December 24, 2007, After Dark in the Rockies, the Full Moon, Mars Shining Bright, 15″ of Snow…
posted for The Moderate Voice

UPDATE: IT IS DONE…

PEPINO

Big Boy Dalmation, Guardian of the Family

Born 1994, Died December 24, 2007

Go well dear, dear, loyal old friend. Thank you for showing us, we who are far more frail, what bold unconditional love a soul can truly give to others while on earth.

And, don’t rest in peace, Pepino. Run in happiness. Strong again and to your heart’s content. There is a little boy in heaven just waiting for you, and all our mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers have just now come to heaven’s gate to meet you.

Let our tears be the river that takes you there Pepino.

December 24, 2007, Early Afternoon in the Rockies, posted for The Moderate Voice

When your grown children call you ‘mommie,’ their childhood name for you, you know they are in need.

The call came just an hour ago. Pepino cannot stand up. They are carrying him to take him outdoors to the bathroom.

Six months ago I had a hunch. Christmas. I thought Pepino would make it through Christmas. That’s not to be.

I promised my family six months ago, I would…. well, what? Certainly be there to take Pepino to rest, for the family has suffered a loss of a son 11 years ago, that makes it all come rushing back now that Pepino is so ill, and devastatingly so. On the phone just now, I could tell. The boat with the dark sail has pulled up and moored right outside my family’s minds, and they are building sandbag walls as well as they can, so as not to slip back 11 years, to not have that vault that took so many years to shut, crack open again…. Just trying to stay here in the grief of Now. It may not be possible completely. The worlds do leak into one another, sometimes.

I just pulled on my snow boots a few minutes ago. Then, I’ll get in my black pickup and drive through the snow to get down to the city where my family and Pepino are waiting for me …

But, I stopped as I was lacing the boots, thinking for the millionth time this year about my elders who are all gone to heaven now … and suddenly I thought “I am putting on my father’s boots, my grandfather’s and grandmother’s boots”… the big shoes of the people who stayed up all night to help the mares, the people who had their arms up to their elbows to turn an ewe or a colt in the birth canal, and the ones who looked angry while in tears, when they laid the horses and the dogs down as their times came.” I hope I can do as well.

I understand now, they weren’t angry, just so intent to do the right thing by their animal, by this loyal, stalwart soul who’d been their familiar for so long. In the end, to focus the most infinite tenderness and love possible in one burning star of might, enough to do what must be done, to do what no one in their right soul, can hardly stand to do…

….to lay this grand dog, Pepino, our relative, down.

Maybe I’ve lost it, but before leaving, I’ve stumbled around gathering up Pepino’s Christmas gifts to take to him, a little red mesh stocking filled with bones and a label showing a silly Dachshund in stocking cap dancing on back legs. Pepino always liked other dogs, even pictures of dogs. He would always grin like he’d just seen Chaplin take a prat-fall.

And two things keep conjuring to mind, one, a prayer for the dying animal by William Stafford the poet, and the other a tiny child’s prayer that keeps translating itself in my mind to Pepino: Now I lay you down to sleep, I pray the Lord your soul to keep….

Six months ago I had a hunch. Christmas. I thought Pepino would make it through Christmas. That won’t be. But just now I thought, maybe Pepino will have made it … it’s literally Christmas already on the other side… of the world.

Big breath. Prayers. I can do this.
Without losing my mind. I hope…

_____________

July 17, 2007, posted for The Moderate Voice

I Promise The Last Voice You Hear Will Be One of Such Love: Pet Loss
By Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The worlds leak into each other sometimes… Most often when our lives are surrounded by people who are facing life and death challenges, we don’t want to burden them with sorrows going on in our own lives. So I was thinking.

…until July 1st of this year, when, on Freecycle ads, I saw “WANTED: Christmas wreath.” I had one. I contacted. The son of a father who is dying quickly wants to make one more Christmas for his dad. In July. No better place my Christmas wreath could go. But too, when this stranger, this good son wrote back to me, copying my email back to me, I saw I’d made a huge Freudian/ Jungian/ Adlerian typo in my email to him. Instead of writing “Christmas wreath,” I’d accidentally or otherwise instead written, “Christmas grief”…. I’m a shrink. I get the picture. The worlds leak into each other sometimes. Being a shrink does not insulate; if anything, it sandpapers the senses all the more, right down to the walls of the arteries.

This summer, in my family world, there are waves of “know it’s coming, try not to think about it right now.’ Pepino, our family “big boy,’ is a 13 year old Dalmatian who last week was just a crazy bitey, grabby, wacko-grinning pup jumping all over, mistaking all of us for a fun trampoline. Today, Pepino is a brave elderly dog who sleeps most of the time and has cancer throughout his whole body. So far he is not in pain, but my family has known for months… “time, time time keeps slipping into the future…’

I know. I do. I’ve been here before over these many decades, with my team of Huskies, with our “found on the road’ dogs… all of them, “throw yourself into the grave with them’ times… but I’ve never been here before in “this way,’ not since a hideous “watershed event,’ took place in our family’s life… an event that all things of our lives are now measured against forever, as “before’ that event, and “after’ that event. I’ll get to that time in a moment; it’s a place in the psyche that I have to circle to build courage to look, not for the last time… there’ll never be a last time.. but for one more time…

In the meantime, there’s Good Boy Dog Pepino. God, if I describe this, I know you will be able to see him vividly:

he had big heavy black balls that swayed so much when he walked that he swaggered instead of prancing…. just like you see some big lug human guys doing, walking down the sidewalk in full braggadocio with their feet widely planted apart… It made me laugh with joy. In dogs. And men. Both.

