*Content Warnings: Physical Violence or Abuse, Depiction of Death or Terminal Illness, Animal Abuse* by: Stephanie McCarley Dugger In June 2020, my mother was diagnosed with covid. Three days later, my husband and I learned our dog Memphis was in the later stages of ALS, a neurological disease, and was given, at best, a few weeks to live. My mother’s diagnosis was frightening. She had high blood-pressure, COPD, and diabetes. She was wheelchair-bound from severe neuropathy and worn-out knee replacements that occurred in her 40s that now needed repeating in her late-60s, all in addition to various diagnosed mental illnesses. Just five months before she contracted covid, I had moved her into a permanent nursing care facility. The last time I saw my mother before the outbreak was February, when I went to hang pictures on the walls of her new room. Before I left, she asked about Memphis, a dog she had only met twice. “He’s getting old,” I said. She nodded and squeezed my hand. Her question was surprising; my mother’s acts of true consideration were rare. I desperately want to hold on to that memory. Two weeks before the covid restrictions were imposed, and days after I visited the last time, the nursing facility went on lockdown because of a stomach virus. This meant by the time my mother was diagnosed, she hadn’t had a visitor in four months. If covid hadn’t happened, though, she would have had very few visitors, mostly me and my aunt, who had been taking care of her for the last several years. Few other people wanted to see my mother. For my own part, the lockdown provided a sense of relief that I had an excuse not to visit, a reason to stay away from her. From the time I was young, my mother called me her best friend. She told everyone how close we were, how we shared everything. In truth, I was frightened and guilted into telling her everything. She told me how I would go to hell if I kept secrets from her. I went through each day keeping a list in my head of things I should tell her so that she could in some way be an interceder with God, then he would see I was doing what I should and let me in to heaven. I didn’t tell my mother about my life because I wanted her to know—I knew sharing with her would only make things worse—but I was too afraid to keep anything to myself. My mother parented through fear; she didn’t know how to make her children feel safe or secure. She insisted when I was bullied—even to the extent of being hit—I turn the other cheek, and if that failed, I walk away. She used herself as an example: once, she got into an argument with my father’s stepmother, who slapped her. My mother dutifully turned her cheek, waiting for the next slap. My father and grandfather, who were standing in the room, said nothing. No one stood up for her, and my mother didn’t stand up for herself. For my mother, that scenario was a win—she had taken the high road by not striking back with her hands or her words. For me, walking away didn’t work. Others read it as weakness, which only encouraged more mistreatment. I never fought back, though. I knew that if I got in trouble at school—for fighting or for anything else—I would get a beating at home. In the fourth grade, my cousin, the one who would years later try to kill my family, cheated off my test without my knowledge. The teacher, not knowing whether to believe my denial or not, paddled us both. My mother insisted my father use the belt that evening. So, when Vivian, a bully in my class, threatened to beat my ass nearly every day of middle school, I hid in the bathroom, in classrooms, and in the band room. I was humiliated to be so weak, but I was more terrified of doing something wrong, of being hurt at school and then again at home.
I understood early on that my mother would or could not keep me safe. She couldn’t even give me an illusion of safety. *** I knew a truer sense of security only after I married my husband—a person who finally helped me understand what it means to feel protected but still have room to be myself. That feeling intensified with our dog, Memphis. When Memphis and I walked alone in the park, I felt his watchfulness. Although he was never an aggressive dog, he was alert. He was a chocolate lab, big enough to worry someone who meant harm. He also had a deep bark, barrel-chested and frightening, even if he was all noise and no bite. He used his voice, too, letting us know if anyone walked close to our home: the mail-carrier, meter-reader, or someone on a run down the sidewalk. Memphis had a natural sense of protectiveness. If he saw a small child on our walk, he stood near them, guarding them. Sometimes we saw babies at the dog park, their family sitting on a bench, the baby in a carrier on the ground. When he noticed them, Memphis abandoned his play with the other dogs to stand over the baby. If they cried, he went to the baby’s mother and nudged her with his nose. The mothers at the park found this amusing and charming. To me, it was safety.
