Every day I see photo memories of that day stored in the cloud. This month it’s been the winter sojourn to Andalusia as COVID was nipping at our heels. Cross country skiing during cold COVID days. Walking Annie, both of us bundled in winter coats. Starting last week, it was the first days of my solo, midlife gap-year, three-month trip to Europe, now fourteen years ago. Photos of Bologna, Italy, my first exploration into a country I knew I’d love, but had little idea then how much. Like an dear friend I can’t wait to see again, I visited various regions of Italy three times during those three months, and five times since – Emila Romagna, Veneto, Lombardy, Liguria, Tuscany, Umbria, Lazio, Sicily, Puglia, Basilicata, Campagnia.
Castello di Procena, enroute to AcquapendenteRome’s Largo di Torre Argentinasunshine on the Amalfi Coast, looking down onto Positano4th time lucky at the Trevi
A year ago, inspired by a heart-to-heart conversation with my husband where I invited us to both reflect on the dreams we had yet to realize, and what and how we could help each other do so in the time we had left, I was struck with the idea of returning to Italy for an extended period. I’d come to the realization that my big dream of living there was highly unlikely for many reasons. But what might it mean to adjust to the 90-day limit for visiting Canadians?
And so I began bringing shape to my dream. Drawing on the lustrous threads from that first-ever visit, I planned to depart this year, mid-February, and return mid-May. I’d live in Florence, where I found the perfect apartment in the market and cafe-rich neighborhood I’d first visited in 2023. Bright with lots of natural light, a soaker tub, well-equipped kitchen and spacious bedroom, and a lovely, English-speaking ex-pat host, I made the deposit. Too, I’d return to Venice during Carnevale, pulling through that golden thread. I made deposit on the Zen-like apartment in a glorious treed residential area, a bit beyond the Castello neighborhood I’d first visited that first time.
“possibility in the palm of a hand,” Venice 2011
Sitting with it, looking at dates, wanting to be in Italy during Easter, I modified the original three-month plan to become “70 Days for 70 Years,” a celebration of my upcoming decade crossing birthday. Catchy, the container for some writing, my dream coming to life glowed. Curiously, I kept putting off booking my flights.
Sitting with it a few more months, after a wonderful trip to Mexico for last year’s birthday, and the arrival of our wonderful Walker, I came to know I didn’t want to be away that long from my life here – with Sig, with Walker, in our home, in my community. Yes, I could have modified it, but that wasn’t the answer. I simply knew I simply needed not to go, now.
This past week, seeing those fourteen-year-old photos of Bologna, and of Venice during Carnevale – which really was an unexpected stroke of good fortune to be there then – and knowing if I had made that dream my reality, right now I’d be in my apartment in Florence. I’d be packing my overnight bag to head out on the train to Venice.
More wistful than sad or disappointed, I feel deep peace knowing I’d once again heeded my intuition. I’d picked my own bouquet of fragrant winter roses and was content with that.
Forty-four years ago, Sig and I, with Beckey, our first of seven dogs, all English Setters except for one (Sassy, an English Pointer “rescued” from a divorce wreck shortly after our arrival, and soon to become Beckey’s inseparable friend) drove into Edmonton after four days’ traversing Canada from southern Ontario. I’ve written several times here about that journey and this anniversary. Today, I’ve chosen to share the poem I wrote last year.
EPIPHANY January, the first month in a new year, its early days bringing an undercurrent of unease. For decades, I’ve managed to find a way across its threshold. But this time, I’ve felt its days darken, weigh heavy with melancholy. A bone-deep sadness, its source finally becoming clearer.
Epiphany. When centuries ago, legend spoke of three wise men following a star, carrying gifts for a newborn king. When forty-three years ago, our arrival on this prairie province we made home. And decades before, the sudden death of my young, adopted, never-known grandmother, her passing shrouded in secrecy, leaving behind her toddler child, my mother, now holding tenuously to her own life.
Epiphany. Dawning stark cold and bright, like this winter’s belated arrival, that two-thousand-year-old desert shining star, when I realize my body’s primal response to grief touching and traversing maternal bloodlines. Embodied. Wordless. Anxiety rendering them, now me – the daughter of my young, adopted mother, born to bring her happiness – highly sensitive and self-doubting.
