A Tale of Two Dogs

Things are wobbly at home, and I have not written a newsletter entry in about a month. More! More than a month. There have been more hospital trips, and our beloved dog Hazel died.

There was a day while Cliff was hospitalized where I got up, saw she was seriously not doing well, took her to the pet ER in New Haven. I waited in the waiting area while Hazel was being assessed, and then I stood outside, talking with Cliff’s counselor about the possibility of bringing her down to where he was at the hospital about 45 minutes away to say goodbye to the dog. Clearly that violates every hospital policy, and yet his counselor also had a dog in heart failure, and she said, “I’m going to find a way to make this happen.” His wonderful psychiatrist at the hospital was also a dog person, and no one minimized the impact that losing a dog would have. And Cliff was very attached to Hazel, as she was attached to him. He was her person.

I didn’t even get a chance to directly tell him that Hazel wasn’t doing well, but he’d known, of course. We’d known for about a year that she had about a year left. In all the back and forth, someone told him and he called me, and I said that if nothing else I would drive her down there and we would find a way to get him outside for a minute and then apologize for everything later.

By the time we got out of there it was noon, and they’d met with me in a special area where they deliver bad news. And it was clear: the life was draining out of her. The doctor said, “She doesn’t necessarily have to be put down today.” But her suffering. So I put the poor girl in the car, drove through a McDonald’s drive through and got two orders of fries and two hamburgers, thinking somehow I could give them to her for lunch, not thinking that she didn’t want to eat anything, not even American cheese, which was her favorite substance on the planet. I ate the fries and drank water and drove, sitting in clogged traffic on I-95, gunning toward my arranged time to meet Cliff outside the door of the hospital at 3:15.

We made it, and we got there even a little early. I got her out of the car, but she could hardly walk, and she was doing the thing that our previous dog, Gonzo, had also done, of trying to crawl into the bushes to die in piece. I think at one point during the day I heard that there was a term for this hiding behavior, but now I can’t find it on the internet. It’s sort of a sacred time, so I think there should be a word. And it makes a kind of sense, as I have also had that instinct to burrow and hide when I am in pain and sick.

I got another call telling me to drive up to the front of the hospital, where Cliff would meet me with a nurse, and then he came out, already crying. I won’t write the goodbye scene; it’s as hard as you can imagine. But even with him there, she was seeking the ground, burrowing into the plants, seeking protection. And it was good for him to see this, to get to say goodbye, to be with her as she was dying, to know. And this seemed important for his grieving and mental health, to get to be part of this process and to know what was happening. And he got to decide. As we put her back in the car, he said, “Go right to the vet and have her put down.” And then things worked, and I called the vet from the highway, sobbing, and at first there was an appointment for the next day, but then they called back and said, bring her right in, and then there was more traffic, and I made it there, and I held her, and they wrapped her in a blanket. And I kissed her face and whispered to her while the life went out of her, and then I stayed with her afterward, until the skin in her face slackened and she no longer looked exactly like herself.

My life feels a little blasted and shattered right now. I think part of the reason I’m having a harder time writing about this round of challenges is that, the last time, it felt as though this crisis was happening to me in that it was also about my marriage, my husband, and my future. This time around, I have had to detach with love, which is sort of the Holy Grail of Al-Anon. It’s a fine hovering between two states: active engaged love and a boundary. I see, this time, that this is not happening to me. I tell myself that I will have a life, regardless of what happens. But I also see now—and maybe I have known it in past crises but have forgotten it, as another kind of protection—that you don’t choose to be in the state of detaching with love. It finds you, and it is not pleasant. It is not something to be willed. It is half separate, like a gingko leaf. I know that I will have a life, that I will be fine. I just have no idea what that life will look like. But I am continuing to live my life. This time I am not actively mourning the loss of possibility. I am going out with friends. I am getting drinks, talking on the phone. I am deciding to live in this sort of extreme half-separated state. There is an element of holding my breath. Meanwhile the state of the country, and what MAGA is doing to it, that defies belief, and that is another layer of hovering separation, another extreme sense of tearing. I have not been to many protests this spring because they usually conflict with hospital visiting hours.

This continuing to live life means that I am trusting myself. I am going in the direction of love and life. This is why, three days after Hazel died, I was on PetFinder looking at dogs and puppies. About half of the dog people you meet will say that it’s wrong to get another dog right away, that there needs to be an interim mourning period. But I’ve had enough sadness, both in my life and in my year, so I was on PetFinder just looking at the sweet faces of dogs, knowing that it takes months to get an application approved, and often there are heartbreaking near misses, so it didn’t really matter when I started to look.

Cliff was decidedly in the camp of feeling that we needed an appropriate mourning period. So when I saw that there was an adoption event the next day at a pet store about an hour away, I said to myself, Fuck it, I want to hug a puppy. My friend Nalini said, “You’re coming home with a dog. You know that, right?” And I said, “No I won’t. There are so many wrong dogs out there. I’m going to see that not every dog is my dog.”

But then I saw her, and I asked to hold her, and she crawled right into my lap. And so I filled out some forms and I got to take her home within an hour, and then I drove away with a puppy curled in the back seat.

A few days later when I was arranging the details of Cliff’s discharge with his counselor, she chided me for getting a puppy so soon, and actually called me a “crazy woman,” as a joke but as the kind of thing that isn’t really a joke. Also how bizarre that a real mental health counselor would call a patient’s wife crazy.

What I wanted to say was: “Bitch, you have absolutely no idea what my life has been like, and you clearly don’t know that I have been forged in fire by dragons, and under great duress I have nurtured the gentleness and life-force in myself, and I have survived by learning to move toward love, and I am moving toward love like a goddamn parade that has a battering ram at the front in case of any trouble.” But I didn’t say that. Instead I laughed and said, “It’s the best thing for us.”

And of course, because I am sensible and connected with this dog immediately, and because I understand myself and my life, and I sensed the gentle sweetness of this runt puppy of the litter who happened to come from the region of Arkansas where my dad was born, she has been nothing but an utter blessing.

This is Izzy.

In the midst of this life, the book is coming out in two months: Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O’Connor Means to Us. You can read all about it here on my website, and you can pre-order here. We have events coming and more on the way, including an event on July 22, release day, at Books are Magic in NYC!