It still amazes me how this dog gave me so much of what I had needed in my childhood, how completely he loved the people around him, but also how close to an animal I could get, how much I could love him, and how expansive that love between us could grow. ***
I knew, based on the limited information we had about covid, that my mother’s diagnosis could be her death, and that it could be a lonely and terrible one. I didn’t want that for her. I had committed my mother to this facility to keep her safe. Her home healthcare staff had told me she was a danger to herself, both physically and mentally. She was too much for my aunt, who was aging and dealing with her own health issues, and I lived too far away to keep a constant eye on her. I knew I couldn’t bring my mother to live with me, in part because I wasn’t equipped to provide the level of care she needed. So, when she could no longer take care of herself and became too much for others to care for her in her home, I believed a skilled nursing facility was the safest place for her. Now, she was facing this disease that isolates and destroys, in a place where none of her family could get to her. ***
When we received Memphis’ diagnosis just days after my mother’s, I was devastated. He was old, nearly 14, and I knew his time was drawing near, but I could not imagine my life without this dog. In the following weeks, I spent every minute I could with him, petting him, holding him, telling him how grateful I was for him, how much I appreciated his friendship and love. The ALS affected his movement primarily in his back legs and hips, so I massaged them daily. I tried to memorize every detail of him: his drooping eyes, crooked teeth, the moles that had grown in his aging years. I pressed my nose to his so I would remember how soft it was. Every afternoon, I sang him a song from our favorite movie: The Lord of the Rings. The song, “Into the West,” is about a crossing over, a parting. I a line from the song, “safe in my arms, you’re only sleeping,” brought me comfort. I knew that in the process of euthanasia, for a few moments before they pass, dogs sleep. I wanted Memphis to feel safe, to know we would be there with him until his last moment, to know he would go to sleep in my arms, not alone, but surrounded by love. The only real safety I could give him was in my presence with him.
Memphis died on the morning after the 2020 election. Many things were up in the air at that time, including how many more would die from covid before our leaders made real decisions. What was certain was that my dog was at the very end of his life—still fully present, but unable to do his favorite things, including going to the park.
In the days leading up to his death, people who knew him reached out to say goodbye. One friend FaceTimed. Memphis was lying on the floor in front of a window we had covered in a privacy film. The sun hit the film and cast a rainbow of colors over him just as she called. He raised his head and looked right into the camera when she told him how much she loved him.
One friend brought his RV across the country so he could remain socially distanced during the trip. He arrived the night before Memphis’ death. Memphis was so happy to see him, he tried to jump up on him. He failed, barely getting his front legs off the ground, but it was the first time he had attempted that in months. When we took him out to pee, Memphis barked at a delivery van.
“I’m so glad to hear his voice,” our friend said. My nephews brought him a bag of gummy bears. They had known him since they were 2 and 4 years old. When they were growing up, they often stayed with us. Their visits were the only time Memphis would sleep away from us. He insisted on sleeping between them, piled on an air mattress, protecting and loving them.
It would be logical to assume these people reached out because they care about my husband and me, and there’s some truth in that. Mostly, though, Memphis was just that special. Every child he came across at the park loved him, and he loved them. They would pet him and exclaim, “he’s so soft, like a rabbit!” Two families close to us adored him so much, they got chocolate labs of their own in an attempt to replicate his love in their homes. Of course, neither of those dogs was anything like our Memphis, not in temperament and not in softness. Election anxiety hovered over us in Memphis’ last days, but it was hard to focus on election results after his death because of the depth of sadness and loneliness his passing left. I needed him to help me get through the grief of losing him. I needed him to help me through the anxiety over state of our country. I needed him to help me feel grounded and safe. His physical body was gone, the part where I could pet him and feel comforted, but what he had taught me about love—about nurturing and safety—that was something I could hold to. ***
When we were children and my sister and I argued, my mother would take us out into the yard.
