consider the fact that we had never resolved the original heartworm issue, or the pancreatitis and liver disease.  Did I mention that he was going blind and could hardly walk from the bedroom to the kitchen or that more often than not I had to hold up his back legs so he wouldn’t fall over into his own shit when he had to go?  All of that notwithstanding, at first, I just accepted it.  If this is what it was going to take, so be it.  We’d come this far, you know?  My mind was racing that morning but at some point, I realized that I had to stop being selfish. 

It was just too much for him – and for me, if I’m honest.  We have been to the brink of death with Maynard multiple times this summer and that emotional rollercoaster definitely took its toll on all involved, especially Maynard.  It took that journey for me (and him I think) to see finally the decline in his quality of life.  After additional unlikely prayer on my part, we made the difficult decision to let him go. 

The rest of that day is a blur.  He had visits from his first owners in the afternoon and I’m told he enjoyed a little bit of baby food before we got there.  SB and I had some time with him before to say our goodbyes, reminisce a bit about fast puppy and tell each other how much happier he was going to be.  I had secretly reserved the right to change my mind at the last minute, but when I looked into his eyes the light was gone.   He was exhausted.  It was time.  Letting him go was the absolute right thing to do, but it doesn’t make it suck less.  I had supposedly prepared myself for that moment all summer but face to face with it, it just did not seem real.  There is no way to prepare for something like this. 

As I had promised him, I was there right to the end.  At 5:13 PM, 20 August 2013, the doctor who had been treating him since the beginning looked at me and said, “His heart has stopped beating.”  I closed his eyes.  My face is the last thing Maynard ever saw in this world.    I physically could not let go of him.

It’s been just about a week since he passed, and I’m just now starting to get myself back together.  I’ve been cool and the gang one minute and a sniveling pile the very next.  The smallest things sat me off, up and down, restless, completely erratic.  I was reminded of a Robert Frost quote recently that goes something like, “The only way out is through.”  That’s exactly what I’ve tried to do and it’s been weird but I don’t apologize for it.  Whatever my process has been it has brought me ultimately to a sense of peace, to the acknowledgement that Maynard had one helluva good and long life. He was fourteen years and nearly a month and his every day on this earth was filled with joy and excitement and spirit.  I had forgotten over this summer just how energetic he had been once, what a huge personality he had, what an unshakeable confidence he had in himself despite his small stature.  He became somewhat of a celebrity at our local vet and at GVS over the last few months – everybody always loved him.  I’d forgotten how playfully aggressive he had been towards Belle at first, how adamant he could be about anything and everything.  He was my perfect road trip co-pilot, my Sunday afternoon nap buddy, my bro at the bar watching a basketball game.  He was / is my family.  Persistent, dedicated and supremely loyal to his very last breath.           

This weekend I made him a proper final resting place; I used red oak.  It’s strong, just like he was and is a damn sight nicer than that flowery tin the crematory sent him home in.  At sundown tonight, Belle and I spread some of his ashes in the back yard around the base of that pine tree in the corner he used to love to root around in so much.  I put the rest in there with his collar and his doughnut and some other things I thought he’d like.  This final symbolic act helped me put a period at the end of this sentence, you know? 

I’d like to think there’s a heaven for dogs like you, but I’m not sure.  If there is, you are definitely there because you were one damn good dog Maynard.  You’ll always be with me in my heart little man.  You were my best friend, my constant companion and I love you buddy.  I’m not letting go, but I have to rejoin the land of the living – live in the is, not the was; that’s what we always talked about, right?  Rest in peace old friend, nobody deserves it more than you do.

      

Maynard

25 July 1999 – 20 August 2013