Today, holding vigil for my mother, wondering whether the 70th wedding anniversary celebration for which we’d booked our flights would instead become her funeral, I’ve had plenty of time to think. To see my family’s patterns and dynamics, know the stories and our secrets, the roles and rules, our shames and triumphs. What made me and entrapped me. What I’ve worked long to understand, unravel, to reclaim and make my life for me. Distance too, a boon, though long double-edged, has given me space and perspective, helping me navigate life’s complex and liminal terrains.
Now nearing seventy years myself, I’ve been naming the crossing of another threshold into this hard, next life chapter an “eldering landscape.” Here, in a world on fire, in drought, and in war, death and illness, failing health and memory, dashed dreams and diminished capacity become its leitmotif.
Epiphany. When claiming myself amidst ancestral loss and unapologetic grief becomes an even deeper expression of love for my life and this world.
(Spacing and line breaks have been altered to fit the page.)
Touched by its prescience. Grateful there was no funeral. Aware I am resolutely traversing the eldering landscape.
I don’t want to live a small life. Open your eyes, open your hands. I have just come from the berry fields, the sun
kissing me with its golden mouth all the way (open your hands) and the wind-winged clouds following along thinking perhaps I might
feed them, but no I carry these heart-shapes only to you. Look how many small but so sweet and maybe the last gift
I will bring to anyone in this world of hope and risk, so do Look at me. Open your life, open your hands.
– Mary Oliver
No, it’s not Friday, the day I typically post a poem, a companion photo, and some musings. But because I’ve been thinking a lot about my ancestors, particularly my Oma, this “saved” poem came to mind. As I wrote in last Friday’s photo and poem feature, we had a bumper crop of raspberries from canes we never planted but that found their way under our fence and which, over the years, have waxed and waned in number and in the amount of berries offered. It’s when I’m out picking those berries that my thoughts have turned to Oma as she loved to pick berries, especially the black and red currants from which she’d make the year’s jam and filling for her Christmas Linzer torte, my favourite tradition.
I had moved west by the time I learned in berry season that she, with my sister and her daughter, would go to the numerous “you pick” farms filling buckets and baskets with juicy goodness. From her, my niece learned and elevated the craft to become a gourmet jam and jelly maker, creating concoctions sweet and savory, fragrant and smoking hot. I have several of those jars in my cupboard, as I do one final frozen Linzer torte sent from my Oma in her final famous care package. Given Oma passed in March 2002 and for a few years before lived in a seniors’ residence in a small one room suite without a kitchen, that cherished cake must be three decades old. But like wedding fruitcakes, with a generous splash of brandy and a prayer of thanksgiving and love for my Oma, I know it can be resurrected. In the meantime, I have learned to make a good enough version and do so every Christmas as a tribute to her tradition. Truthfully, I’m in no hurry to eat that last one of hers as it’s a treasured keepsake of her handmade love.
Picking raspberries this summer in the quiet of my backyard, I’d talk to Oma, as I often do when I’m in my kitchen cooking, using one of the many utensils and dish towels she’d packed for me in those care packages, measuring sugar or flour from the avocado green cannister set she gifted me when I moved into my first flat during grad school. She helped me clean and paint that flat. We drove the two hours together in her new hatchback, the car she’d bought herself after learning to drive in her sixties. We slept on the flat’s hardwood floor after she’d worked circles around me, and before falling asleep, surprised me with the grief she felt at the news of Elvis’s death.
My Oma – despite many unspoken hardships as a single mother in WWII Germany; emigrating to Canada on her own after my father had sponsored her; then marrying a German widower and moving several hours away from us to start a new life in a new country alone; working on the assembly line of Bausch & Lomb stitching glass cases for piecemeal wages – did not live a small life. Fiercely independent and always up for a new flavor experience, determined, courageous and curious, in so many ways she inspires me. I attribute my intrepid, solo-traveling nature to having been “seeded” by her.
HALLUCINATIONS OF THE SOUL The longing for things that you could not have, the yearning for places you were not destined to arrive. Wistful memories of what was not ever meant to be. Regret for not being who you thought you would become. These hallucinations of the soul are agonizing prisoners that must be pardoned and released.
