Day Seventeen

 This morning it has been 17 days since that terrible morning that was to be the last few hours I spent with my darling, darling Daniel.

Just like every other morning, including the one he died, I am standing at my laptop in the kitchen drinking coffee, looking through emails (nope not answering diet questions today, sorry) and drinking half decaf from a huge clay mug I adore,  one with oak,  poplar and ginkgo biloba leaves encircling it, and that holds 16 ounces of liquid. I bought this behemoth a few years ago when I was still consuming vat after vat of strong coffee all day, and had grown tired of refilling my normal, 8 ounce cup over and over. This is the mug and Julia Dean is the creator, if anyone is interested.  On etsy, of course. My home away from home.



In the mornings, I have a rule - nobody gets much of anything out of me until I get that coffee down the hatch. I think this is fair; it's usually 5 am and the cats have dry food out at night; much as I don't like it, the anxiety that empty food bowls produces is much, much worse. Anxiety? well,  two of my cats were rescued from a very bad situation and one, Franklin, was a kitten at the time, he was maybe 7 months when we got him out of there. The woman who kept them believed in fasting one (or two or I suspect maybe 3) days a week, and she fed the cheapest dog food when she did feed them, augmented with white rice, which, she informed me, is "very good for cats". The older cat, Mithrandir, is a purebred and somebody along the line had his front and back claws removed, and then given him to this woman in the trailer who fed rice to kittens. He was completely terrified of everything, as was Franklin, when we got them out; I've told the story before of how Frank lived in the wall for close to 3 months, back at Rupert.  These two are now among the happiest cats I've ever known, but vestiges of their former life remain; for example, they are both really panicked if there is no food available. Even if they don't eat any, there has to be food in the bowls, so I put some dry out at night. Even if it is all still there in the morning, they can rest easy...Frank sleeping in a variety of places, and Mithrandir often vacillating between Danny's large, comfy kitchen bed, and beside me.   But by the time I am up and making coffee, they want breakfast - REAL food, thank you very much. I've made a deal with them; I will never miss a meal unless I am sick or unable to walk, BUT, I get to have this coffee first. Both sit patiently in the window ledges watching me type, read emails, and these days, cry and cry, over that Julia Dean mug of half decaf.
Then I feed them.

 

 

I've been doing this since we rescued them in 2012. Early morning music, often plainchant, Native American flute, or Celtic harp....what Alex calls "that lugubrious hooting you envelope yourself in"...and Korky gets uncovered and his bowls taken out to be washed in preparation for HIS breakfast.

Until 17 days ago, Daniel would be let out to pee first off, before I plug the kettle in- he was always up with me, right till the end. And when he came in,  his medicine cookie (they're not bad, actually I make a version for Alex with more sweetener) and then he too, would lie down and wait for the first vat of coffee to be consumed.
At the end of his life, I'd administer meds to Dan with the cookie, in chunks of butter he really enjoyed.

And then after my coffee, cats got fed, Dan got his breakfast. In years past, that would be followed by another outside trip to sniff once more and pass any residual pee... and then a rest before the first walk - always worried about bloat, his whole life. If breakfast was 6 am, walk one would be around 8. But since he's been in decline, and since my back injury, we couldn't do the walk anymore. So the morning would be a series of outdoor "toodles"...the last 3 weeks an  increasing need on his part to go pee (pass blood).

The face that greeted me every morning for the last few weeks..alert, still wanting to live, despite it all.

...and me thinking, "well UTI makes you feel like you need to go. Plus his prostate is huge! The blood settles down in the afternoon. It's bacterial prostatitis..it's an MRSI.  We'll kick this. I need to research Staphylococcus pseudintermedius some more. I know it can cause clotting - yes, let's go do that".

Always needing to fix, fight, DO, research, make, administer...hope.

It's a form of denial I think, and while I have long perceived this tendency in me as a "love language" - a manifestation of my warrior Moon/Mars in Aries, and overall, a good thing - like all good things it must be tempered, it can't be allowed to run wild, there needs to be a balancing element of - acceptance, BE-ing, all things I have worked with spiritually over so many years (I believe we all need to cultivate that which is weak in us as well as that which is strong) but at the end of Danny's life, it failed me.  Or did it?