This big boy Dalmatian was a glory of a male. Still is, even though he’s sicker than a … yes, well, right. Protective, a great male consciousness; raising his big bony head still, to bark at that sound of footsteps on gravel a block away, sound only he can hear. Got to protect my pups, he thinks; he, the alpha dog; we are his pups. Not guard dog, but Guardian dog. Dear dear dog. And darn irritating/endearing dog who early on, could never sit in a car like a proper person, but that you wound up wearing him like a trembling and huffing polka dotted muffler across your shoulders, chin and chest.

I sense Pepino readying for this final trek; I think he’ll let us know for sure; this last walk yet to come will be slow, measured. We’ll take our time. His time, not ours. It doesn’t matter if we’re ready or not. We wont let him suffer. I know each soul in my family will have their own way to say goodbye to Pepino. I know. I do. It’s just that there are very few times in life that make me want to just stand with my forehead against a cool wall and just stay that way for a long time. This is one of those.

And so, to “the event,’ the ragged core that rises around the very thought of walking Pepino the Good to his end on earth… well, it’s a situation, though “situation’ isn’t the right word, there are no right words I know… it’s an “event,’ which is also not the right word, “an event’ that many other families have walked through, our family also, a time in my family’s lives that I’ve been reduced to trying to explain by saying, “Remember when Rachel wailed on the hills at Ramah and could not be consoled?”Those who know the passage, know exactly what happened in our family…

A handful of years ago, we lost our firstborn grandson. A perfect so perfect little boy. Now, having just emerged in recent time from walking, no, crawling, ugly mouth howling and dead sitting with blue skin on Persephone’s ice throne in places where fire does not melt snow… after being in a grief that cut down everyone in my family til we all were wandering skinless everywhere, and yet the sun still shined… on others. People laughed…others did laugh. But, we were buried behind the glass wall of grief ; we could see life going on all around, but we could not touch it, nor live it for a long long time.

Somehow each of my family in their own ways, learned to, as my daughter put it, not “get past’ it, but “learned to live with’ it… “it’ again needing a million words and no words at all to explain the kind of grief you can only speak of to those who are utterly trustable; those who can hold such crystalline Tezcatlipoca, smoking mirror of memoria-sorrow… without breaking the mirrors, without harming the ones already so broken…

Well, now we look at Big Boy Pepino and wonder, who among us is strong enough to be able to bear taking Pepino to go to sleep forever, to do what is right for him, yet without crashing backward right through that glass wall again and down into that pit of pain that renders even the marrow of the bones. Bone pain. Not purple prose. Real descriptors. For those who have been there.

We’ve just begun the discussion about: Who of us is sturdy enough, healed enough to be there for our valiant Dog, for his/ our last goodbyes which will be so many hugs; those paws on shoulders, his nails biting through our shirts? Who is able enough to bring the toy, be the familiar beloved voice, be the arms, rest the loving hand so these are the last things Pepino will remember as he goes… this creatural dog who in so many ways is a more perfect human being than any of us will ever be: loyal in love, sheltering of the vulnerable, more far-seeing, more all-out brave, more decisive, bold, forgiving, more funny and heartful. Which of my family can bear this, can best take the chance?

I have offered that it be me. I asked my sister yesterday would she come with me if this is the way it goes. She said yes immediately. That together, as my family decides, we would take Pepino. When it is time. We are the oldest, the elders of the family now. We have tucked in all of our beautiful and dear mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, and too, some of our young, to their last bedtimes, and rocked so many through their living slow while dying fast, and rowed so many across that final divide where living spirit is freed from worn body.

I didn’t want to become “old hand’ at these matters. But, I have. Even though the instructions on the box “How To Be An Elder,”are simple: “Be there for others as much as you can. Be there, and be there some more.’ It sounds so easy, but it takes cojones y ovarios. Big ones. Funny isn’t it, being an elder takes being more like the valiant creature: what did I say a brave “pet’ was made of? “Loyal in love, sheltering of the vulnerable, more far-seeing, more all-out brave, more decisive, bold, forgiving, more funny and heartful?”Yes, like that, in human proportion. No one is sprung full-born elder, like Aphrodite on the half-shell. I’m can see that I am working on it, finding the ways. Probably all the rest of my life long.

So, we’ll take it one day at a time, as it is said. We’ll keep Pepino as long as we can without harm to him, as long as his life is decent and he is not in pain. Then. Well whenever ‘then’ comes. I’ll try to ready my family, myself. There is no justifying, no rationalizing that can hold this as utilitarian; Pepino is our relative. That’s all there is to it. There are hours when I think, deep breath, I can do this. I can. There are other moments when everything I do, uncap my pen, fill a note page, wash black cherries, drive my pickup, sit in my chair, and still, no matter what, as Dana Patillo the poet wrote, “my eyes weep without me.”

And I wonder if that email that was a leaking between the worlds’ was prescient, that maybe we still have six more good months left yet with Pepino. Its still a good long time until Christmas, but my heart knows too that some dear souls, in necessity, are having Christmas right now, in July… that somewhere in time, Christmas, that time of The Return of sacred life out of darkness, is not pinned to December; it can free-float anywhere it is needed.

In that spirit, of new life returning, this comes with prayer for those who are grieving in any way… prayer strong enough for you to lean on. May we all be healed, strengthened, learn, and find meaning that matters to us.

©Creative Commons Lic. Dr. C.P. Estés, 2007