I hate even writing on this computer. The last time I used it Wallace was still alive, and it feels wrong that he's not alive now that I've opened it up again. Everything has been the "last time I was at my friend's place...," "the last time I drove down this road...," "the last time I sat out in the sun...," "the last time I wore this shirt......... I was with Wallace." I can't do one thing without thinking that these are the things I always do with Wallace. It hasn't been a week yet, so even the days are marked, "the last time it was Monday...." The last time it was Monday, this same time last week, I had left him at my dad's house to go to a whole day class I needed to take to obtain a certification I needed for my new job. This time last week he was I'm sure, starting to feel really scared. I had my antennae up that the tumors were growing instead of shrinking like they had been. About a week and a half prior I had noticed that with a couple of his stools he'd had a little bit of blood, which he'd had a lot of about eight months ago when he was really bad. When he got to the point where he couldn't walk, his abdomen swollen from his liver failing due to the medications the vets gave him to control the seizures he'd started having this time last year ("the last time it was June....."). Up until a few weeks ago he wasn't bad. His transformation from a dog suddenly at death's door several months ago to one that, though somewhat 'creaky', had gone back to eating and taking small walks and his usual napping with one eye open to watch me as I did the things I needed to do for the day around my townhome, a dog that still enjoyed life as I took him outside to sit in the common area grass outside or at the park so that he could visit with people, his favorite, was all still the same. It was just the blood in the stool. And the fact his energy did seem to be a little less than what it had averaged these past few months since, that put that question mark in my head that instead of him hopefully just needed more time to recover, he was maybe again going downhill. It had started last year with the seizures. He had them maybe once or twice a week. My neighbor had a dog who had them that much if not more for a year, then suddenly stopped. My friend had a dog who had less, but just the same, never had them again. I was still holding out hope that this was what would happen with Wallace. What my neighbor had described in her dog, complete with other health problems, had all just resolved. And though to see anything wrong with someone you love is devastating, I couldn't see having a couple seizures a weeks, and an overall look of being older, as cause for putting him down. It was still his life. He still went outside and gave me that crazy look out of the corner of his eye, face frozen staring straight ahead of him daring me to bring my hand closer, my fingers slowly reaching the corner of his mouth, lightly touching his fur as he held his breath then suddenly via a fake surprise attack bit my hand. Bit it so lightly he might as well have been a toothless puppet. Same way he'd lie on his side and give me the crazy eye with his head lifting up from the grass daring me to bring my hand closer to bite it, and I'd push his head with equal lightness back into the grass while covering his mouth, inducing fake dog rage in his pretend game that I'd foiled his chance to savagely bite me as I slammed his head into the ground. Over and over again. It looked like his quivering gaping snarling mouth formed a smile at the same time. So when I took him outside last week to take him to my dad's and he wanted to stay out on the grass and relax and play and I didn't have the time, I assured him that the next morning when I took him out he could spend all the time he wanted outside. And so when I dropped him off at my dad's, this time last week, I didn't think it was going to be the day that he turned, the day that his eyes went from saying he liked being here, to the day when I saw in them it was all over and he needed to go. The day that I had dreaded, irregardless of cause, since the day I got him. The day for which I looked while he was sick for signs that instead of winning the fight he was being beaten by it, and in relief had not yet seen, was here. The last time it was Monday, nine minutes from now, he had his first of four seizures and started without me, having left his side, to spiral down and cross that line of no return. This time last week. This exact time.
Yesterday was one week from what I just wrote. Another week in suspended animation. So many thoughts that I could have been writing about, but they were so strong it took all of my energy to watch TV and do the basic activities of the day of showering, making a little food, and cleaning up the little bit of nothing after myself at Lisette's house to distract myself from the full force. Not that that's even possible, they're full force in your face at all times, but sitting completely in this reality without the drone of a fluffy TV show, or a dark one of some investigative show discussing the details of someone's murder or disappearance acknowledging how empty and lonely this world can be, takes you out of the horribleness of your own situation while you're simultaneously drowning in it. I couldn't face coming home. But it also felt like there was nothing else to do. I couldn't face a third week with my friend and her kids going back to their Monday school and work routine, and ignoring my so called life as I'd done for two whole weeks, so I came home to face the firsts back here. My first night without him. My first shower before bed. My first dawn without him. Two weeks ago today I shared the sun rising with him, knowing it would be his last. The night I picked him up from that afternoon at my dad's when he turned, seeing him so empty and defeated and having given up, I'd made the decision to call around the vets the next morning to see if I could find a vet who would come out to the house. He hated the vet with a passion, like all dogs, but from being stuck in a crate for long periods by his first abusive owners and then locked in the pound and almost being euthanized before I adopted him at the last minute, I knew having been caged at the vet and left by me a couple times before when he was sick was an association of his own special hell that I couldn't bring him back to. So I stayed up with him all night knowing it would be his last. I dozed from maybe 3:30am to 4:30am, then waited the next hour for that first ray of light that would signify the end of his last night, and the beginning of his last day. And in fact with the exception of a few recent days, have woken up at that same time every night to see the first rays of light as some kind of marker, or rememberence, or just wishing I could have it again.
