Life Goes On, Sort Of....

And so it is nearly 3 weeks since we lost our beloved Nutty and I am still crying every day. He has left such a big hole in my life that I often feel despair that nothing will ever fill it.

As the days go by, there are short moments when I am not aware of my grief, when I'm running to the post office or jumping on a bus, but my sadness is always with me, like a big black blanket, draped over my chest. While I do enjoy being by myself, it's when I'm alone that I feel saddest. And yet there is nothing anyone can say or do that makes anything better. It's like all the colour has drained from my life and it's hard to feel very happy about anything.

I cried in bed last night, just thinking about the lovely boy. Oh how we miss him. I cried because I miss him so much and I cried because crying is a connection with his memory. And I cried some more because when I am no longer crying about him I think a connection with him will be lost. Mad I know, I know that I am connected to him whether I am happy or sad.

S is very sad too but he deals with it better. He is more practical and matter of fact. Logically I know that none of us can live forever, it's just that I feel I could have coped better with losing anyone else but Nutty. It is quite simply the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I can't believe I have got to 50 before I was truly bereaved. If anyone else in my family had died it would have upset me less.

I have a lot of people I like a lot, but very few people I love. Maybe just S, perhaps Teflon-dad and eco-brother. If I had children I would experience that unconditional love, but now Nutty is gone, I don't unconditionally love anyone.

I read constantly about grief and am fascinated about how people deal with it. Really there is a great well of despair out there and the world can be divided into those that have lost and those who have not. sometimes people will say, `oh my grandparents have died so I have been bereaved', but most of the time, there are exceptions I know, losing an elderly relative is sad, but usually comes with a degree of acceptance.

Reading back the entry I wrote just after Nutty died, I can't believe that I wrote I felt a degree of relief that he was out of pain. That was very selfless of me, but to be honest, I don't feel remotely relieved. Of course he couldn't have gone on the way he was, but his decline had been so sudden, I just wish we hadn't taken him with us to Yorkshire (the car journey weakened him). But I must accept it was his time. The vet said that he would have died some time as the cancer had weakened him so.

President Ikeda writes;

The impermanence of life is inescapable. In Buddhism, this is a fundamental premise about the nature of existence. Why should death come as a shock? From the standpoint of life's eternity, it could be said that birth and death are occurrences of minuscule significance. That is all well and good in theory, but the human heart cannot fully come to terms with such events through theory alone.

 

It's so true. I understand the theory with my mind but not with my heart. Yet, I mustn't be maudlin. The pain will fade and happiness will come. I will make something good come from this sadness.

Farewell...

Well, our dearest most darling dog has died. We had to help him on his way as despite his body pretty much shutting down his little heart was still pumping away. Richard, the homeopathic vet, had given us a remedy, Arsen Alb, which speeds up the dying process, it works 50% of the time but not for Nutty. But it did slow things down for him, I think. He was lying beside my bed all night and he woke me up about 3 times with other-worldly groans. He didn’t seem to be in pain but the sound was the sound of dying, a groaning whimpering, like he was neither dead nor really alive, but moving to a new place.

 In a way perhaps it is better he had the injection. If he had died naturally I would not have believed he was really dead and probably had to go to the vet to confirm.

Now he has gone, I feel utterly numb. My chest is full of tears, my solar plexus feels like there is a stone lodged in it and I am deeply sad. But also quite philosophical and relieved that the worst is over. Nutty is released from his old, sick body and can be reborn into a young and healthy dog, or more likely in his case, as he was such an extraordinary spiritual and compassionate creature, another human being.

The late Bill Weston, a very wise Buddhist friend, used to say that animals that had become so close to their human companions would be reborn as humans. Knowing the sort of dog Nutty was, and how evolved he was, that is easy to believe. I never saw him show a negative emotion. Even when the Tinies moved in he was relaxed and happy to have them around. He was never upset when they stole his food (he was a very considered, slow eater), never jealous that he now had to share us with them. He was just pure love, love, love.