Clear the room. Open the door and let them leave. And in this space, you’ll paint a glorious existence of being here with presence and contentment for what truly is a relevant and meaningful life.
– Susan Frybort, Open Passages –
Still in the first month, Frybort’s poem speaks to me of a tender way of approaching the new year. Not bound by resolution making, or even fixed on a word for the year (though comfort, grace and gratitude continue to accompany my focused breaths), the imagery of pardon and release, of allowing discontent an open door from which to leave, invite a softening and deepening into possibility. Evoked too for me, is a favourite from Rumi, The Guest House, as rendered by Coleman Barks.
It’s been a challenging month. I’m happy to be home to days that are ever so slightly growing longer, especially in the late afternoon, and to temperatures rising to comfortable from last week’s frigid depths. My family and I are relieved that my mother is home, regaining her strength.
Discerning “guides from beyond” from “agonizing prisoners,” balancing hospitable welcome with unabashed leave taking, giving gratitude its due, we all make our way.
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
– Danusha Laméris –
I’m anticipating, weather permitting, that my mother will be discharged from hospital to home today. Like a cat with nine lives, she has made a remarkable recovery from her doctor’s sobering announcement two weeks ago that we prepare for the worst. Relief is mingled with realistic concern that she may not yet be out of the woods, as the crisis – impacted bowel, diverticulitis, pancreatitis, and a pancreatic cyst which is diminishing – the consequence of three years on Ozempic has lingering, if not long-lasting implications. Has she now entered her 9th and final life, having used the rest? Will her bowel and pancreas recover? Is she able to tolerate a gain in weight to return to health? What are the consequences for my father’s well-being? These are pressing, significant questions.
One day during a hospital visit, upon the recommendation of a patient recovering from leg reconstruction after a harrowing motorcycle accident last fall, we walked down the hall to the little tuck shop for homemade egg salad sandwiches on toast with sides of bread and butter pickles. That patient wheeled himself down for a coffee, saying he preferred it to Canada’s caffeine mainstay, Tim Horton’s, stopping regularly for one and to visit staff before his own admission. With a kind word for everyone, a twinkle in his eye, freshly showered, shaved, and dressed, admittedly bored and itching to be released, I sensed and said how he must bring a much-welcomed kindness to the overworked nurses with his amiable nature.Just one of the kindnesses that abound in hospitals, those “true dwellings of the holy.”
We’re home now, having arrived late Wednesday night to still frigid weather. But yesterday, enough warmth mixed with sunshine made that hour walk outside a healing balm. Too, sleeping in our bed. I’ve caught up on correspondence, letting friends know how my family and I are faring. Your small kindnesses – expressed here, on social media, in emails and messages – have most certainly created another “true dwelling of the holy,” for which I am beyond grateful.
He said, “One life on this earth is all we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be, that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully, and bravely, and beautifully as we can.”
– Frederick Buechner –
This was a new one for me from author – theologian – minister, Frederick Buechner. I always appreciated his oft quoted definition of vocation – “the place where God calls you is the place where you deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Sitting at my mother’s desk, having arrived yesterday from the ridiculously frigid temperatures at home to the balmy “banana belt” of Niagara with its 30+ degree difference, I’m hours late posting today’s photo and poem feature. We made a quick trip to visit my mother in hospital last night and see that while weak, tired, and thin, she is rallying, with the original prognosis of preparing for the worst, modified. Tomorrow is the MRI and ultrasound, which will help us know what next. My father is relieved for this development, happy for our presence, and my sister can step back into her life.
With hours of waiting – at home, in the air, here – I’ve had plenty of time to think…about family patterns and dynamics, history and story, roles and rules. I smile to myself thinking that undergraduate degree in family studies and social work graduate degree specializing in individuals, families, and groups have served me well. Distance, too, has long been double-edged, giving me space, clarity, and perspective, all helpful in navigating liminal terrains such as this, an eldering landscape. I found Buechner’s quote earlier this week on Facebook, one of those “right place at the right time” sightings. It fits.
Thank you for the kind and thoughtful comments here and on social media which hold and support from afar me and my family.