What I have to believe in now is, that  I did not fail him. Because this denial of how close to death he was, of how great the obstacles were, this crazed belief that there was a medication or an herb (or many herbs) that could ease his discomfort and extend his life - well that is the core of me, it's my central strength and it was the most naturally, and fiercely loving, way I could approach his end of life.  I want to share a bit of an example, because this haunts me and writing it out helps - also, for any of my Sisters in Sorrow (and brothers, I know you are out there) who may read this blog.

I had been both anticipating the end of dan's life as well as fighting as hard as I could, to extend it, for many months. I saw him older and slower and heat intolerant last summer, but he still perked up for walks and despite a few bouts of unwellness, he was himself, just old. Then the paw stumbling...his long nails?  and occasional coughing (which I thought was his heart condition progressing, but it was dry and hacking) and finally, the GOLPP diagnosis.
November.
And then the bloody urine, and clots. 

Every step of the way - and I reality check by going back to older posts on Facebook, and here, I was trying to stay in  contact with the reality that death was coming at the same time I was fighting it. Isn't that just love? Even after he had blocked twice in January, I was ordering herbs and upping his Yunnan Baiyao and doing whatever I could. The drug to open/relax his urethra made him sick - what about kava kava? And so on. 

The night he blocked for the last time, I contacted our vet right away. It was 8 ish and he emailed the ultrasound vet to see if she could come in early and do the procedure. I said yes to it as I could not allow this awful thing to go on. Mark felt Danny would be ok overnight, and we needed a full bladder for the ultrasound anyway; but by 2:30 he was up, asking to go out repeatedly, straining. I was beside myself but nothing I could do. So, I put on "lugubrious hooting", made coffee, and stood here at my computer. I DID AN ACTUAL DOG DIET in the hours between 2:30 and 6:30 when I got the go ahead to bring Danny in. Dan lay near me, in increasing discomfort about which I could do absolutely nothing. I checked my email every ten minutes to see when my vet was up and we could leave.  Just as I as getting ready to go, Dan began to show respiratory distress. I was not sure he would make it to the clinic, but he did,  and you know the rest of the story.

What haunts me is, those hours between 2:30 and 7. I was insane with worry, but I stood here and did a client recipe I hadn't been able to finish the day before. Alex keeps asking me, what on earth do I think I should have done? He thinks the fact I was as normal as possible was the very best thing for Dan - and he's right that if I paced around and cried and hovered over him of course that would have escalated his anxiety. But part of me wishes I could have just sat with him...not that my back allows for very much sitting anymore - and just been present. Again I go back to - but I believed with all my heart we still had a fixable condition, series of conditions. That we would find the treatment for his bloody urine, that we would manage his GOLPP. That death was coming, but "not today".

So how can I beat myself up so much for this?

I think as I write this, it's because when we love so much, when we have such a profound bond and connection, we want everything to be perfect. Maybe souls more advanced than I are past this, but I wanted every moment of every day to be perfect for Dan, and if they couldn't be perfect, at least they be very, very good. I desperately wanted the end to be soft and loving and easy, so badly I wanted that. When he was in the back of that abomination Alex calls a truck, I was unable to twist around and comfort him. I kept checking and he was flat out sleeping, but that feels wrong to me too. With the money I spent on decor and stuff for this house - a compensatory gesture on my part after losing Rupert, which was basically un-decoratable  - I could have bought us a half decent car.

And the fault finding goes on, and on and on.

What messages can I take away, how do I reconcile myself to my human failings in the face of such a loss and such a love? I think that is part of the Big Work ahead, I'm not going to try to find answers in a blog entry or a day or a few weeks of grieving. It's part of the process I need to pore over every detail,  reality check, write - that's one part. I also need to cry, talk to Dan, build his memorial table, and try to switch all of this off for a couple of hours a day. There is immediate work and there is Big Work - isn't there always? - and the Big Work is addressing my patterns of denial, frenzied sometimes, and how I avoid pain (or so I think) in many ways both reasonable and unbalanced. The immediate work is still, not 3 weeks into this, making myself eat and sleep, crying, writing/creating, talking this through with Alex....feed cats... and then, when I am able to accept them, the hidden spiritual gifts Dan has left me with, aside from the many obvious ones I already celebrate,will become clearer, more comforting, a balm on the raw pain that makes up my life right now, and a beacon for the years I will walk ahead, without him.