(Fair warning, this one's long.)
It's not often that I cry, but I can be a man admit that it happens. Generally speaking, I don't cry when I'm in physical pain; I swear or complain. I cried when I had to leave the Mirror, but not when we broke up. I occasionally cry when I'm overcome by the extent of God's love for me, and I cry when someone dear to me dies unexpectedly. The calendar year 2005 is scarcely a third complete, and I've already cried more this year than the entire rest of the time I spent in college, and you could probably add high school to that. First it was my grandfather, in the first week of January. Now I've lost the only creation God ever engineered that honestly loved me without condition: my dog, Majo.
I realized, rereading the
previous post, that I wasn't terribly clear as to the details.
We got Majo when I was thirteen, when our previous dog (Buck) began having real problems getting around. Both were black labradors; black labradors are quite possibly the finest dog man ever bred out of the wolf. We had her the entire time that I was in high school, and most of the time that I've been in college (I'm due to graduate in June).
Most dogs are great, particularly big dogs. Buck was great; he was an old man from the beginning. He'd run around if you wanted him to, but spent most of his life just laying around the back garden. He was a wonderful bird dog, and my dad and Twitley (my brother, not his real name) took him out hunting constantly before he couldn't get around anymore. He had a very calm temperament; he'd bark at a few things, but you could put a two year old neighbor girl down with him, and she could pull his ears or pinch him and the most he'd do would be to get up and move. Buck lived to be forteen years old before he just couldn't, or wouldn't, get up one day, which meant that we couldn't get food down him to give him his medication. I was fifteen at the time, and I helped dad take him around the block to dad's buddy the veterinarian. I watched while they put him to sleep, and I stayed there with him, crying for some of it.
Majo was a great dog, but for different reasons. Whereas Buck was content to give you attention when you sought it, Majo demanded attention constantly. You could tell Buck to "stay" and he would. Majo was terrible at staying where she was told, because she was always curious. She wanted to see what you were doing if you walked away from her. It took Buck a while to get used to her, because she was so damned curious about him, and wouldn't leave him alone.
I'm told that Majo was a great bird dog, too, though I can't say for a fact that I ever went out bird hunting with her. She was a lot more high maintenance than Buck was. The only big thing I can remember about Buck with respect to medical care was that he had a couple of tumors removed once, and we had him on some pills or something to help him move around during the last year or so. We had more problems with Majo. Her primary issue was boredom. Some dogs, particularly hunting dogs, tend to get extremely bored, and will actually lick raw spots on their limbs. We started dealing with that about five years ago, either before or after I spent a week in DC. Every now and again it would get bad enough that we'd be in for more medication. The take-away from that is how energetic and excitable Majo was. She wasn't designed to be cooped up in the kennel all day. If we could have trusted her in the back garden like we could Buck, it wouldn't have been an issue, but her excitement and curiosity required us to put her in the kennel unless we were there to supervise her.
A lot of the time, though, Majo was exceptionally well behaved. She even did things that showed me just how smart she was. Since last Autumn, she'd been sleeping in a crate kennel in the garage because of some hair loss on her back. I may have babied her a bit, but I think it helped her, because it meant that she got more contact in the morning than me just getting her out and putting her right back in with a full dish of food. With me putting her in every night and putting her out every morning, it gave her a few minutes to walk around and get her bearings a couple of times a day, and a routine. Except for the times when she ran off (which were infrequent for the most part, and helped to encourage my patience), she was perfect.
Yesterday I let her out of the crate kennel later than usual, but she and I stayed in the garage for a while as I cleaned my car out in preparation for the field exercise with the Marines. As usual, I had to call her back from exploring once. I gave her a little more physical attention than I generally have time for; aside from being patted on the sides, she seemed to enjoy having her collar bone scratched. She was a tough dog to please, because she was always so excited to be getting attention that she was moving all over the place. She ate while I cleaned the car out, and then I let her stay in the garage while I did some things inside the house. Before I left to go out with the Marines, I put her in the kennel; she ran out there, turned around, and sat down next to the gate like usual, waiting for me to finish the walk.
While I was up with the Marines, I barely caught a call on my mobile phone from my dad saying that she was acting strangely and asking me if she could have gotten into anything in the garage when I had her out. A year or so ago she had a bit of an episode when she got into some fertilizer or something. This time, she was laying in her kennel, out in the rain; this was unlike her. Dad went to let her out, and she took a few steps into the lawn, and then her backside plopped down and she was laying down in the grass. Dad called his buddy the vet, and while he was waiting, she started looking worse and worse. He called again, and met the vet at the veterinary hospital a few minutes later.
At some point I called and asked if she was getting better, and if I should come home, and he said that he didn't know. The vet worked on her in the back of Dad's Suburban for a few minutes, and she was wagging her tail, but not moving much else. Dad said that it sounded like her breathing was getting very shallow. They took her inside, and Dad went back out to close and lock the Suburban. When he came back in, the vet was still working, and then at one point Majo's head dropped back, and that was it. The vet says that it was something to do with her heart, a heart attack or aneurism or something.
Today at work we had the chapel visitation for my great-grandmother, as I mentioned below. Dad had received instructions from the vet that if I wanted to spend some time with Majo before she was taken to the pet crematorium, that it needed to be today, and that I should call him between 1130 and 1200. I went down there, and I probably spent about half an hour with her, and I cried. It came in fits and starts, but the tears were there, and my face probably still shows it; it certainly still feels it.
I certainly didn't spend time with Majo every day of her life, but I spent time with her for most of them. I was the one who fed and watered her, I was the one who noticed when she was behaving abnormally. She was my best friend not because of some silly cliche, but because she always, always, always loved me, even when I had to discipline her, even when I didn't make time to spend with her; every time she saw me, she was excited, and any time I needed some company, she was there without question, without fail.
So why am I feeling guilty? I'm not necessarily feeling guilty. On the other hand, it's a very, very strange sensation to be mourning an animal more than my great-grandmother. Of course, there's a rationale behind that. Majo died suddenly, while we had warning with the Matriarch. Majo died young for a lab, while the Matriarch was nearing ninety-six, and had been in declining health for years. So I'm not guilty about lamenting Majo so much; we lament greatest what we esteem highest. Majo earned my lamentations, perhaps more than any other creature I've ever encountered.
I'm not quite sure how I'm going to handle all of this, aside from ploughing right through it and doing what I can to press on. All I can say is that this doesn't feel right, and it's going to take some time for me to reconcile that in my head.