In a week’s time my husband and I were to have been with my family celebrating my parents’ 70th anniversary. A staggering accomplishment given current divorce rates. Instead, after several back-and-forth conversations with my father and sister, wherein the “no choice” choice was made to cancel the family dinner, photographer, and flowers, we’ll stick to the flight plan and hold vigil, virtually and in person, for my mother, whose health and life have been seriously compromised by taking Ozempic. She is the second person in my close circle who has recently suffered a life-threatening bowel obstruction from this much touted, so-called weight loss miracle drug. Here as I type, she is with my sister in a hospital 30 minutes from home, the closest facility able to provide the CT scan needed to determine the impact to her bowels and life, while my father, bearing a week’s weight of worry for his wife, collapses with fatigue at home. (Another story, the sorry state of health care crippled across my country.) Thankfully, my sister is an RN, astute in her holistic perspective, clear and courageous in her advocacy, compassionate in her care.
In the last twenty-four hours I have learned of two friends losing their life partners. Before Christmas, another. And I wonder, will my father be losing his? For an hour today of personal respite, I attended a silent writing circle. After introductions, the host set a 45-minute timer wherein we muted ourselves, turned off our video cameras, and wrote. “January, the first month in a new year…its first days always bring an undercurrent of unease…for decades I’ve stepped across its threshold, yet this time feel days darker with melancholy…a bone deep sadness, its source clearer with each passing day.”
“Epiphanies,”I wrote.“Three wise men bearing gifts; the anniversary of our arrival 43 years ago to the prairie province we call home; the sudden death of my young, never-known grandmother, shrouded in secrecy, and leaving behind her toddler child, my mother, now holding tenuously to her own life. And today, dawning stark cold and bright, like winter’s belated arrival, the realization of how intergenerational trauma has shaped and coloured my stepping into most every new year ofmy life, tarnishing it with inchoate anxiety and grief.”
I’m as OK with all of this as I can be. Intuitively, instinctively, even presciently, I’ve been naming and writing here about crossing the threshold into this hard next life chapter – the eldering landscape where death and illness, failing health and loss become its “leitmotif;” where unapologetic grief becomes an even deeper expression of my love for my life and this world.
Sustained by those few near and dear kindred friends, my community of walkers, a monthly check-in with my therapist, my beloved and our quiet sanctuary of a home; and the ever-present beauty a step outside my door, I’m OK.
By the time this post drops, I may find we need to shuffle flights to arrive earlier, and I pray my prayers of comfort, grace and gratitude carry me and us through. Too, being held by forces seen and unseen – the angels, ancients, and ancestors.
I’ll borrow a poem from Mary Oliver to sign off:
“You don’t want to hear the story of my life, and anyway I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway, it is the same old story– a few people just trying, one way or another, to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.”
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends, and thank you for yours…
“I don’t think the common thread that runs through humanity is greed or power or these sorts of things. It is this binding agent of loss.”
Nick Cave in “Loss, Yearning. Transcendence,” On Being with Krista Tippett, November 22, 2023
I’m home a day having made my annual sojourn to see my parents and attend my mother-in-law’s funeral. A typical Niagara November where heavy clouds threatened rain and snow; a steely grey river whitecapped when wind blew against its current; bare limbed trees; ditches and gutters filled with bland brown leaves. Dreary, yet an apropos outer mirroring of a family’s inner experience, with a beauty found in the skies. Wistful.
On the day of the funeral, as I drove with my parents the twenty minutes up the highway towards the church, the arrival on the wind of a short-lived weather system brought blue sky, sun and bracing cold, felt especially as we stood at the cemetery for the internment.
It was a short visit wherein I recognized it’s the time in the cycle of a family’s life where we congregate more often for weddings, funerals, and the births of babies. Amidst this occasion of loss, I found moments of gladness in meeting a nephew’s bright-eyed baby, a niece’s toddler-princess daughter who endearingly acknowledged the absence of her tiara, and new young partnerings. I heard about career promotions and sudden job loss, and how one young couple is intent to choose work in service of humanity, and life balance. With family members bedecked in sweaters hand knitted by their mother-oma, a talent about which I read to the congregation from Sig’s in absentia tribute, yes, we were bound together by our loss.
