#23: An obituary for my dog.

in which I push myself to be emotional and sentimental publicly.

Upcoming Astrology:

Mars Cazimi on Saturday, November 18: Mars is going to find a little rest in the cradle of the Sun on Saturday, November 18. This means that he’ll be out of the direct rays of scorching heat and get a little reprieve, an oasis in a desert. 

On the one hand, it’s nice when a planet isn’t being aggravated or suppressed by the Sun—we expect them to be less pokey, maybe a little less petty. On the other hand, an unencumbered Mars in Scorpio sounds a little like continued aggression, anger left to simmer. Also, he’ll be back under the beams in like… a day or two. So, short lived relief in any case.

Obviously, as always, call your representatives and stand against genocide perpetrated by Israel and anyone. Be aware of the kinds of fights you’re getting in, consider what is worth your peace and what isn’t (I don’t have the answer for this, it’s just a question I try to keep close by). 

This is something like an obituary for my dog.

I unexpectedly had to put down my dog, Riley, last Saturday. 

It wasn’t unexpected in the sense that he was young or very healthy or otherwise seemed to have a lot of time left on the planet. He was about 15 years old, he was struggling to walk and stand on his own, his heart murmur had been progressing faster and faster, and his belly was getting somewhat distended. I knew that he had less than a year left and likely less than six months. Our trip to the vet was intended to include a hard conversation about timeline and when I needed to start thinking about his discomfort and weighing it against my discomfort with losing him. Still, I didn’t know when I took him to the vet that it would be the time to say goodbye. 

The technical details: his heart murmur had in fact progressed to the last stage before it would be more accurately called an entirely dysfunctional organ, his spine and hips were at immediate risk of being thrown out painfully and completely, and the swelling in his belly was either caused by leaking fluid from his heart or the result of a hormonal disorder that would not have a cure and that would cost quite a lot to manage. A laundry list of high risk issues that had kept him teetering on the edge of a major health event for some time.

As much as the event itself was a surprise, I’d also been preparing for this for a long time. I remember six years ago when Riley was still only nine (which felt old) and he slipped off my front porch in Austin. I thought he broke something. Taking him to the vet while he cringed and cried and I thought maybe I was already going to have to say goodbye. The vet gave him a strong doggy aspirin and sent him home feeling fine. Since then, I’ve been surprised at every checkup to find that he had essentially nothing wrong with him. Clean bill of health, up until March 2023. That’s when his heart issues showed and began to progress quickly. 

By July, when I was planning my move from Austin to Philadelphia, I knew he would struggle with the change and that it was unlikely to be a positive experience for him. Still, he made it here and he adjusted to shorter walks on uneven sidewalks and already chilly mornings. In some ways I’m glad he didn’t have to put up with a real winter. A faint silver lining. 

Something I’ve been preparing for, and was surprised to suddenly be dealing with, is the balance between emotionally falling apart and my instinctual scramble to pull the pieces together and hold them in shape. 

I struggle with feeling my feelings. It’s been one of my main topics of discussion with therapists, friends, workshops, and journals for years. I remember participating in an Enneagram panel in 2021 and sharing that I knew I would say goodbye to my dog eventually and I desperately did not want to get through unscathed. I knew it would be possible for me to white knuckle it and think my way to the other side—I’ve done it before with all sorts of grieving. As much as this is manageable, a mundane loss in the grand scheme of things, I want to hold it as messily, heavily, and unhappily as it demands, despite almost everything in my body and brain wanting to explain it away with reference to his age, to the way my life will easier now, and to the global atrocities that far outweigh this. I want to explain it away but I am not going to. 

Recently a writer I enjoy, Haley Nahman, wrote about losing her cat Bug to a heart disease. I knew that sometime soon I’d be feeling many of the same feelings, but I also couldn’t quite imagine them. This, from her newsletter after Bug passed, is how it feels:

Absence is such a strange thing to contend with. A seat unoccupied, a meow unheard. … This place feels so empty without him, and too small to hold my sadness. But it also feels wrong to be away. As if he’s home alone and I need to come back to him, and in a way he is, and I do. He’s nowhere to be found here, and everywhere too.

- Haley Nahman, Maybe Baby 

Like Haley in an earlier part of the newsletter, I too am shocked by the memory of my pet’s sudden weight resting fully in my hand. The last look Riley gave me before the sedative took over and his shifting as sleep gave way to death. It’s easy to get in a loop of guilt that I didn’t give him an extra treat that morning, to feel I should have brought him to sleep in my bed on the last night, or even to question (just for a moment) whether there was something else to be done. And again like clockwork my instinct is to reason the feelings away, diminishing them as I protect myself from discomfort. (Call it the plight of the Enneagram 5 or someone with a Gemini Moon maltreated by Saturn or our culture’s fear of death or all of the above. Call it what you want). Overriding my instincts is the commitment I made to feel this experience from start to finish.

For years he’s been the center of my orbit, even when I pretended otherwise. I didn’t show him off to people and I didn’t post a million photos or talk about him on dates all that often. My last boss didn’t know I had a dog for the first six months we worked together. I probably have been afraid I’d be seen as someone sentimental, someone out of touch with … something I can’t quite name. Sanity maybe, because I can be that dramatic sometimes. Still, I’d estimate probably more than half of the poetry I’ve written in the past eight years circles my feelings about him overtly or not, sanely or not. Here’s a short piece from a long poem called Relaxed boy. that I began in 2019.

There are many, many more pages of drafts and poems that circle around his impulse to expect care and how existentially absurd I found it. Unqualified, unconcerned care. I could not (still cannot) understand the way that caring about someone makes you vulnerable. Such a daily, obvious thing that is not something to understand, just to feel. And still hard to feel.

There is a lot more I could say now that I’m coming up on a week past the last day, thoughts about how it’s getting easier but that is also a sharp discomfort on its own. When my friend asked if I had a vacuum for some crumbs we’d swept off the kitchen counter, I had to correct myself when my first instinct was, Don’t worry, Riley will clean them up. These little moments mark time passing and my changing daily life. They show me what still feels normal and what won’t feel normal forever.

In astrology: the mundane, the every day and the local, are on one end of an axis that has God and philosophy on the other side. This is the tension of between the 3rd and 9th Houses. There’s something to say about that here, something about the big world implications of the lost routines, dailyness, and neighborhood walks. It sounds trite and feels accurate and tastes a little saccharine in the back of my mouth, which, for someone like me is not a bad description of the way it feels to love a dog. 

Give your people, human and more than human, a hug. Thanks for reading and thanks for being in my world. And rest in peace to a perfect friend, Riley the Dog.

Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.