He was the centre of my life for the last 4 years and I miss him, miss him, miss him.

I have been googling up Buddhist guidance about losing pets and there is a lot of helpful stuff. Buddhists believe that all people have been our parents at some time and many Buddhist schools go on to say that all living beings have been our parents. While I have no problem believing that all other humans may have been my parent at some stage, it is a leap of faith to believe all animals have been our parents. You might say, but more and more people are being born than in any other time in the world’s history, how can we all have a connection? The answer to that is that they come from other planets, other solar systems. Not so far-fetched when you consider even scientists are now recognising the existence of other planets apart from our own small one.

After talking to Magdosha the homeopath yesterday, she reassured me that he will be reborn and that I can determine to meet him again. This may seem wishful thinking, but I’ve never had any trouble believing in reincarnation for humans, so if you believe in reincarnation for us, it is a very small leap to believe in reincarnation for other species.

So I don’t necessarily believe that, say some poor battery chicken has been my mother, but I do believe that chicken will die and be reborn into the world again, in some shape or form. And as for a dog like Nutty, with such close connection and influence on his humans, well I do find it easy to believe that he will be reborn in favourable circumstances.

That dog taught me so much about compassion. I know understand why parents of severely disabled children mourn their early death so desperately, for I love a dumb animal who cannot talk or communicate in a `human’ way and yet the love and soul communication is perhaps deeper than with those I can speak to in my own human language. But there is a language of the heart and some animals can speak that fluently.  

Unsurprisingly the day didn’t start off very well. I’d had a bad night, what with the Tinies on the bed, Nutty’s throes of death and my dear pal wandering around upstairs at 5am.

So at 8.30am, when I finally dragged myself out of bed, I felt Nutty and his beating heart… incredible….. how awful that the one thing I have been dreading for 4 years (that he stop breathing) was the thing I now hoped for. I had no choice. I am strong willed, but even I cannot fight the cycle of death, however much I might desperately want to.

I came in to see him and to our amazement, he was sitting up, licking his skinny, blood-stained paws. But he didn’t appear to recognise me, although yesterday I did elicit, oh joy! a small tail wag when I stroked him.

Before his decline (which has only been this last week), he was always so happy to see me in the morning. That was `our’ time when he would wake up and make his way to my bed and wander round looking for loves and strokes. He was never a cuddly dog. He didn’t enjoy being on the sofa, rug or a bed, although he would often enjoy a big scratch of the bedcovers if we lifted him up for a bit.

He was always happiest on the wooden floor. I could see that many times he would almost endure my cuddles through gritted teeth, like a son being cuddled by his attentive mother and longing for it to end! But I always loved stroking my boy’s beautiful tawny fur and kissing his little snout, even though he would often close his eyes in distaste, `oh please hurry up Mummy!’.

And yet, wherever I was in the flat, he would always wander around until he found me. He would climb upstairs, downstairs, clip clop, clip clop, `oh where is my mummy?’  

Steve always accepted ruefully that I was the most loved, that given the choice, Nutty would always follow me. I had a little game where I would walk round and round the sofa and Nutty would just keep following me in circles. Steve would reach out and stroke him, but Nutty would ignore him, so focused was he on following me.

So I rang the vet in Elizabeth Street and she only had an 11am slot  and didn’t have time to make a home visit, which we would so much have preferred. I was aware, making the appointment with the receptionist that this was the very last time I would refer to Nutty in the present tense...I kept quite calm, I didn't cry. After 6 months of crying on tap, now the very worst thing is happening I went into auto-pilot. I've realised that when the very worst things are happening to us, something in the human phyche kicks in to get us through. It's only later that the numbness fades and is replaced by raw, excruciating pain.

So, come the time, Steve took Nutty downstairs and we carried him to the car. I sat in the back on the floor so I could kiss and stroke him and tell him how much I loved him.