Too, an unexpected and joyful reunion with a professional colleague last seen thirty years ago. He and his then wife “chummed” with Sig and me before they relocated to Niagara. Reading the obituary, he made the trip to offer support, much as we had given each other as recently graduated social workers navigating the complexities of outpatient psychiatry.
I’ve learned, albeit wistfully, to keep in mind the adage attributed to Ben Franklin when visiting my family. With work schedules and weekend commitments, I saw only my nephew, appreciating his brief visit, acknowledging his life’s fullness as he makes his way as husband, father of two boys, field supervisor with Hydro One, and part-time farmer. My niece and her family, with a young daughter I’ve yet to meet (hampered by covid) has an equally full plate compounded by her husband’s chronic health condition. My sister, now living in the states, knew even before the closure of all border bridges due to an explosion (terrorism ruled out) the challenge of crossing during American Thanksgiving weekend, took a pass. This time, sitting quietly – at the funeral in the church pew with my parents, and in their home, each of us reading on our devices, watching a Netflix series or a Saturday morning soccer game – marked episodically with conversation, missing Sig’s presence, I wondered how many more times I’d be making these abbreviated journeys.
“Our lives are defined by that love, that joy, that laughter, but also by anxiety, fear, despair. And somewhere between those is, I think, a responsibility: recognizing the truth of our past and all that has preceded us, not in a way that’s meant to paralyze us or overwhelm us or trap us in a sense of despair, but in a way that is meant to help us recognize and remember our own agency.”
Clint Smith in “What We Know in the ‘Marrow of our Bones'”, On Being with Krista Tippett, November 2, 2023
I put the kettle on to boil for my americano. I put fresh water into one of your bowls, a scoop of canned pumpkin into the other. Making my way to fetch you, and welcome your joy into my heart, I first glance out the front window for a moment’s glimpse into a new day. I walk downstairs, say good morning, and pour a cup of kibble on top of the mound of pumpkin. Lean over to fetch you from your kennel. Maybe I get lucky with a quick sniff and kiss. You shoot up the stairs, skewed carpet in your wake, and wait impatiently at the back door, howling for me to hurry. Maybe you make a side stop to take your own quick glance through the window to see if any rabbits are worth your first bark of the day.
Finally at your demanded destination, I laugh out loud because no sooner outside, after catching a sniff of the still dark morning air, you pivot, bound back, jump to be let in, the urgency to void suddenly displaced by the urge to eat. Your exuberance for the new day continues, as racing down the hardwood hall, you skid into the kitchen, and launch into breakfast. That scarfed down, you tap dance across the floor, and head cocked alert in anticipation of the next course, a couple of chopped carrots chunks.
My turn. Maybe. I scoop coffee into the stove-top espresso pot, section a grapefruit, get cream into my mug before you signal the need to go out again. That done, another sequence of your morning routine, followed by another couple of carrot chunks, finally my coffee steaming and poured, and I sit down at the table to glance at my phone and the morning paper. You take your place in the hallway, looking into the kitchen intently at me. Then it comes…
…your barely audible “grrrr.”
Satisfied that I’ve raised my head in acknowledgement, you take your leave and settle onto “your” sofa to begin one of your many morning naps, expecting my company. Later you’ll move upstairs to get comfy on a bed, whichever is the best for basking between pillows in sun. Yes, we’ve created a Goldilocks, allowing you to jump up at your whim onto sofa or bed. You, the first since our first so many decades ago. We, with the weakened resolve of aging. I wax nostalgic…
But back to today…
The morning sun is shining exceptionally bright. Yesterday I remarked at its growing warmth, its being higher in the sky, its promise of seasons to come, though mindful we have many more weeks of winter cold. You return to the kitchen and nudge me to follow you, to sit with you on the sofa. With my full mug, I wait for you to choose your side, and then settle in beside you. We look into each other’s eyes, I lean over to kiss your head, and then stroking your haunch stretched out beside me, I tell you the story of your coming to us, prefaced by saying, “You’re one of the best things to have ever come into my life.”
