TOP DOG PRESS
TOP DOG PRESS
by
Skian McGuire
Grief,
as someone wrote, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the
next day it spins and then stops at loud and rageful, and the next it is wounded
keening, and the next day numbness, silence.
Anne
Lamott, Diving into the Wreckage
I have been thinking a lot about grief, this past week.
My
beloved friend and occasional naked love slave, who has been helping keep my
head above the waters, surprised me one day with a gift of listening matter,
recorded on CD and left in my car to play while I drive. It included many
wonderful things, but most apropos was Anne Lamott, whose writing gave me a deep
sense of “Yes, that is exactly it,” and I felt I was a human being among
human beings again, the way I sometimes do at Meeting for Worship, sitting in
silence with Friends. (This essay can be found in its entirety at http://www.salon.com/aug97/mothers/lamott970814.html
)
Grief is never very far away for me. Most of the time it’s only ankle deep,
something I wade in, hardly aware of its presence. Now I find myself awash in
it, barely able to keep my footing some days. Having decided I would not talk
about my relationships in this public venue, I won’t get into detail on the
proximate cause.
The
thumbnail version is this: I found, in a sudden overload of feeling, that I
could no longer stand the emotional pain of a formal BDSM relationship I had
entered into with a woman I still love and cherish, and I asked to be released.
It was only the formal bond that was crushing me under the weight of my own need
and expectations; I never meant to end anything else. But my love was so hurt
that she can no longer speak to me. If I could have had more sleep and not been
in such pain, if I could have thought of a better way to take care of myself –
maybe by saying, at that moment, that I needed to talk about the BDSM
relationship before I could keep taking part in it – I would not have hurt her
that way. And I wouldn’t be grieving a loss I don’t even know for sure is
lost yet.
That’s
what makes grief such a pisser, really – the human predilection for
anticipatory grief, for losses that have not actually occurred in reality, at
least not with finality, anyway. When I put my dog Fletcher down, at the age of
14 with no real use of his hind legs left in him, it was after anticipating and
grieving the anticipated loss for months. When it finally became clear that the
kindness was necessary, I made the appointment for the vet to come to the house
three weeks in advance. He would die at home, without fear, among familiar
smells and his packmates just outside, with me on the floor petting him and
telling him he was a good boy and how I loved him; I knew his suffering would be
the least it could possibly be, as he fell asleep one last time with my hands on
him and my voice in his ear. I cherished every day I had with him, and reminded
myself that he was still here, he was still alive, still with me, that the loss
hadn’t happened yet. I knew that when he was gone, he would not be in pain
anymore. None of that made any difference. Every day my heart broke. Every day.
And then he was gone (the vet cried, too) and the grief came up over my head and
swallowed me.
In the town where I work, there’s a family-owned garage where father and son
(with coordination and the tracking down of parts by Mom) have been taking care
of my cars for 17 years. Without them, I probably would not have been able to
keep my postal job, which requires that I supply a vehicle with which to deliver
the mail. I buy all my gas there, regardless of the cost, and they put me at the
head of the queue when my car breaks down. They fix my car while I case mail in
the morning and drop it off for me by the time I have to go serve my route. In
all these years, they have never charged me for as much time as they actually
spent doing the work. I can no longer count the times they’ve brought the
wrecker to haul me out of ditches or tow me back to the garage or even (in one
mortifying episode) to bring gas when I stupidly ran out, and they have never
charged me for the service. Not one dime. This past summer, when the old man got
sick and died, I spent days dripping tears on the TV Guides and phone bills and
supermarket circulars. I grieved because he might die, then I grieved because he
did die, and I can’t say I ever knew the man very well. He was kind to me,
that’s all, for a very long time, and I could not keep myself from weeping.
I
couldn’t explain it. My lover (who I am grieving now) said she’d heard
somewhere that every loss we suffer is not really a separate thing, but
something that builds on and remembers the last, an accretion of mourning,
resembling, maybe, the process by which an oyster builds a pearl. It made sense to me; it felt like that. It wasn’t just old
Ralph I’d lost, but everybody. Nipper, dog that was put to sleep with the
mange when I was 3, my Grampa who sang me Mairzy-doats in a brogue so
incomprehensible it took years to figure out the words, my father when I was 17,
whose death my sister announced to me with the words, “Daddy’s dead!” --
a name she hadn’t called him for years. It was my poor Grandmother
who’d outlived two husbands and a son and a great-grandson, and faded away in
a nursing home with nothing left to live for, dumped there by my father’s
squabbling survivors. It was my first dog Demmy and Fletcher, too, and cats and
acquaintances and my friend Cleary, with whom I’d done a boatload of beer and
meth, who killed herself in detox and now I will never know if I actually had
sex with her (that’s blackouts for you). It was every love I’d ever lost,
however doomed the relationship might have been from the start and however
better off I was without them. It was a pearl big enough to fucking choke on. Of
course I cried.