I hate it here. It's so comforting and familiar, I missed being home, but the reason I love it here so much is because of how it was with Wallace. It reminds me of him and I miss him, so I want to be here, but it kills me to experience it without him. It's like a mean trick, the comfort of seeing everything that I associate with him is followed immediately with the slap that he's missing from it. Two contradictory sides of a coin somehow existing at the same cruel time. Waking up in the middle of the night having him gone. Waking up this morning and not needing to take him out. It's so weird, it's come full circle. I remember bringing him home from the pound and worrying about how the responsibility of having a dog was going to affect me. Not that I begrudged it, just wondering how it was all going to go. I had every minute orchestrated in my crazed morning routine, leaving at the last moment possible to still get to work on time, and I wondered about how the unpredictability of having to take a dog down to the grass area below my townhome was going to affect my race. What if one day he peed really quick? What if he sniffed too much another day and it threw the time I was counting on off? How much earlier should I wake up? So dumb. These were not major questions, yet I was oddly nervous about even the simplest details of getting my first dog. And now, to wake up for this first time and not have to throw on a sweatshirt and double check that there was a bag in the pocket just seems like a waste. It transformed from feeling like a waste of a few precious minutes in the morning to have to coordinate something so mundane as taking your dog downstairs, to feeling like a colossal waste of not needing to take him down. I could lay down those extra few moments in bed and get up when I dictated, not when I felt him staring at me and faintly panting, politely asking me to take him out. It wasn't a luxury at all to be relieved of this responsibilty, it just made getting up and immediately doing the things I needed to do seem indulgent and empty. I've spent the entire day watching 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.' I started watching the series a month and a half or so ago. Though the worry over Wallace's health had become chronically familiar, I can't say it'd ever become comfortable exactly. The levity of watching a bunch of gay guys fuss over different people's appearances and various other superficial aspects of one's life to, oddly enough, add depth to the relationships within it gave a needed contrast to my days inside guarding over Wallace. So since I started watching this series with Wallace, I still feel like he's not so far away as I continue watching the episodes. He's on the other side of the universe, but it lets me bask in the equation that if I haven't finished watching a television series that he used to be around for, he can't be at least in terms of time that far away. But that's all it is, is time. It doesn't matter if I just saw him, or it's twenty years from now, he's still going to be just as gone. But this whole theme of 'the last time I did X I was with Wallace....', as long as I have it, makes him seem like the reality of him truly being here isn't that far away. But the more I bask in doing these 'the last time...' things, by definition, the less I'll have. So I simultaneously am avoiding them because I don't want to run out, somehow effectively erasing him, or at least banishing him to a realm of the dog I used to have a while ago to the dog that I just had moments ago and should be here. When I get to the last episode of 'Queer Eye' I'll no longer be doing something relatively impermanent that I started with him, and can no longer say the, 'the last time I saw this it was with Wallace,' because it'll change to 'the last time I saw this Wallace was dead.' I don't want to sit in the sun on my porch because the last time I did that was when I was listening out for him inside and Wallace was still alive. I didn't want to go sit by the pool, even worse, because the last time I did that was almost exactly a year ago when he had his first two seizures, induced by the heat, sitting out with me by the pool. I was shocked to see the seizures in and of themselves, but it took the two times for me to piece together that heat in general encourages seizures in those prone to them and that I needed to stop that, from that point on taking pains to make sure he was always kept cool. I don't want to vacuum. His bits of dog food are on the floor. I didn't want to unload the dishwasher. I had loaded it when he was alive and his dog dishes were inside. I don't want to put away the laundry on the bed, I had done it while he was still alive. I even slept on the couch last night to avoid putting away the laundry, and because the last time I slept on it I'd spent his last night on it with him. Keeping up those things that allow a continuum of when he was, so recently, still here and refusing to finish the things that I had started with him. As if I can somehow freeze frame these moments to keep him from getting further away from me, that if I just did something with him, then I must have just seen him, and if I've just seen him, then he must have just left, and if he just left, then he must be just out of reach. Just right at my side. Faulty, irrelevant math. Keeping something dead at my side because its life has been so interwoven with mine I can't picture the weave of mine existing without him. Like that stupid gorilla that carried the body of its beloved cat friend around with it for ages. Except I'm not stupid. Nor was the gorilla, only people called it stupid to avoid contemplating the depth of sadness one creature can feel for the loss of another. I'm not comparing the loss of an animal to that of a human, nor am I belittling it. As if the lack of need to save for a college education for it, an inability to open up a joint retirement account with it at the bank, makes its love any less precious. I mean I understand that having a spouse naturally leads to one expecting and planning for what you'll do together when you're old and no longer working, or in having a child how you'll support them in all their different needs as they age all the way up to, god willing, your own death. So to lose a spouse or a child or a friend means the loss of all these far reaching plans, anticipations of loving support, a loss unique and wrenching to the core in and of itself. So again, not to compare or diminish either, I'm just saying love is love and to lose it and everything about it that brightened your life is shattering. Animal deaths seem to be viewed as lesser, both in the quality of the relationship as well as the quality. As if in quality because they can't communicate in words, they somehow can't truly speak to us or experience an honest exchange of love. Which is like saying you can't love a child until it has a full vocabulary, that tragically losing a toddler is akin to having a gold fish won at the faire die after only a couple years. Those poor parents aren't just mourning the loss of what was to come in their child's life, they are of course mourning the loss of their beloved child as it wholly was when it died. Or that because a child has cystic fibrosis and isn't expected to live past the age of sixteen, the parents in knowing this are going to love it less than any other child, as if they should just be grateful for the time they did have and it shouldn't hurt as badly. Just more stupid, stupid faulty logic. Love is love.