Though not initially…
Too soon that weekend in August when we claimed you as ours. Too soon after your predecessor, Lady, passed, she holding on until my return from three months’ travelling solo. Once home, my heart broken by grief. For her. For a career I loved “abolished” in a corporate reorg. For myself, shaken to the core by culture shock.
Then the call from our friend: if we wanted you, we had to come that weekend as he needed to quickly unload his kennel of dogs to tend to his dying wife.
We’d make a vacation out of it. Tour the southern foothills. Visit a national park. View the mountains. Dine at that local café off the beaten track, known for bringing in first class musicians in between their main touring gigs.
When I first saw you, then a year-old clumsy pup, the largest of your breed we’d ever had, I was struck by your gentle nature, your soft mouth. I was dismayed though that at a year old, living in the kennel, you weren’t yet house broken. Once home, after several inevitable messes, I wondered if you’d ever learn. Now I laugh and regularly swallow slices of humble pie with healthy sides of crow.
That was twelve years ago, making you now nearly thirteen.
These days, as I take in my own aging reflection, I see age advance in your white face, clouds in your dark eyes. I see you gingerly lick and occasionally chew on your front legs. Watch you size up the height of the bed before jumping. Take the morning stairs slowly, sometimes tripping. Arthritis most likely the culprit, given you’re a sporting dog with an instinct honed to run for miles across the prairie an hour or so at a stretch, on the wind of bird scent. Walking now, we seldom manage ten thousand steps, and nothing too aerobic.
Looking at you, I feel my heart seize with the inevitable, and wonder how I’ll bear your passing, my loss. It gets harder every time. The sinking truth, so wisely spoken by Mary Oliver, that our dogs die too soon, and we would do anything to keep them with us longer.
My storytelling over, I caress your silky ears, again kiss the top of your head, and lay my hand on your rib cage as you lay your head on my lap. All is quiet except for the tick tock of the cuckoo clock. Soon your soft and steady breathing syncs with mine. Looking outside, I notice the windsock hanging on the bare willow barely stirring.
A few moments later, all is in sync – the clock and our breathing, the swaying windsock and wind chimes.
As if each and all are moving to the soft and slow and steady rhythm of our inhale and exhale.
The sun glows orange on the claret-coloured blanket draped across the sofa.
The sky, a robin egg’s blue.
And in this moment, I feel we have stepped into a timelessness that is eternity.
Found for a moment, you and me, heaven here, on our sofa.
(An “adoration” is a poetic form of deep love and devotion originating in spiritual traditions. I wrote this for Annie in 2020, with minor revisions today.)
our morning routine
How life changes on a dime.
Just a week ago I ended my Monday morning post – the first in weeks – with an update on the remarkable recovery of our beloved Annie dog. Today, I write this post with equal measure heartbreak, and gratitude for her.
Yesterday at dawn, Sunday, June 18, after holding vigil for her on “her sofa” for the night, we knew it was time to make the final trip to the vet. After another day of being so totally present in all the ways she is uniquely “Annie” to and with us, Saturday evening it suddenly came to an end. Rousing from sleeping beside me while I watched a movie, I opened the door for her to go outside. She stood unsteadily, disoriented, with labored breathing – just like the end of April. As the evening progressed, it became apparent she had lost the function of her legs and sensed with us the inevitable. Carrying her in a towel sling to the truck, we drove the short distance to the emergency clinic to begin that last intervention, one administered with much tenderness, respect and reverence for her, and us.
I know many of you have met Annie, enjoyed my stories of her, and posting of her photos as we walk in our neighborhood. Too, many of you know well the path Sig and I now walk, this our 6th time. Overcome with the shock of this time’s sudden, irreversible turn, this is the best way to let you know of her passing and our loss. If you choose to comment here or on social media, please know we will read with gratitude but may not be able to reply.
Give up on your agenda – this is exploration, not exercise. She can’t hear you calling her on, but then, you can’t smell whatever is so intriguing about that clump of grass, so maybe just relax. Stop counting steps. Don’t even count birds, or minutes or the things you have left to do on your pressing and eternal list. Move gently into the immeasurable. Stop to greet children. Consider that the most fascinating thing in the world could be your neighbor’s garbage can. Observe without judgement what is near to hand – even if what you see is the halt in her step, the way her spine has begun to show. Walk just long enough to remember that love is not an antidote to death, but loss is not the opposite of life.
