And On A Personal Note...

  Tom Petty once wrote that "...the waiting is the hardest part," and we certainly discovered that when we made the call to the vet.  We had backed out before, our dog looking as if she had miraculously turned the corner; but now we knew that the quality once there in her life was now vastly diminished, the loss of the use of her back legs, the incontinence of all sorts (we were doing 6-10 loads of laundry daily, mostly of her "pads" but often her dog beds as well), and her occasional gaze of "is that all there is?"  On the other side of the coin she appeared normal, eagerly doing her twice daily walks (we had a doggie wheelchair), gobbling down her meals as if we hadn't fed her in weeks, and sleeping whenever she had a clean pad under her, even if it was only for ten minutes or so.  But the waiting.  We had called the mobile vet again since we had cancelled the appointment two days earlier but now the vet was booked (our dog absolutely hated going to the vets, meaning that when she did appear for a checkup or some sort of exam, she would have to be muzzled as well as me having to hold her as if I were an aging wrestler demonstrating a choke hold take down); could we wait until the morning, she asked?  That was yesterday.

   There's something about having that time to wait and knowing what the end result will be, as if on death row and watching the hours move fitfully by.  Suddenly we felt as if we were judge, jury, and soon, executioner of sorts.  Was this the right time, or perhaps better said, would there ever be a right time?  Certainly people who do this for a "living" run the gamut as well, from those who appear to not give it a second thought (such as those working in slaughterhouses) to those whose job it is to put animals down, even if it's from a compassionate viewpoint.  Our friend recently became a country mobile vet, her territory

CT scan of a pigeon; from Sierra Magazine, Scott Echols

covering farms and such in rural areas, and told us that euthanizing horses has proven more difficult on her mentally than expected (veterinarians have one of the highest rates of suicide).  Or imagine being a people whose culture doesn't allow you to speak such emotions, a people such as the Inuit living in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, a place which has the highest suicide rate in the world.  In a piece in The New York Review, the forced relocation of the peoples into settlements came primarily due to the U.S. building radar sites "to spy on the Soviets" and the Canadian government "keen to prevent the US from claiming sovereignty over this potentially mineral- and natural gas-rich area, hastily established towns and forced the Inuit to settle in them."  Continued the piece: Older Inuit told me they remember armed police officers arriving at their camps unannounced and ordering everyone to leave. Sled dogs --even healthy ones-- were slaughtered before their owners’ eyes.  “One family I know was sitting in their house in town when the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] showed up and shot all their dogs,” said Alice, who collected testimonies for an Inuit- initiated inquiry into the dog killings.  “They even shot under the crawlspace, right below where the family was sitting.”...Imagine the shock of these polite, dignified people when some RCMP officers killed their dogs and ordered them into the settlements, when some residential school teachers abused them, and other powerful qallunaats --as whites are known in the Inuktitut language-- insulted and patronized them.  Many of the residential school children, in particular, came back angry and alienated.  The emotional training they’d received as toddlers was no match for the arrogance, insensitivity, and stupidity, let alone brutality, that they encountered in the qallunaat world.  With no language to describe their hurt and loneliness, they turned away from their families.  Another image from a different article, one of a lone abattoir worker pointing a rifle at a Hereford laying down on the grass, is one that haunts me not for what is likely a humane death for the cow and sustenance for the farmers, but for how that person doing the shooting could never be me.  Life is just too connected to imagine it ending so suddenly as without warning.

   Marcia Bjornerud wrote in Sierra that: ...As a geologist and a professor, I speak and write rather cavalierly about eons.  One of the courses I teach is The History of Earth and Life.  It’s a survey of the 4.5-billion-year saga of the entire planet -- in a 10-week trimester.  But as a human --and more specifically, as a daughter, mother, and widow-- I struggle like everyone else to look time honestly in the face.  Most humans have no sense of temporal proportion—the durations of the great chapters in Earth’s history, the rates of change during previous intervals of environmental instability, the intrinsic timescales of “natural capital” like groundwater systems.  As a species, we have a childlike disinterest in the time before our appearance on Earth.  This ignorance of planetary history undermines any claims we may make to modernity.  We are navigating recklessly toward our future using conceptions of time that are as primitive as a world map from the 14th century.  But that description was my wife and I, puzzled over the 13 years of good times and memories that were now gone in a poof, a surreal moment of life as if caught in a magic show...now you see it, now you don't.  But author Bjornerud goes on to end her piece with this quote from Charles Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species: There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.  

   What's next, if anything?  As with evolution and even in trying to comprehend eons, we are likely incapable of knowing.  But our only hope is that, as one of our friends who has a "gift" and has more than once baffled us with what he "sees" and "feels" from those that have passed (both animal and human), our dog was ready to go and our other dog patiently waiting to greet her; "she's telling you that it's okay," he told us.  Whether true or not, it's as pleasant a scenario as we can hope, because we certainly don't understand the rest or what comes after.  In life it is your intent, he told us, not what you did or didn't do, but your intent.  And if that is the case then all we know is that our intent was to love her as best we could, never realizing that she would give us back that love tenfold.  Godspeed girl, wherever you are...

To the girl that knew me better than most humans...thank you.