Ornery girl
Life, love, and the food preferences of a geriatric pitbull
Maybe I lost my mind a little bit. I made bone broths, organized little cups of different items like charcuterie. But Dani seemed into it.
To be honest the labor was some mix of penance and distraction. I’m normally a pretty direct person, honest with myself, and not the type to hide from hard topics. But coming back from a three-week vacation to see my dog wasting away, at death’s door without warning and all the events that followed are still barely bearable for me. One of those thoughts so horrible, so repellent, that before you even consciously experience the thought your psyche wants to recoil, dropping it like a hand relinquishing a scorching pan before an articulated thought of pain even hits.
Why is dog “man’s best friend”? The phrase is attributed to a king of Prussia, another version to Voltaire, and it can maybe be considered codified most formally by lawyer George Graham Vest in 1870.
The Odyssey, Sherlock Holmes, White Fang, Call of the Wild, Old Yeller - how old is the concept that dogs somehow have manly connotations?
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the literary love of dogs has been claimed by men and coded as important, significant and meaningful. When women love animals it’s funny and embarrassing, you have “horse girls” and “cat ladies”.
Growing up I had abridged/kid-friendly versions of both White Fang and The Odyssey. Even then, the heart-wrenching dog scenes were as close as I came to ever not being able to stomach content in a book. I felt like I understood perfectly the male protagonists’ profound connection with their dogs.
For a fast reader eager to get my hands on any ‘adult’ topic I wasn’t supposed to know about, death in connection with dogs was the only edgy theme I ran into that I remotely could relate to as a young reader, and the only one I couldn’t handle. I remember finishing Where the Red Fern Grows in 4th grade and feeling abject fury at the author, for making me experience that pain, for cursing the concept of a dog to a horrible death even in fiction.
The loss was a feeling I knew before knowing it personally, a universal despair.
I can’t say I’ve toughened up any over time. In other ways life experiences have sanded off my touchy-feely edges, I have less patience for employers and men and my family than I did when I was younger and idealistic no doubt. At almost 35 there are fewer emotional “firsts” for me, and feelings have to penetrate a thick outer crust of experience and world context, each hurdle mellowing the force of the eventual impact.
When my dog Bark passed suddenly and prematurely at age 3, I buried it within myself as if it was something on par with the horrors of war. I took down all the pictures I had of him. It was such a raw nerve that I still seldom look at pictures of him. I know it’s dumb, it’s a dog - his brief little life would have flickered out at some point, and I did my best to give him a good life. But small details haunt me. When he first displayed symptoms of what would eventually kill him, I was juggling him and Dani, 110lbs of dog. I thought he was just being difficult and scolded him to hurry along several times. He was in pain he didn’t understand and I didn’t notice it and instead was annoyed with him.
There’s a reason for the special outrage over misfortune to the innocent, kids dogs etc. It stems both from their innocence, and the concept that they are our responsibility. There is a transitive form of blame when something you’re meant to protect gets hurt. This being was under my care and something happened to them. Even if I didn’t directly cause it, there is a corrosive, sick, almost infected form of sadness that stems from that link.
Whether women get credit or not for the dog lovers that we are, women have understood me as well as anyone can in the moments I’ve been brought to my knees by a failure to keep an animal safe. In my memory I have no self awareness of how big a spectacle I made in the vets office on learning Bark would be put down, but I have some vague idea of the mechanics of my grief, sobs gasping out of me too fast to answer questions. I must have had the appearance of someone whose heart was breaking. As the receptionist brought me a clipboard to indicate if I wanted a keepsake from his ashes I was surprised to see tears streaming down her face too.
For anyone as sappy as me about pets, I’ll not go into too much painful detail about what happened to Dani. Suffice it to say, I had her in boarding while I was in Patagonia and a hernia condition she had became critical. Ultimately she had to have a small lobe of her liver removed as well as hernia repair.
On top of that primary issue, she lost 20% of her body weight while I was gone and developed a bladder infection. The place where I was boarding her didn’t call me or get her medical care even though they noticed her weight loss six days before my return. They have an associated animal hospital not 20 feet away.
Realizing that I left her alone and in pain (at a minimum) and that she was neglected (almost certain, judging by weight loss) has made me feel a way I can’t say I even recognize. I express myself pretty well I think, I have a refined emotional palate. I can clock whether I’m feeling jealousy vs envy, wistful vs nostalgic, and whether obvious feelings of anger I have at others are more accurately of anger towards myself.
Although I’m normally emotionally literate the feelings I have about what happened to Dani, I can’t get into words. I have never experienced such extreme desolation across my emotional landscape. The errant thought hit me, “This must be what it’s like to be a psychopath or narcissist, to carry this extremity of darkness and depravity in your mind”. Emotion so terrible that it becomes a cognition apparition of the most horrifying, repulsive reality you could ever dream up.
