One Christmas, a while back, we had to put our dog to sleep. I wasn’t going to write about it but then I thought about how she liked
to sleep curled up beside my chair with her nose on the heat register, content
to be doing nothing, which brought to mind a book my son gave me one Christmas
called The Art of Doing Nothing which made me remember a poem I wrote when she
was a puppy . . . and so it goes.
Sunny was twelve but spry until the week
after Christmas when her belly suddenly bloated and overnight she could barely
walk. It seemed her legs would no longer support her stomach. We thought she
was constipated and the vet said to give her pumpkin and if she wasn’t better
in a few days to call back. We gave her pumpkin. She ate it; she would eat
anything.
But Sunny didn’t get better. She could
manage the porch steps down, but when she finished her business she couldn’t
climb back up. She just stood there looking up with her mournful little shih tzu
eyes. So there we were, carrying her
inside and out, up and down, like a puppy. My laptop sits on a table beside the
heat register and it was always her favorite place, but she wouldn’t leave her
bed. I put part of a fried egg in her dish. She ignored it.
The next morning, she lost control of
her bladder, legs splayed in a widening pool of discolored urine. I looked down
at her in horror. My husband took her to the vet. The prognosis? Possible
kidney failure or a tumor or any number of other age-related ailments. The
cost? $120.00 for a diagnostic blood test and $80.00 for an X-ray, and this just
to find out what was wrong. Surgery, recovery . . . who knows? The vet said she
could still die in six months. Our other
option was $58.00 for euthanasia and $120.00 for cremation if we wanted the
ashes. If not, they would “group” cremate her for $50.00.
“My God!” my daughter said. “That would be like Auschwitz!” The kids
didn’t want her cremated. They want her buried on the farm with a cross above
her grave.
My husband carried her home in a bag
while I was at work. The problem? The ground is frozen. This dilemma makes me think of the burial-delayed
funerals in the U.P. They have a no-shovel season from November 15th
to March 1st. Digging into the ground would be like trying to
penetrate 8 inches of concrete. Most cemeteries have thinly-walled buildings
that rely on Mother Nature not refrigeration to keep the corpses cool. The
caskets are tagged and slid into racks in the storage facility until the spring
ceremony, which is no different than a regular burial. They’re used to this up
there. There’s a large Finnish-American population in the U.P. Back in the old
country, bodies were stored in the church’s bell tower until they could be buried.
We don’t have a bell tower but we have
mounds of rich, organic compost. So as
of now she’s nestled under a mound of compost, and next summer she’ll be spread
over the farm. Is that so bad? Do the
kids know this? No. They want her buried with her blanket and her stuffed
animal with a cross over her head, or a marker on which would be inscribed: Here lies Sunny, a good dog. She never peed on the floor until the day she
died. She liked carrots and lettuce, eggs and pumpkin. She liked people.
And this is the poem that is about more than a dog
but you know how one thing reminds you of another and then another because
everything is connected.
THE ART OF DOING NOTHING
The mercury outside my window
is covered with ice
and frost breached the inside of the glass.
I scrape it off with my nail—
it falls into the sink.
The furnace drones without pause
and my summersick dog lies on the
register.
A draft runs through the house.
It sets chimes ringing and makes
her nervous.
I inventory things not to do.
It’s in a book—The Art of Doing Nothing.
Meditate and you can see things
that aren’t there—
brandied cakes and a bottle of
wine
set out on the sideboard as if
for a friend.
I look behind doors and pause at
the stairs
come full circle to see myself
sitting there—
in a winged-back chair, out of
window’s view,
back to the wall, like a
shell-shocked soldier.
Night blankets the house in a
mantilla of doubt
but only cold comes in from under
the door.
Connected with and inspired by poetry friends at: The Imaginary Garden with Real Toads for the Tuesday Platform. Add a poem of your choosing for feedback if you are a poet and a writer.