“Beat the shit out of each other,” she said.
When we stood there refusing to hit each other, she threatened us.
“If one of you doesn’t hit the other, I’ll do it. Punch her! Hit her in the face!” she screamed.
She kept this up until my sister and I were crying so hard we couldn’t breathe, begging her to stop, to let us go back inside. My sister and I fought a lot when we were young, and often it was physical, but we never fought at my mother’s command. It was such a ridiculous scene; it was one of the many ways our mother seemed out of control, and we had to be the ones who found and kept sanity. I realize now that none of us were in control. My mother’s method worked—my sister and I would stop arguing—but we were reduced to terrified, uncertain children trying desperately to find solid ground. ***
While my father’s go-to form of punishment was his thick, leather belt, my mother preferred her hands and words. She wasn’t good at hitting us with the belt, though she tried a few times; she couldn’t get the belt to hurt like it did when my father used it. She tried other weapons, too: switches, wire coat hangers, a wooden spoon, a brush. Ultimately, she resorted to hair-pulling with my sister and me. When she was angry, my mother would grab us by the hair and drag us around the house, either screaming or growling through her gritted teeth. She was especially keen to pull our hair when she was brushing it. My mother wouldn’t let us fix our own hair until we were well into our teen years. Instead, she sat us in front of her on the floor while she sat on the couch, and she brushed out the tangles and styled our hair in ways we hated. If we moved, cringed because it hurt, or begged her to fix it a different way, she grabbed a handful of hair and started jerking.
When we were older, my sister and I refused to let my mother touch our hair. Eventually, I told her that if she hit us or pulled our hair again, I would call the police. I knew I’d never really call them; I was too afraid my siblings and I would be separated, never to see each other or our aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins again. My mother had told us many times how much worse our lives would be if we went into the foster-care system. I was terrified to mention calling the police to my father, who would have beat me, but I knew my mother was afraid of us reporting them. Once she could no longer use her hands against us, though, she resorted to exclusively emotional manipulation.
My mother’s usual way to get us to do what she wanted was to tell us how we didn’t love her, how she was going to leave us all, how we were driving her crazy and made her want to kill herself. She used this tactic for almost everything: if we were slow getting up in the mornings to get ready for school, if we whined about doing the dishes, or if we said we didn’t want to go to the basement to do laundry. At first, it was heartbreaking. I hated that I was such a disappointment as a daughter that I made my mother feel that way. The first few times she threatened to leave, I panicked. I cried, begging her to stay, telling her I would do better, be better. In those moments, she would look down at me, unable to stifle a smile, and say, “we’ll see.”
Eventually I got tired of my mother smiling at me when I was upset. It was a pattern she had shown throughout my life. I came to believe that me hurting was the way my mother liked me best. More likely, the smiling was about her own mixed-up feelings, not mine, but as a child, I only knew that it looked like she enjoyed my pain. ***
Memphis knew instinctively how to defuse aggressive situations. When my husband and I play-wrestled with each other or our nephews, Memphis pushed his way between us, licking our hands and legs, trying to get us apart, or he would bring a toy to divert our attention. It always worked because we were afraid we would accidently hurt him in the melee. I don’t know how he would have handled a real physical confrontation between people, but anytime he was around when dogs started to fight (which was often at the dog park), Memphis wedged between them and tried to get one to play with him. He never ran from dogs fighting and he never fought with another dog, but dogs never kept a fight going around him.