The feeling is so large and unmanageable that it comes to me in pictures, like a comic strip reel of hallucination trying to build towards some terrible scenario. A scenario horrible and extreme enough to correspond to the feeling. Swimming before my eyes I see it like a corrosive sludge, a volcanic poison flooding my throat. A post-traumatic post-nasal-drip as I consider and reconsider what she went through, billowing down through my body and choking me, surely disintegrating everything in its path like acid. That vision still isn’t enough to match the darkness of the feeling. None of them are.
It seems like for the time being a ruthless narration is going to be my constant companion. You left her alone to die, it whispers against my ear. I can’t even say it makes me feel bad because the fresh horror of it and the associated emotional pain gives me some satisfaction. Good, I should feel bad. I should feel bad because I left her alone to die, confused in pain and without comfort.
In the same way I had to take down Bark’s pictures, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to put up pictures of Patagonia. It is another form of catharsis to give the voice the pictures, to see some mountain and go that’s the mountain you were at while she was wasting away alone. There’s some level of fortifying masochism in punishing my raw emotions further. I track it like some nonsensical ledger, like if I can suffer as some form of tribute it will undo or balance anything that happened.
My friends say all the right things, that I didn’t know, that it wasn’t my fault, that I go overboard feeling personally responsible, and their points are reasonable but fall flat. I feel this bad because I should, because I am responsible for her. Other people don’t feel this bad because the feeling is so agonizing that they simply couldn’t experience it without their brain interfering, rationalizing and denying to protect itself.
I’m many things, not all of them good, but my brain is ruthlessly honest with itself. I don’t let myself hide from whatever terrible thought it may come up with. Not because I’m strong, just perversely curious. I have to look at the dark, slimy things on the underside of the rock, I can’t not know, no matter the cost. The cost is that I know and that yes it was my fault.
The degree of turmoil I’m feeling over a dog to some of you may sound ridiculous. But I’m not very sentimental about people or kids or romance, we all have something that pulls at our heartstrings above all else. My animals are mine. The only relief I get other than emotional self-flagellation is an ironclad pact, the conditions of which I’m still adding.
The first part: I am done traveling the rest of Dani’s life. I won’t board her again. After making that decision I questioned it, thinking what if I ever get sick or am in an accident, shouldn’t I have a place I know on hand for an emergency? For a moment I thought I’d recover myself and her from this horror and force myself to find one for that reason, just to have in case. But when I thought of having to take her there for the intake assessment they do to evaluate temperament, some inviolable boundary within me roared up like a tidal wave, a sonic boom transmitting a silent scream of “no”. No, I can’t and I won’t. I can’t take her to some facility and watch her pull on the leash in protest when she realizes I’m leaving her. I’ll just not travel and not get sick or in an accident, that simple.
The second part: You are now looking at something of an expert on the animal welfare clauses of North Carolina agricultural law. I paid a few hundred dollars for a lawyer yesterday. These cases are hard, but I will ceremonially take even a loser case as far as I can to punish the facility that neglected her and cause any mayhem I can for them. I plan it like a delicious meal I want to savor, scheming up how long to wait so that they think I moved on before calling animal control to inspect their facility or having a civil complaint delivered. I want to prolong the entire situation as long as possible so they have to remember what they did to Dani and so they don’t get a minute’s peace.
The pillars allowing me to function right now are attending to Dani’s every need, rehashing my own pain and guilt and feeling some balance or righteousness from bullying the injury, and the idea that I will make it the last thing I do to destroy the people that did this to her.
After everything, it’s the least I can do.
In between my emo moments and deliberate prodding of my emotional wounds a couple things manage to bring me actual happiness that I don’t bother begrudging myself.
The first thing that has brought me happiness since all this is that Dani is a very funny dog. High on pain medicine, she trots around headbutting me with her cone, demanding scrambled eggs. In her stoned state she keeps deciding to lay down on other people’s lawns when its below freezing outside and I really need to get her back indoors. She is a highly noncompliant patient, breaking through barricades and trying to climb stairs. The cats have decided to take advantage of me free feeding her all day long to dart out and steal kibble, Dani is on to them and barks and chases them off enthusiastically.
The second thing that has brought me joy is the stunning and touching level of support she’s received, not even just from “dog people”. People truly like Dani, even though at this point she is a grizzled old ornery girl, missing some teeth and a span of fur across her hind leg, mulishly stubborn and often slightly stinky. She’s not the most outgoing dog, she’s not the type to want to be everyone’s friend. She’s aloof and amusing and apparently, very memorable. My neighbor picked their cat because they so loved Dani’s coloring and it reminded them of her. People stop me to exclaim over how she looks like a little tiger. People have come out of the woodwork to wish her well, suggest lawyers and ideas to get justice for what happened to her. People have responded to my pictures saying to tell her they love her. We’ve gotten calls from vets we don’t even go to anymore who somehow found out through the hospital system about what happened just to send her well wishes.
Maybe women don’t get lionized in literature for the love between us and our dogs. But Dani seems to somehow anyway have generated her own larger-than-life lore, with me along for the ride. I hope or wonder that the investment people have in my scruffy, not especially friendly, not particularly well-behaved dog is because of the strength and quality of my love for her, that maybe it lets them see her through my eyes. I know I am forever marked back by her love for me.