Briefly checking in...

I've gotten a number of emails, comments, or phone calls--thanks, everyone...truly--from people wanting to check in on me, see how I'm doing this week after what happened with my dog. And rather than responding to each individually, I'm going to hedge my energy and reply to them all at once on here.

How am I doing? Who knows. I mean, on the one hand I'm okay. It's not like I'm a mess of tears or falling apart every other minute (although I certainly was in that first 18 hours or so, before I got home Monday evening). But it's just a bizarre week. I'm not trying to "stuff it" or anything--I certainly know and have learned better--but, like it is with Anna, Chase's death keeps popping into my consciousness in different ways. When I hear a neighborhood dog bark, when I see the squirrels--Chase's taunting nemeses--racing around on my and my neighbor's fences or when I hear their chattering, when I see a dog being walked down my street and I brace myself for the ear-splitting barking that's going to ensue (except it obviously doesn't, since Chase is no longer here to go nuts barking at the dogs or the squirrels). Seeing his dog toys around the house or the yard, his food dish; finding it odd when Anna's stuffed animals or my teddy bear (that I gave Charley sometime in high school or college and that I--rather embarrassingly--have slept with since he died) stay where they're dropped. (Chase had an odd fixation with picking up these items--or shoes before we moved--and carting them around the house, bringing them to the living room or the hall and dropping them on the ground there. He never damaged them or did anything but carry them to a different room, but it was a mildly baffling and annoying habit.) So seeing these items not moving around our house...it's weird.

Or more pointedly, the sudden, accidental, (and rather violent) nature of Chase's death unexpectedly grips my consciousness--and my gut--when I least expect it. For four years, I've lived with the survivor's knowledge that life can end in a instant and that there isn't any way you can stop it. I was protected by numbness and shock for so long that the panic-attack reaction to new triggers didn't happen much.

But this week? Now, when I see Anna on her swing in the backyard, going higher than she's ever gone before--she just learned how to pump on a swing in early May--my heart practically stops as she shrieks and giggles and as the swing jumps and bounces from her going too high for gravity to keep her going in a smooth arc. I had to restrain myself from screaming at her last night to get off the fucking swing, that she could fall off and get....well...dead. I don't really know how I managed to stay calm enough to simply tell that she was going high enough, to tell/ask her to not go quite so high right now.

After Charley's death, I always know that life is short and that you never know what can happen. I don't know if it's something I eventually need to learn to work through or not, but sometimes I often feel paralyzed, terrified, from a paranoid fear that something will happen to Anna too. And I generally try to calm myself down, tell myself that the likelihood of disaster striking me again isn't terribly high, that I can't live my life crippled by fear.

But.

Having your three-year-old hyperactive, sweet, cuddly, handful of a dog suddenly die in a horribly violent, bizarre accident when you're 1000 miles away on vacation? (I mean, really: whose dog fucking hangs itself??) I'm insanely giddy that it wasn't Anna; it wasn't my parents, my sister, her kids, her husband, or any of my other friends, family, or their kids. And I'm relieved that it wasn't any worse than it was. I mean, it was pretty horrific and tragic...but it was quick. He didn't suffer much, he didn't hurt anyone else or any other dogs, he didn't get loose and get lost in the woods in a huge forest, he couldn't have been in much pain (or at least not for long). And I'm also relieved that I don't have to deal with his escalating problems anymore. I'm not glad that it was so permanent or horrible, but like a long-term caretaker of a terminally ill loved one, there is a sense of relief that the struggles with him are finally over.

He was a handful of a dog. He was sweet and wonderful 90 percent of the time (although in all honesty, that number might be a bit high); and the other 10-30 percent of the time, he was too much for me to handle. He was too smart, too strong, too hyper, too resourceful--and as presumably part pit bull--too much of a wild card sometimes. I had no idea what I was getting myself in for when I adopted him from a rescue almost two years ago. He was a really good dog in all the myriad ways in which you can't really train a dog--like with how he acted with kids, his patience, his endless adoration and love, his nondestructiveness--and he's the type of dog that would have been a fabulous, wonderful dog as he got older...once he worked his puppyness out of himself and he calmed down...but I frankly had no idea how to get to that point two or three years from now. I have my hands full with my life as it is--with being a single parent, with raising a little girl on my own, with balancing my life, with trying to work my way through the quagmire of grief and widowhood over the years--and I didn't really know how I could find more reserves to also train and calm down a demanding, quivering, excitable mass of energy.