I didn’t sleep well after Memphis passed away. At first, I had nightmares. In the dreams, a man broke into our house and started dismembering my husband and me with a machete or chainsaw. Eventually, I started going to sleep thinking about Memphis’ fur—its softness, its smell, the way it felt when I rubbed his ears. I imagined us sitting together, his head in my lap, me petting him until we were both relaxed. It didn’t stop the nightmares, but it calmed me enough to get to sleep. ***
After Memphis had been with us for seven years, I started having seizures. Without any training, Memphis was able to pick up on when I was about to have one. He would nudge my husband with his nose, then sit at my feet. My husband knew then to help me lay down.Memphis stayed with me until I was myself again. Knowing he could sense them coming and knowing he was willing to stay with me was a great comfort. I’m not sure what he picked up on, but he had that sense about anything that bothered me or my husband. At various times, we both had knee injuries, and Memphis would sit next to us and lick the hurting knee until we had to make him stop. If we had a headache or stomachache, he lay with us in bed. He was a nurturer and knew his presence soothed us. ***
The only real medical emergency I had in my mother’s presence was when I was a senior in high school and had just had my tonsils removed. After a few days of healing, I woke one morning to a sharp, metallic taste in my mouth. In the bathroom, I spit bright blood into the sink. I didn’t know if the blood was coming from my mouth or my throat. I called out for my mother. I tried to sound calm so that I didn’t worry her.
My mother came into the bathroom and saw the blood in the sink. She called the doctor, who told her to get me to his office or the emergency room immediately. Too anxious to drive me herself, she called her friend. My mother put me in the back seat of the car, handed me a bowl to spit the blood in, and got into the passenger’s seat in front. As her friend drove us to the doctor’s office, my mother repeatedly looked back at me, asking if I was okay.
When we reached the office, the doctor looked at my throat and said the stitches had broken loose. He decided to try to cauterize the open incision. He pulled out the gear—including the long metal cauterizing iron—and went to work. What followed was like something out of a low-budget horror film. He pulled a chair in front of the chair I sat in, had me open wide, and started melting the skin together in the back of my throat. After just a few seconds, I vomited blood all over me, him, and the wall behind him. He explained that our stomachs don’t tolerate human blood very well, handed me a bin, then tried again. We repeated this cycle over and over. After the first episode of vomiting, my mother left the room, unable to stand—I don’t know what. Her daughter vomiting blood? The doctor trying to melt the skin together? The smell of the room—a mix of the metal of the blood, the burning smell of flesh? Probably all of it. I understand now how horrible this must have been for her, but at the time, I felt scared and abandoned. When the doctor finally stopped the bleeding, I walked out into the waiting room.
“My god, you’re so pale,” my mother’s friend said. My mother said nothing. *** When my mother recovered from covid, I was relieved. She had a relatively mild case—low fever, slight cough, tiredness—but I knew based on other people’s experiences she could take a turn at any moment, so I was anxious throughout her illness. Once she was moved off the covid hall and back to her regular room, I knew she would be okay. I was happy she had escaped such a lonely and terrible death, and surprised, based on her comorbidities, that she pulled through the illness so easily. In that gratitude, I knew we would not get a similar reprieve with Memphis. He was dying soon, no matter what. Still, he made it longer than any of us expected. We got five more months with him after his diagnosis. In those months, I spent every moment I could with him—much more time than I would have had before the lockdown. My husband and I got him a cupcake for his fourteenth and final birthday, and we let him have the same dinner we ate each night. I wanted him to feel peace in his last days and in his passing, and I wanted him to understand how much he had changed my life for the better, even if I could never effectively communicate it all to him. After my mother returned to her regular room at the nursing facility, she grew ever more hostile on our phone calls. She was hurt because I wasn’t visiting, even when I explained the nursing facility was still on lockdown. She insisted she be allowed to live on her own again. She was, understandably, angry that I had “put her away” and was going on with my life while she remained confined to a nursing home. Our phone calls were making her increasingly upset, but as I was one of only a few people who had regular contact with her outside of the facility staff and residents, I felt obligated to try to keep her spirits up. I switched from