– Lynn Ungar, May 2, 2023 –
Over the past year at least, I’ve been saying that walking Annie is no longer exercise. It’s fresh air, the gift of being outside noticing life around us. That I may walk 10,000 steps, but certainly not aerobically. And I’ve long known for a dog, walking is “scent shopping,” so I best be prepared for meandering. But in the last two weeks, the gift of this oh-so-perfectly-timed poem, could not be truer. Some of you might know that two weeks ago yesterday – after our morning walk, treats in the kitchen, sleeping…errrr…supervising our work in the office, and then going outside to her kennel when the house cleaners arrived – Annie suddenly was not ok. Disoriented, barely able to walk let alone stand upright, shallow breathing, drooling, incontinent – the ER vet clinic gave us a diagnosis of THC poisoning, an increasingly common incident given our carelessness with roaches and edibles. We were given a prognosis, took her in to see our vet the following morning, who confirmed the diagnosis, but by Sunday her condition was not improving. No appetite nor eating, so we bought electrolytes for her water (on the suggestion from a Facebook friend who saw my posting). Her walk had not improved, in fact we were seeing more weakening. But of most concern was seeing her paw at her right eye, and when I did the reflex test I’d seen the vets do, she didn’t blink, leading us to believe she’d suffered vision loss. A return visit to the vet on Monday morning confirmed my first, and our worst suspicions: she’d most likely had a stroke. “She’ll not live to 17,” the vet said, referring to Annie’s predecessor, Peggy, who died late into her 17th year. And with further examination, and seeing Annie’s lethargy, I wondered if she’d last the week.
After deliberation, we decided to pass on the neuro consult, not wanting to add further distress to Annie with the battery of tests required pre-exam. We know she is happiest with us, and so we’d keep her home, tend to her best we could, hope for the best, and pray for a miracle.
This is my “Lazarus” story, because with every passing day, Annie has returned to herself, engaging in all the patterns and endearing ways she is who she is, with us. Looking eagerly for me to get her leash to walk, barking at the neighbors (fulfilling her job as guard dog), finally eating regularly with creative concoctions of smelly canned fish to pique her interest, remembering to remind us to fetch her favourite dessert of dentistix, and following me down into the office where she takes her place on her supervisor’s cushion. The big right front paw she would persistently, heavily place on my keyboard at noon to signal lunch and a walk…the one I would curse for interrupting my work…that has been slow to return being the side that became weakened. But tonight, she placed it on me as I napped, reminding me of dinner time. It comes. I pray it comes in the office, on my keyboard, and I will kiss and welcome it back.
Annie is a bird dog, smelling her particular stock in trade. We think her loss of vision and diminished sense of smell have been the most disorienting for her, with her hearing less for the past couple of years. Sleeping more than usual with the trauma of it all, and the neurological stress has been exhausting. At yesterday’s chiropractic session, we learned that dogs have the ability to reroute blood to injured areas of the brain. We’re hopeful that as we see her eating and sniffing with more precision and focus outside and during our walks, coming into the kitchen while we cook and eat dinner, her scenting is returning. We pray, too, that her eyesight might improve as pressure comes off the optic nerve, because the eye itself is in good health.
In the last week, I’ve read of several friends having to say goodbye to their beloved fur companions. Each time I feel my heart squeeze. With Annie being our sixth dog, this is a heartbreak I know too well, yet wouldn’t trade for the joy each brings, the love I feel, that grows with each one, in return. Lynn Ungar writes it one way. Mary Oliver in her volume Dog Songs, writes it another: “We would do anything to keep them with us and to keep them young”[1].
At thirteen years, walking slower, needing my help to be lifted onto the bed, and now ensuring she makes it up and down the stairs safely, with this health crisis, I know Annie isn’t young, and that I can’t keep her forever. I am simply so thankful to have her with us now, for as long as now is.
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. And deep gratitude to you who replied to my posting on Facebook. Your love, thoughts and prayers have helped immeasurably.
A Wabi Sabi Life 