The Practice Death

I was away at college when my dog of eight years died from liver cancer. It hit me hard, harder than I would like to admit, that I hadn't said goodbye to him for real when I left. I'd been home a few days before to attend the funeral for a childhood friend. Ironically, she'd also died of liver cancer.

I have anxiety, with a side-order of OCD and depression. This means that if I'm already in a stressful situation, it only takes one little thing to tip me over. That semester, I was overloaded on coursework I had to get A's on to maintain my scholarship, working as a TA to earn some cash, coming to terms with my mother's loss of employment, and grieving not only for my friend, but also for my dog. Suffice to say I was stretched thin. So when my second dog died not two weeks after the first, my dad didn't tell me for week. He was afraid that this would be the thing that tipped me over.

And he was right. I completely shut down. Lucky for me it was a Sunday.

I didn't leave my room that day except for a few trips to the bathroom. The heating was broken, and I was sweltering, but I didn't leave. I lay on my bed, and watched mind-numbing videos. I don't remember what I ate, or what I drank. I must have had something. I had an assignment due the next day that I told myself I had to work on, but as I watched more videos, and watched the day pass by excrutiatingly slow, I didn't work on it, and didn't work on it, and didn't work on it, until it was too late and I was in the depths of dispair, because I always turned in my homework on time. That was who I was.

That day was a hellish purgatory, and when I woke the next morning with tired eyes and a head full of miserable thoughts, trying to pull myself together enough to go to a class at eight, I knew that was not the right way to deal. And I said to myself, then and there, that I wouldn't do this to myself ever again.

A year passed, and most of my family bounced back from having not one, but both of our faithful dogs die in the span of a month. We started talking about getting a new dog, because we missed having them. The reason we didn't just go out and get one was that my dad didn't really want another dog. He loved our two, and wasn't ready to let them go just yet. But my mom wasn't having any of it, because the last time our family dog died, it took ten years for him to get over it. So she found a dog that he couldn't say no to.

His name was Target. A rescue dog with PTSD, he feared strangers, men, clouds, parked cars, and wind, among other things. The point being, this was a problem dog. That's rescue speak for broken. Normally, he wouldn't have popped up on our radar, since my family left the rescue a few years ago. But, because my family was well known in the rescue association for dealing with problem dogs, we got a call from the head of the association begging us to take the dog in. No one else, she said, could handle how messed-up the dog was. We were the only ones who might be able to help him.

And we couldn't ignore that. Even my dad, with his heart so set on never dealing with the pain of watching his dog die again, couldn't ignore this dog that only he could help.

So it happened that the day my parents took Target home was the day my dad's brother suddenly died from a heart attack, at an age that heart attacks are considered a distant, almost improbable, possibility. He was visiting my grandparents when it happened. He'd been talking when he suddenly stopped, and he never finished his last sentence.

My dad called me when he found out, having learned from last time that it was better to tell me bad news as soon as possible.

Having learned my lesson, and sticking to the promise I made myself the year prior, I dealt with my grief better than before.

The funeral was that very week. I couldn't go, which was harder on my dad than it was on me, I think. That whole week, my dad worked on his little brother's eulogy. It should have been a tense time, a weary time.

But that week Target proved to be a great distraction. It being his first week with the family, he was a novelty in the house. Something for my dad to focus his energy on. Something for us all to think about, and focus on, and talk about. His presence forced us to be aware that there was still more in the world, that there was normalcy despite grief, that things would, eventually, resolve themselves. That this, too, shall pass.

The death of the two family dogs was a trial, but now I call it a trial run. For me, it was valuable practice in the art of grief, giving me the proper tools to handle a bigger death when it did come. And for my family, it was like a practice hurdle to prepare us for the death of a loved one, a death that sent ripples out into a larger world than our little household. I think that if they hadn't died when they did, if they hadn't died at all, we would never have gotten Target. And I think that the novelty of that dog, with all his odd quirks and fears, is what helped my family stand back up on its feet as quickly as it did.

So though it sounds callous, the timing, and indeed the fact of their passing, is too perfect for me to call their deaths anything but a blessing.