our weekly phone calls to sending a card every few days. The cards weren’t extensive. I tried to keep them upbeat but included as little about my own life as I could; I didn’t want to make her feel worse about living in the convalescent home while I was in my own home, living my life with my family. I sent her blank stationary, envelopes, and stamps and asked her to write me back, but she wouldn’t. I kept in contact with the facility staff, and I called her every few weeks to make sure she was okay and to see if she was getting my letters. She insisted she wasn’t, that she had seen no evidence I was sending anything. I kept mailing them anyway. When Memphis died, I told my mother in a card. I wrote how sad I was and that I missed his presence, his steady breathing in whatever room I was in. A week later, my mother finally sent me a letter. It was barely legible in her shaky handwriting. It, too, was short—a brief mention of how she liked her new therapist and was doing well. At the end, she included a postscript: “Sorry, sorry about Memphis. I know you miss him.” *** I can’t help but compare the fear and anxiety I had when my mother caught covid with what I felt when we received Memphis’ diagnosis. Both my mother and Memphis were aging, and I knew both deaths were approaching, Memphis’ especially. The life expectancy for a lab is 9-11 years, and he was nearing 14. There were several times I had been frightened about losing him over the years: the time he chewed the cap off of a bottle of lighter fluid and drank it, the time he ate a bottle of ibuprofen, the time he sliced the pads off his back paw when he kicked a basement window while he was running outside, the time he ate an entire case of nectarines (pits and all), the time he ate a bag of raisins, the time he ate three dark chocolate bars, the countless socks he ingested. He had spent so much time at the vet’s office, and in the ibuprofen scenario in ICU, that they knew to be ready if I called. We tried our best to keep things out of his reach, but he was cunning and determined and inevitably learned how to open drawers, cabinet doors, and even baby gates. But the pronouncement of his coming death, the vet’s declaration that we should make his last days comfortable, was a different kind of devastation. In the last two years, Memphis had slowed down a bit—he was much less interested in getting into things—but he still didn’t look or act as one would expect a dog his age to act. People who met him were shocked to learn how old he was. Even the vet admitted that he was one of the youngest old boys she had known. My mother, on the other hand, who was relatively young, had been in poor health for much of the last two decades. Both of her parents died in their 80s, and even before covid, my mother was in worse health in her 60s than they were up until their last days. On one hand, I expected to get a call about someone finding her dead at any time. On the other hand, she was so young to be near death, so far away from the expected end of a lifetime. What I realized in those days of my mother’s and my dog’s diagnoses was that I was going to miss my dog much more than I would miss my mother, that losing Memphis would be sadder and more challenging than losing my mother. At first, that realization was sickening. I felt like a terrible daughter, a terrible human being. But the truth is that even though his penchant for getting into things created a lot of anxiety and worry, Memphis brought light, happiness, a sense of security, and unconditional love to our home. My mother’s love was, at best, conditional, and happy moments with her were rare for even those of us closest to her. I have a hard time recalling any moments with my mother that were not undercut with her bitterness or resentment. I don’t know what caused my mother’s anger at the world. She must have had a difficult childhood herself—no one in her family talks much about their younger days, except to say they didn’t have an indoor toilet until my mother was a teen. Perhaps she wasn’t equipped to have children, perhaps her struggles with mental illness took too much of her energy. For all my life, I have carried guilt for not being able to make her happy, for not being a good daughter, for feeling let down by her, but mostly because I expected her to make me feel save and loved, but she couldn’t. I saw that as my flaw, not hers. *** My mother’s mention of Memphis the last time I saw her and her note about him after his death were significant because they were rare acts of kindness. She had no love for dogs. When I was young, we had dogs that were always kept for the service of the farm, not as pets or members of the family, and they were always kept outside. They were mostly wild and roaming. They were a security feature—there to bark if someone walked onto the property. My mother regularly voiced her disdain for the dogs, how she hated them. When she caught me petting one, she told me I was just asking to get sick and made me go wash my hands. The dogs ate scraps from our dinner, when we had anything leftover, and