And Still More, A Day, A Dog

I fear this is bad blogging, but if you want to start from the beginning, read March 2, then March 3, then what follows. Tomorrow I will finish the whole thing and post in entirety. Today's entry will be shortish....here goes:

In June, our lease was up for our apartment, and we'd bought a new one, but it wouldn't be ready to move into until the fall. We'd decided to spend the summer in Connecticut, so my cousin Ellen came over to help me pack. We stayed up until past midnight, rolling glasses in bubble wrap, stopping for Chinese food, cold drinks: it was already hot, the way New York gets in the summer. The next morning we loaded up our Jeep, and I left Ellen in the car to go up and get Johnson, who'd been resting in one corner of the almost empty main room, breathing slowly, because of the heat. Although I wouldn't admit it to myself, I'd kept glancing over at him, fixating on the rise and fall of his chest for a few seconds at a time.

When I got upstairs, the sun was streaming in the multi-paned windows on the worn yet still glossy, over-varnished floor. I'd left the green canvas dog bed on which he was lying; all that was left was to get him and it downstairs. The vet had been warning me for a few weeks that I needed to prepare myself, that the question I needed to keep asking myself was about quality of life. I did not want to be that pet owner who keeps things going for selfish reasons. I knew I owed Johnson more than that. I wasn't sure I was brave enough. I helped him up, and he wobbled for a second, then steadied himself. This is the last time we will walk out this door together, I thought, dramatically, as I always do when I move. But this time it was dramatic, a little anyway. The next time I moved into a new home it would be as a mother, as part of a family of my own. Families, in my experience, had dogs. I had convinced myself Johnson had a shot--however long--at making it to winter. I wanted him and the baby to meet.

I didn't tell anyone this. It sounds corny to me now, and a newborn baby and a dog can't form much of a relationship--is it possible I didn't really know this at the time? Or was it something else entirely? It occurs to me now that as long as I had Johnson to care for, I didn't have to think about caring for anybody else. I waited by the elevator for Johnson to shuffle over. When the doors opened, I set the dog bed down, but he stood by it, looking straight ahead, the way you do when you're in an elevator with someone you don't know or feel awkward with. I remember thinking this was funny, the way he was staring at the doors, stony-faced, if a dog can be that, but I didn't think it was funny when I realized he'd lost bowel control. Neither did he; he had almost never, in twelve years, had an accident. He kept looking straight ahead, unmoving, as though unwilling to acknowledge to me or himself what he'd done. I checked my pockets, knowing I had no bags. When the elevator stopped in the lobby, I pressed the "open door" button and grabbed someone's newspaper from the mailbox bank. I scooped up the mess, and took Johnson by the collar, walked him slowly out to the car. Hang on a sec, I said to Ellen, and I walked to the garbage can on the corner and threw the mess away, feeling stony-faced myself. Are you okay? she asked when I got in the driver's seat. Sure, I said, looking straight ahead, through the window, at the stretch of road in front of me.

Johnson perked up a bit when we got out to the house in Connecticut, although he couldn't manage the stairs, which Ben and I pretended to each other was not a problem. Pregnant, I was having trouble lifting him, so Ben would carry him down to the spot he loved in the yard, and he'd lie there all day. Then, Ben would carry him back in at dusk, so he could eat, have his paws soaked and wrapped. I did the middle of the day soaking and wrapping outdoors. In late June we had planned a road trip to Illinois, to visit Ben's family, and against all advice, I decided we were taking Johnson with us. I knew it wouldn't be uncomfortable for him in the back of the car, on his dog bed; I knew that nobody--not even the most conscientious facility--would be willing to do what his caretaking required, I also knew that I could not leave him, not for more than a few hours at a time. I had not know this a month before, but I knew it by then. The trip would be for a week.