I honestly didn't know how I'd do it, or if I could. Or if I even should. Chase dying, particularly in such an awful way, was never how I wanted it to end--not in a million years--but among my immediate reactions to the horrific news, relief, on a dozen different levels, was one of my first ones.

But it still sucks. (Such deep language and vocabulary I have for it, huh?) And I miss the little furball, obnoxious and a handful or not. I wish I'd at least been able to see him to say goodbye...but my family had to do something with him, and at 50 pounds, he was a bit big to stick in a freezer or fridge until I got home. (Sorry if that's a grotesque image; it's a bit of a joke with Charley's family and one of our friends, after cats died but couldn't be buried right away because of things--like marching band competitions--going on that day...so "putting the dead animal in the fridge" is a bit of a morbid inside joke. Besides, when I only got to see my dead husband after two days being spent in a fridge at the morgue and when he was a little, um, altered from doing tissue donation--he looked perfectly normal (aside from being dead) but because we'd--I'd?--donated some of his bones, skin tissue, and I don't even remember all what, he was wrapped in plastic under his clothes and probably had PVC pipes or something to replace some of his bones. And sorry, too, if that last description was a bit too much...but welcome to the "normal" of my life. So a dead dog simply in a fridge or freezer, until I could get home to see him? Downright blase.) So my dad and my brother-in-law buried Chase on my parents' property the night that he died, in their "pet cemetery" (curse Stephen King for giving me a macabre mental image of one, even if I've never read the book) alongside my parents' dog and two cats, all of whom we had when I was a teenager. And as I've realized over the years--through two cats of my own that we had to put to sleep in the last 5 years, Papa, and Charley--I have a need to witness the death, to see the body. And with our dog, I didn't get to. It is what it is, and I can't change it, and there really weren't any other options...but I do wish I'd gotten to see him, to pet him, give him a kiss, and say goodbye, the same as I have with our cats, my husband, and a beloved surrogate grandfather. And who knows--if I'd gotten to see him and say goodbye, maybe then I'd have a slightly calmer mental image in my mind of our dog, rather than constantly seeing him in my mind's eye, hanging out the motor home window. I may not have been there and I may not know the precise details of this specific campsite, but I know exactly what the scene would have looked like, after last year's camping disaster with the dog and after hundreds of camping trips with my family and the motor home over the last 20-plus years. And I can't get that last, horrific mental image out of my head.

I've also been aware of a small bit of irony since getting home and seeing Anna: that I just sat through a session on How Infants Grieve on Saturday morning, at the widowhood conference.

Little did I know that I'd be putting much of it into active practice or awareness, less than 48 hours later.

Anna saw Chase hanging there from his leash, you see, as my family returned to the campsite and first found him. She couldn't help but see it, as my mom said. My mom got her away from the campsite as fast as they could, but in the surreal horror of returning to camp, it registering what they saw, and racing to get him down, to give him CPR (bless my dad and sister), Anna still had to see a bit too much for any almost five-year-old...especially for a beloved dog and constant playmate, and for a kid who was blissfully spared immediate grief over her father's death because she was only 10 months old at the time. My mom took her away from the campsite pretty quick--before my sister and dad started trying to revive him (best as they can tell, it had just happened)--and Anna hid behind a chair in the immediate, scary flurry of activity before she was taken from the campsite, but still...she saw enough.