hunted their food otherwise. We never took a dog to the vet. I didn’t realize until I was an adult that they should be fed dogfood daily and receive proper medical care. I wonder how many of our dogs starved to death. I only remember a couple dying; the others simply disappeared. *** By the time Memphis came along, I knew how to do better. I knew to feed a dog, to keep them inside, give them plenty of exercise, to regularly take them to the vet, give them monthly prevention meds, and to keep things that are bad for them out of reach (though that didn’t always work with Memphis). I was able to find some forgiveness for my mother in this learning. She had performed the basic necessities when I was young that kept me alive: she fed me, clothed me, and took me to the doctor when I needed it. I understood that if she couldn’t give me other things I needed, it wasn’t because of a flaw in me, but probably a lack of knowledge or ability on her part, or, most likely, some trauma she had experienced in her own childhood. She also deals with mental health issues that have made her life difficult in ways that, because of my own struggles with mental health, I do and don’t understand. Whether or not I can pinpoint a reason for my mother’s behavior doesn’t change the fact that I am more devastated at the thought of living without my dog than at the thought of living without my mother. In the quiet of my home, in the day-to-day moments, it is his presence and love I miss. I don’t know what I will miss about my mother, but considering her death makes me feel more sadness for her than myself or my family. I have tried to show my mother that my decision to put her in the nursing facility was an act of love, the best thing for her. She didn’t have much say in it, so she feels betrayed, and on many levels, she was. She told me for years that she wanted to go to a nursing home, and which specific one, but when it came time, she fought not to go. It was much like the psychiatric hospitals she had been in: how she had longed for a stay there—threatened it as her way to get a vacation—but never really wanted to be there once she was taken. I can’t know what it was like for her to get the option to make her own decisions taken away, and especially for her to end up in a situation where she can’t see the people she loves. *** Two months after my mother went into the nursing home, my family and I moved her belongings out of her apartment and into storage. She had gone directly from another mental hospital stay into the nursing facility, so she had no idea she would not be returning home when she left it the last time. She had lived in a one-bedroom apartment for elderly people on a fixed income. My mother was a heavy smoker and I have asthma, so I hadn’t spent time in her home in years. When we saw each other, it was usually at my aunt’s house, or we sat outside on my mother’s porch. Cleaning out her apartment, I realized how distant I had become from her. Some of that distance was a way to protect myself, but it was also an act of rebellion, a way of telling her I no longer had to share every detail of my life with her, a way to tell her I resented having to share everything with her when I was a child. I wanted her to know that despite all of the confessing, I was no safer. It had not served its purpose. Part of the reason my mother could no longer live on her own was due to her mental health decline. Several times over the last year, her home healthcare workers had found her hallucinating, convinced someone was trying to murder her, and attempting to flee her apartment, or lying in bed in her own urine and feces, unable to make it to the bathroom. She had been in and out of mental health hospitals throughout the last 35 years, but after two extended stays in the months before, we were advised by her doctors to find her a permanent care facility. Between her physical and mental decline, she wasn’t safe on her own. As I packed away her belongings, I saw the evidence of this decline everywhere. Beside her bed, I found a notebook. The pages were filled with nearly illegible, frantic scribblings: the alphabet, “goodbye,” “hello,” “help,” “save me,” written over and over. She had obviously spent her nights in a panic, feeling unsafe and helpless. It was heartbreaking to see her state of mind. I realized then I should have gotten her out sooner, that she should not have been living alone. I also found that she kept nearly everything I gave her over the years: cards, angel figurines, bookmarks and journals (even though she hated to read or write). She kept the picture I had framed of her and me—taken the day she met Memphis, the last time she and I took a picture together—by her bed. She kept a Mother’s Day poem I wrote her just after I married, framed and hung on the wall in the living room. I also found evidence of a woman I never knew, one I wish I could have known. I found photos of her taken a few years before. She is standing in front of a brick wall, wearing a beautiful green floral dress and sweater I had never seen. The pictures tell a story: a