But he hates the car so we were sad to put him through it for his final day, and unfortunately the traffic was heavy, which just made it all harder.

I had to carry him into the vet because Steve needed to park up. I thought I would carry him, just to have the final cuddle and contact. But that wasn’t so good because in my distress I couldn’t remember which part of Elizabeth street the horrible vets' was.

With hysteria welling up in my chest I had to place Nutty gently onto the raised step outside a house while I called the vet in a panic. They gave me directions, it was only a few houses down, and I picked Nutty up carefully and carried him gently inside.

The unpleasant receptionist (God we hate this place), said `oh the vet is still doing paper work, you can’t go straight in’, even though when I called I had said, `is the vet free because I will wait outside until she is', (I didn’t want the invasion of privacy you get in these places with everyone staring at you), and she said yes she was free. But although she tried to make me stop and dump Nutty on the floor or whatever, I insisted that I put Nutty down on his final resting place, rather than be carried from pillar to post.

Anyway, the vet was professionally sympathetic, not like Richard of course, but she was the best we could do at short notice, and I really didn’t want to keep the beloved going any longer as he was really shutting down and could have started to suffer. He hadn’t eaten for 5 days or peed for a day and I could smell urine on his breath, like it had been going round and round his body with nowhere to get out. Richard had explained that toxins would be building up in his body and it would be unfair to keep him alive another day.

Unbelievably, this vet then explained we needed to sign a consent form, fair enough, but astonishingly, given that I had phoned up that morning explaining the situation and that our dog needed to be put down, she then disappeared for 5 MINUTES to get `the paperwork’, (this vet seems obsessed by paperwork), why hadn’t she pulled out her wretched form, which only consisted of a few lines anyway.

The vet nurse stood impassively by, saying nothing, and the vet then shaved Nutty’s leg, quite gently, thank goodness, and quickly put the needle in. Nutty didn’t flinch, by now he was so far gone he was not very aware of very much. S and I were steady and emotionalness. We had been preparing for this moment for months and had cried and railed, but we were strangely calm. Later S said he had been chanting to himself, I had just been numbly focused on the moment, blank really.

Then, literally, within seconds he was dead. The vet gave us a pep talk, in special compassionate tones about what we wanted to do with the body etc. We took Nutty’s floppy little soft body in our arms, I paid the bill to the hatchet-faced receptionist who did not even offer a crumb of comfort, so cold-blooded was she, `thank you for your kindness’ I said sarcastically, but she was so inhuman she didn’t blink.

I went to the car, S had put Nutty in the boot, but I took him out of the boot and put him in the back with me. We drove to Guildford in silence mostly, talking a bit about Nutty and the good times, my hand on his tawny back for the last time.

My great regret was that the ending might not have been as tranquil for him as he deserved. Thanks to the beastly car, traffic, S’s bad temper, and then my grief and getting lost (only for a short time), it’s not what I wanted. And yet WE DID OUR BEST, in our horrible imperfect human way.

But things got much better. S calmed down a bit as we drove. The sun had gone in and the Surrey countryside was shrouded in gloomy grey cloud. We pulled into Longdown road, for the first time in a year, since we sold the house where I grew up. We slipped into our field opposite, that my Mother left us, which was overgrown, wild and rather beautiful.

We put Nutty in his pram for the last time and wheeled him down the gravelly drive and into the field. It was hard to push his pram though the thigh-high grasses, poppy and wild flowers and we struggled to the corner of the field.

The ground here was too hard to dig, so S found a spot nearer one of the fruit trees we planted in memory of mum in 2009, where the soil was a bit easier to dig. But it was hard going but thanks to S we dug a reasonable grave for the Beloved, wrapped him in his towel and placed him in the ground. We put the soil back over him and I placed a rough posy of wild flowers on top.