And Anna's having a rather rough week. Not in the usual, expected ways--she's not crying about Chase or in the throes of an adult grief (nor am I, for that matter)--but as I've heard from my widowed friends over the years and listened to their stories and struggles with their kids in the wake of dealing with a dead parent over the years, Anna's reactions and grief over our dog's death keep popping up here and there. Sure, she periodically says she misses Chase, talks about him, or says that she's scared without him here. But it pops up in other, more bizarre ways: In a sudden, rather marked increase in her fear of spiders on her play structure. Fear of sleeping alone (although this reaction was rather expected for me; she's slept in my bed with me since I got home). An inconsistent, decreased appetite. Dissolving into disproportionate (and atypical) tears over small, slight wounds. Or more jarring for me as her mommy: in hysterical tears over not wanting me to help her brush her teeth at bedtime, over hysterically insisting I not help her buckle her seat belt. (And in writing this right now, rather alarming warning bells are starting to go off for me right now, that she's trying to be entirely too insistently grown up and independent right now--compensation, perhaps, to prove subsconsciously to herself, to me, to whomever, that she's a big girl, that she can handle what she saw, her dog's violent death, that she can "do this"? I went in and met with my grief counselor on Tuesday afternoon to take care of my own grief needs, and she said--quite astutely--that Anna could probably use her own therapy for this. I've been sort of waiting and watching, trying to gauge when it's the right time--or if there ever really needs to be a time--to start taking her to a kids' grief group because of the death of her father. Who knew that instead it might be the death of our dog that is the truer tipping point?)

So I'm in damage-control mode this week...with Anna, with me. When I realized Tuesday night--a day after I got home from the conference, and three nights after Chase died--that Anna was being pretty clingy and was still quite scared, I got smart and called my brother, told him I needed to stay home with her yesterday instead of going into the office. I'm home with her again today, although I'm trying to get some work done too.

So we're in damage control. And staying-close-to-home mode. And lovey mode, and being-sensitive mode. Both for Anna's needs, and for my own...which is pretty draining overall and doesn't really lend any room for knowing how I'm "doing." I'm doing some things--symbolic acts, tangible projects--to help Anna through this...and myself...but that's about as much (or little) as I can know right now. I'm rather an ostrich with its head buried in the sand--sort of--this week.

So we're here. It's been a crummy week, but there's nothing--on the surface--ostensibly different from any other week. But it is different.

My parents were really concerned that I not be told the news when I was alone; they wanted to tell me face to face. My sister, on the other hand, thought I might prefer some privacy...which was quite right. After four years of widowhood, after being alone when the police first gave me the news about Charley's death, and after having to survive through so many unsurvivable, impossible things entirely on my own, I don't know how to deal with or react to things if someone's there to see me, hear me. I don't know how to let myself fall apart in public, around people I know. (Around strangers is a totally different thing; I have no problems whatsoever falling apart around strangers. Don't ask me how that conundrum works.)

So as hard as it was being alone, in an impersonal hotel room 1000 miles away, when I first got the news about Chase, I'm grateful in a way that I was alone, that I had nothing to distract me from the wrenching shock and vortex of my grief over my dog. There weren't my usual ways to staunch the overwhelming, vomitous purge of what I was having to survive.

And in many ways, I reacted harder to the news about my dog's death than I did my husband's. There was no anesthetic shock, no numbness this time. There was just me, and a sudden, unexpected, accidental, and horribly violent, tragic death, and nothing to separate me from it. And in comparison to the weird disreality that's come once I got home, I'm relieved that I had those first awful 18 hours.

For me, it's never been the obvious, gut-wrenching spews of grief that are the hardest to deal with. The harder, more trying things to deal with in grief are when it goes subterranean, when I can't really put my finger on when it's happening, or how, or where. I hate the numbness and "normality" that's the flipside of day-to-day dealing with grief, more than the immediate eruptions of it.

So this week, since being home? I have no idea, really, how it's gone. We've stayed busy, distracted ourselves, done some things (which I'll probably write about sometime later) "for Chase."

But I won't lie: it's been one kick upside the head. It's not a kick in the gut or the heart--not yet...or maybe it won't ever be; who knows?--but I'm still just stunned over the whole thing.

And I really, really wish it had never happened.

And I really, really wish it wouldn't have some lingering, continuing presence in my life. But like it or not, it's something I'll have to work through, do my grief work with, over the next few weeks...or however long it takes.

I'm not in self-pity, "poor me" mode (or not too much)...but a large part of me is just saying, Enough already! When on earth do I get a BREAK??

Or hell, a normal life?

(And I guess this post didn't turn out all that brief, did it?) Until the next time....

And thanks again for all the support. I'm a lucky, lucky person to have such a wonderful group of people in my life. =)