woman who knew happiness. In one, she has her lips puckered in a kiss to the camera while a woman adjusts her sweater for her. In another, her head is thrown back in laughter. In a third, she flashes a huge smile as she hugs a young girl. The pictures are from an impromptu photo shoot—candid, unguarded moments of delight. I was glad to see my mother experiencing this joy, but it also made me sad to know I never made her feel free to be herself, that I never got to see her truly happy. I felt I must have been a great burden to her, something that wore on her. My parents married in their early twenties, and she got pregnant with me two months later. I wondered who she might have been if they had waited. I wondered what kind of relationship we could have had if I had truly felt about her the way she did about me—that we were best friends. I have tried to find good memories of my mother, times of true happiness, love untarnished, but I can’t. For a while I thought this, too, was a failure on my part. I thought I was too hard on her, that I wasn’t working hard enough to see her in a better, truer light. Lately, I’m coming to accept that maybe there just weren’t many of those moments, that was just who she was, who we were. This is a worse prospect to me. It means the reality is out of my control, that I can’t reclaim lost happy moments of my childhood, a lost sense of my loving mother, because she wasn’t a loving mother. As we cleaned out her apartment, I considered what it must have been like for her to know she would never see her home and things again. My mother had not even had the chance to make plans about what she wanted to keep, or to throw away anything she didn’t want us to find. It was another kind of betrayal to go through all her things, deciding what to take with me, what to give away, what to trash. *** I know our choice to put Memphis to sleep was an act of kindness; he was in pain and because of his lower quality of life, no longer a mostly-happy dog. But it was also an act of betrayal. He had no say in it. He couldn’t actively vote yes or no or how or when. He told us with his body and mood he was tired, but he didn’t really get to say, “I’m ready.” He didn’t get a say in what happened in his last moments. I expected at least some small sense of release when Memphis died. I thought that, amid the grief, I would have some gratitude for the relief of no longer having to care for him every day, no longer worrying over him, watching him struggle, not having to take him out to pee every hour as his old body required, not having to carry him up and down stairs each night, or sleeping poorly because I was listening for him, worried he was uncomfortable. That relief has not come. I miss worrying over him and taking care of him. Each meal, each moment of entering or leaving the house, each morning I wake up is the same: “Where is he? Oh, he’s gone.” His absence fills every space. At night, I still hear him—the click of his joints as he stretched, the puff of his jaw as he breathed out—and must remind myself, again, he isn’t really here. I find his fur in places I never noticed before—beneath the bathroom sink, on the leaves of houseplants—and miss de-hairing my clothes each morning before I leave. As the evidence of his presence is fading—the poop bags in the bottom of the trash bin emptied into the garbage truck, the dying flowers sent by a friend the day he passed, the vacuum filling slower and slower with what fur remains—I refuse to clean the smudges from the windows where he pressed his nose, watching the world outside go about its world business, wishing he was out there running, chasing, sniffing. I miss all the work that went into having him here. I have for a while now expected to have a similar sense of relief-amid-grief when my mother passes: no longer having to field her resentment, to know she is lonely, to explain over and over that I love her, I love her, I love her. When she got the covid diagnosis, part of me anticipated letting her go. But losing Memphis has taught me I can’t predict grief. I can’t assume how I will and will not feel when I lose someone. I wonder what spaces my mother’s absence will fill, what spaces it will leave. *** I don’t know what happens when we die, but I no longer believe in an afterlife. I suspect we end, return to the basic particles around us and are finished. For a long time, I was fine with this; it meant a quiet rest. But I understand why people do believe in things like heaven or reincarnation. Sometimes I wish I still had some of my old beliefs. I wish I could look forward to seeing my Memphis again. It would be a great comfort to believe in reuniting, to hold on to the idea that he is not physically gone forever, irrevocably, from my life. I even find myself wishing that dog-ghosts are real. I wish that, because he died in our home, he was somehow able to leave an imprint and still be with us. This belief in the afterlife would also give me hope about my relationship with my mother. Perhaps we could start over or have a bond free of all the chaos and failures we both