We did memorial gongyo and chanted a bit for him. I wrote a temporary note explaining to the nice gardening people who are tending the field that we had buried our beloved dog. I will organise a beautiful headstone, or wooden plaque like we had for mum’s grave in due course. And now we have a spot where we can pay our respects and remember and cherish him.

As we were leaving I asked S to go back and find out the name of the tree under which Nutty was buried (it seems unbelievable, Nutty! Buried!) Our vital boy is no more.

There was a gasp as S shouted, `It’s a Celestial Dogwood!’.

Talk about a wonderful and mystic coincidence.

For Nutty was truly, our Celestial Dog.

I looked up celestial and it means heavenly, holy, spiritual, godly, otherworldly, saintly…. All these words describe our beautiful boy to a t.

We drove back to London feeling a bit more philosophical. Ceremonies are comforting. We opened our front door to paroxisms of delight from the delighted Tinies who were so happy to see us. 

And so life must go on. They are life and Nutty is gone.

I pray that Nutty and I will meet again and that I will again have the privilege of loving another creature with all my heart, unconditionally. I hope other dogs will come into my life that I can help and who I can share this bond with. I need hope as the emptiness I feel now I have finally lost the creature I loved more than any other in the world is just too gut-wrenching to contemplate.

Yet in a way I feel relief that it is over. Living with a dying person is so exhausting, you long to help them, and yet there is only so much you can do. I nursed him to the best of my ability, until there was nothing else I could do.

I came home and threw away his little syringes. The blood stained rug that smells so strongly of him… S said oh wash it, it stinks, but I love the smell of it. Yes it smells of cancer, but I never minded his smell, because it was him.

And so we go to bed, calm, sad, broken-hearted, with some relief that Nutty is now free.

Goodnight my darling, I will miss you more than words can say.

Nutty's Life is Slipping Away

It's with a heavy heart that I report that Nutty, our beloved Sheltie, has still not perked up.

He is sleeping most of the time, occasionally heaving himself up on his shaky old blood-stained paws to follow me about. Sometimes if I've left him downstairs sleeping, he will wake up and drag himself up the narrow wooden stairs to find me.

He has barely eaten anything in the last few days although I've tempted him with freshly cooked chicken and Lily's organic chicken and turkey sachets (which he normally loves). I've resorted to syphoning Daylesford's excellent Scotch Broth into his mouth which he seems to like well enough. At least that will give him some nourishment. His mouth tumour, (squamous cell carcinoma, to give it it's horrible title) is about the same. It's distressing how people turn in the street and stare with horror as he perambulates past in his pram, it does look very gory, it's true.

When we take him to the park he finds it hard to walk, he is so fragile, the smallest gust of wind will blow him over. Boyfriend on a Short Fuse is quietly devastated, he bottles it all up whereas I sob at the slightest opportunity. Friends say I am being `very brave' but I'm not, I have always been emotionally incontinent, although in recent years have embraced my family's stiff upper lip, but now I have returned to my old weepy form. Better out than in I suppose.

I felt calmer after chanting with some friends this afternoon. Dear Julie came by with 2 beautiful bunches of scented stocks. She is so thoughtful and it gave me such a lift.

Friends are very understanding. They know that grief is grief, whether it is for a dog or person. Losing Nutty is far, far worse than losing my mother or my grandparents, something I find quite surprising. But many people say they felt the same. Because love for your pet is unconditional and how many people do you love unconditionally? None in my case. I loved my father unconditionally up to the age of about 30 when he toppled off his pedestal, no great reason for that, just growing up I suppose.

So tonight my heart is heavy and my legs feel that they are full of lead. I am reassured that Nutty has had the most wonderful doggie life, most of them spent with his beloved sibling in the bucolic Surrey Hills, with acres of land to run free in and the last 4 years with us in London. Not so much land to run around in, but we made up for that by lavishing him with all the love in the world and the best food money could buy. Nothing is too good for my beloved Nutty but I must be brave and think about saying goodbye because he is worn out and tired and ready to go fairly soon.