this is me, preparing

(everything is happening so fast)

We’re at the vet and I’m trying not to cry so I’m doing that thing I have done since I was little where I dig my nails into the side of my arm, under my sleeve. My dog, Mags/Maggie/Magnolia can’t stand up or she doesn’t want to. Both, probably.

It took us five minutes to walk from the parking lot to the front door of the clinic, and halfway across the sidewalk, she started shitting blood and bile right there on the sidewalk. On Fairfax during rush hour when everyone had nothing else to do but stare.

I tried to wash it away with my water bottle but there was too much of it and two teenage boys were like, “ew gross” so I kept apologizing to everyone because what does one even say in that situation. I knew she was dying then, too. I knew she was dying the night I came home from Seattle and she couldn’t stand up to say hello.

The vet thinks she’s closer to 13. She was supposed to be 2 or 3 when we adopted her but really she was more like 5 or 6 which is why we fell in love with her, probably. She had lived a mother fucking life before she wound her way into ours. (My kinda woman.)

He points to a series of x-rays and tells me what he thinks is happening based on the clouds and the shadows and I nod my head in the darkness, keep pinching, do not cry. He tells me there’s nothing he can do except offer her some heart medication that may or may not help keep her heart from failing but he tells me it’s probably cancer in its last stage and that her organs are likely failing which would explain the blood and everything else that has suddenly happened

“I think her organs are starting to fail,” he tells me.

And I can’t stop playing those words over and over in my head, picturing an actual organ, as in the instrument, exploding.

“Let’s see where she’s at in 48 hours,” he tells me and I thank him and ask Mags if she’s ready to go. She’s sprawled on the floor and slowly gets up and I think about how, just one week ago, I would have pulled on her leash, like, come on, hurry up. But now… I just wait. I wait and feel terrible for ever having pulled her leash at all.

I pay for her appointment at the front desk in silence and think of all the people who come to the veterinarian’s office and pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for bad news. The woman ringing up my card is laughing with the other woman behind the counter. They are exchanging inside jokes and because I’m signing my receipt and can’t pinch my arm, the tears are coming but I smile and say thank you and say, “come on, Mags, let’s go.”

Outside, I step over the mess of bloody shit and iced water and burst into tears.

We don’t know how long she has but I tell the kids right away that she’s dying, one at a time because their schedules are all staggered and I don’t want to wait until tonight. Because I know they’re all going to need me to break the news in different ways.

The pain I feel for their loss is so much bigger than any feeling I can process right now. I know how much she means to them. How vital to our family she has been.

The vet prescribed her some medicine that might make the swelling in her heart go down and I started giving it to her right away but she still isn’t eating. Feels insane to give her medication but more insane not to, I guess. When it’s up to you to play god, it’s hard to know what kind of god is the most humane.

I want to keep her alive, but…

I don’t want her to suffer, but…

I fucking hate playing god.

And yet, for the last three days I’ve wrapped the pills with meat and rubbed her throat to swallow. I have removed all the rugs from the house one by one, covered in urine and bilebloodshit, now outside to dry.

My son plays her music from the piano, and I think, look at this. We gave her a lovely life, didn’t we. Full of love and music. But also, there is an expiration date to this scene and I can’t not sniff the milk of it all. Hide my sobs in the sleeves of my sweatshirt.

“Mom?”

It’s okay. I’m okay.

The day I brought Magnolia home in the Fall of 2016, she climbed into my lap, all seventy pounds of her and fell asleep. A month later Hillary Clinton lost the election and I wrapped myself around her and didn’t move for several days.

She was with us through Hal’s diagnosis and death, sleeping every night with a different daughter. Same during the isolation year, and even now, her bed is on the trundle next to the bottom bunk. She has followed me around our house, whimpered outside the bathroom door, slept at my feet under my desk for every word published, rode shotgun with me on every road trip… She has been, no hyperbole, the greatest dog I’ve ever known.

One of my daughters doesn’t want to think about it. Steps over what appears to be urine on the hardwood floor. Groans frustratingly when she realizes some of it has gotten on her sock.

“Mom. I think Maggie peed again.”

Okay, one sec.

We all hold grief differently, me and my kids and you and the world. Some of us want to look the dying in the eye, hold its hand, stroke its ears. I’m that way, for sure. But I also feel paralyzed when I look at a thing and know it will be different soon.

There is nothing heavier than the mundanity of an afternoon when you recognize its finite. That everything is changing and dying and growing up and somehow you have no control over any of it even though you still have to make all of these decisions.

I’m talking about Maggie but I’m also talking about my son, in his last months of youth, playing piano after school on a Tuesday afternoon. I want to live inside this moment. I want to hold onto it with both hands. I watch them both like a piece of paper in Back to the Future, knowing that their letters will disappear.

And then yesterday, the same son, got his first college acceptance letter. I took the girls to Goodwill to go shopping to cheer them up and that’s when he called me with the news.

“Mom. I got in.”

You got in!?

And I am so happy for him that I’m screaming in Goodwill and the girls are like, Mom shhhhh you’re embarrassing us. And then I attempt to race home to him, but this is LA and it’s 5pm and we’re stopped in traffic and then I realize the reason we’re stopped is because there is a car that has flipped over on its side and it’s in the middle of the road. And the driver must have climbed out the window without his shoes on because there is a man without shoes on just standing there like something out of a dream.

And the scene of the accident just happens to be directly across the street from the scene of a different accident: the blood stain on the sidewalk in front of the veterinarian’s office. A sort of emotional ground-zero of everything that is happening right now.

Archer is waiting in the hallway back at home and we tear through the house to congratulate him and I’m hugging him and we’re so proud and in the corner of my eye, Maggie is lying on her bed with the sheet still over her back and I can’t not look at her from my man-sized son’s shoulder. Can’t not see her when I close my eyes. They are both going to leave us in different ways and I can’t not connect the two.

There is no bigger loneliness than pulling away from an embrace and understanding, from all angles, what that means. The hearts pressed together, then pulled apart. The fading in against the out.

When something in your home is dying it brings the future into the present in a way non-dying things don’t. Grief is a tagged moment, even when it’s in motion. A row of one-way spikes in a parking lot. Can’t reverse or your tires will pop.

“Mom. What if she dies in her sleep.”

That would be ideal, actually.

I wish she could just die in her sleep.

But I know what’s coming.

I’ve been here before.

Had to decide when it was time… I don’t feel like it is yet but maybe I’m wrong. It just happened so fast and I wasn’t prepared so this is me trying. This is me preparing.

I am writing this on the hardwood floor as close as I can sit with her and she doesn’t seem to be in pain so I guess I’ll just stay here until I can’t anymore.

Which is what she’s probably thinking, too.

Is that what you’re thinking, too?

“Mom?”

And everything that is happening is so big right now. Life-changing shit. Which is when I feel the most small. I have good news and I have bad news, what do you want to hear first. Trick question because it all bleeds together on the side of the road beside the upside down car that needs a tow truck to flip it over.

Quick, someone call Triple A.

“Mom!”

Yeah, I know. I’m coming.

I’ll be right there.