perpetuated in our relationship. Perhaps it is my belief in finiteness that makes Memphis’ death so hard. Or perhaps it is just the infinite love we had for each other, the bond we shared, the dependable presence and loyalty to each other. It all seems so one-sided now—only moving outward from me now that he is gone. *** Some scientists suspect our consciousness exists for a moment after the body dies. In case that is real, we stayed close to Memphis for a while after he passed, holding him and telling him over and over how much we love him. The vet, too, was mindful of this. Whether for his sake or ours, as she and the tech lifted his body into the box to take him away, she whispered to him, “You’re such a good boy. You’ve been such a good boy.” I worry over many details of Memphis’ last days. I wonder if we waited too long to end his suffering. I wonder if we should have waited longer. I wonder if the time we sat with him after he passed was long enough, if we should have held him longer. I wonder what he felt in those last moments, if he knew this as what it was: our biggest sacrifice, our truest act of selflessness and love. Because every day since, I have wanted him back, wanted to hold him and pet him, kiss him, and share the rest of this beautiful, terrible life with him, which I know is my own sticky heart getting in the way of what’s best for someone other than myself, for this being that will always be and will never again be with me. Every morning, I practice yoga that ends in several minutes of lying still. When Memphis was here, I did yoga beside his bed, where he would watch me patiently until I got to the end. Then we would spend those last minutes of stillness wrapped up together, me petting him, telling him how much I appreciated him. He would lick my face and cuddle up to me until I got up and pronounced it time for his morning walk. I still do yoga in the place where his bed used to sit. Now, when I get to those minutes of stillness, I lie there alone. I picture myself flying out into the cosmos where I find some version of my dog—sometimes he is a puppy, sometimes middle-age, sometimes the old, old boy he was at the end. Sometimes he brings me a ball. Always, he is happy to see me. He licks my face, and I pet him, and we let each other know how much we’ve missed being together. Then I tell him I’ll see him tomorrow and send him off to play or sleep or whatever he’s in the mood for. It’s hard to start my day after that. Life without him is lonely, and I just want to melt into that space with him and never leave it. I don’t want to face the quietness, the reality of my world without him. Even this time with him will be lost. One day, I will be so tired I forget to recall him, or I’ll be distracted and remember only as I’m finishing up. Then that day will become another and another until I replace the routine, and I’ll lose him all over again, just as gradually, just as abruptly, just as permanently. *** I try not to think of my mother’s situation as “her last days.” In reality, she is in her last days just as any of us are—the ever-onward march toward our end. But now that she is in a safer place with ongoing care, she could outlive her siblings, my siblings, me. I worry about what that means for her, to live in a home full of people sometimes decades older than her, many who have come there to die. For a long time, I thought of the nursing home as a place of death, but it isn’t that way for my mother. She is among people who listen to her when she talks. She has a roommate she helps with daily tasks such as eating, picking out what to wear, and playing bingo. She attends a weekly church service where she sings hymns with the other patients. She has a new community—some friends, some not—where she gets attention, support, and stimulation. Some days she says it’s a new life, less lonely and more fulfilling. Others, she demands to be let out, to get an apartment on her own again, to live by herself away from decline and death. For me, there’s peace in knowing she is watched over, that she no longer has to struggle with basic daily tasks, that she has company and engagement with people, that it won’t be one of her family members who finds her days after she has passed. I do worry over her last days, even though I don’t know when those will be, even though I know I probably won’t be there at the end for her, that someone else might be holding her hand. Stephanie McCarley Dugger’s (they/she) first collection of poetry, Either Way You’re Done (2017), was published by Sundress Publications. Their chapbook, Sterling (Paper Nautilus, 2015), was winner of the Vella Chapbook contest. Their essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Baltimore Review, Mid-American Review, Poet Lore, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tampa Review, and other journals. They teach Creative Writing at Auburn University at Montgomery and also serve as Creative Nonfiction editor at Los Angeles Review and Thirteen Bridges Review.
Convalescence
About the Author
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