But
grief is never far away, even when there’s no immediate cause. The curse of
being human is that we live just as much in the past and the future as we do in
the present, remembering and anticipating with such vivid intensity that they
seem almost as real as the buttered toast and scrambled eggs getting cold on the
table in front of us. Now I have two old dogs of my own and another who
doesn’t belong to me but is just as beloved as if he did, and I can’t look
at them without knowing that every day I spend with them is stamped with an
ever-diminishing number. I look into the white face and rheumy eyes of my
beloved Gus, and my heart lurches, knowing What Comes Next, if not tomorrow or
the next day, then sometime soon, and how will I ever stand it?
And as for the past – I don’t remember who it was that said, “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.” Faulkner, maybe. Not even my mail route is immune from the overlay of past on present. So-and-so hasn’t lived in that house for at least a decade, but it seemed the most natural thing in the world to deliver a piece of his mail yesterday, and so I had to blink at it as I fingered it and carry it back with me to the office to be marked FOE – forwarding order expired. The house that used to stand on the corner of Dry Hill and Federal has been gone so long that grass has grown back where the foundation was, but a moment of dislocation occurs before I realize it’s missing, and I see for an instant the old woman of the house, sitting on the tailgate of a volunteer fireman’s pickup truck to weep while the firefighter in her turnout coat comforts her. Some days, I can hardly go around a corner without sideslipping time. Everywhere I go, are ghosts.
It’s mostly the ghosts of dogs. I notice dogs more than people as a rule, and I’m not joking when I say that I never recognize customers unless they’re standing beside their mailboxes or they’re with their dogs. Sometimes I drive up a road where my job used to be, for twelve years when I subbed on the route I have now, and I can’t keep myself from looking for Bowser, the black Lab with hip dysplasia who could make it to the bottom of the hill but not back up, to see if he needs a ride home. Or Tobey, an Afghan mix with very comical ears, who met my car every day to get a cookie until he vanished one fall during shotgun season. Or Sheba, the little husky who escorted me down the hill the winter day I rolled my mail car on the icy road, whose elderly human lived in a cabin without electricity or indoor plumbing. She didn’t have a car, either, and I drove her to the vet in my off hours, whenever one of the two dogs or seven cats needed it, and I took in two of the cats myself when she was too old to live alone anymore. The cabin is still there, falling in; it takes me a moment to realize what’s wrong with it. Sheba is long gone now, having lived to a good age in spite of epilepsy that set in later, after she went to live with a neighbor down the road. The neighbor was a good friend to me; she’s gone to live in Canada, now, but that doesn’t stop me looking for her, too. Not all the ghosts are dead ones, either. Not every loss is death.
Still, most of them are, and most of them are dogs. There’s Yarrow, the yellow Lab who came roaring out every day for a cookie, barking and snarling and drooling; when lymphoma took away his appetite I grilled him steak and brought it in baggies to feed to him, kneeling by the side of the car, and when he wouldn’t even take that I delivered the rest of my mail half-blind with tears, that day, and was glad to hear he died, three days later, and wasn’t suffering any more. I can’t stop looking for him, or Jemma, either, the rescued greyhound who went missing in her pretty plaid coat one March day. I scanned the barbed wire fences for days, while her people plastered the town with REWARD posters and consulted psychics, and it was me in the end who spotted a flash of buckle under the water of the neighbor’s pond, when the ice thawed two weeks later.
There are so many of them, everywhere I go. I still half expect to see the doddering ancient Heather out walking with her human, an old maiden lady who lives comfortably on her telephone company pension, who broke her arm falling on the ice one very bad winter. I stopped every day for weeks to give the dotty old black Lab a mid-day walk, and her human has had two dogs since, but it’s Heather I look for. Like Frank T. Dogg, the yellow Lab who got his own junk mail, or the big chow whose name I never learned, who howled all night and finally roused the neighbors when his old man had a heart attack, and who was put to sleep the day after the funeral by the old man’s daughter because her kids were afraid of him. Every time I go by, I can see the old man leaning on his cane with the panting chow pressed against his knee, holding up the other side, out on the lawn the summer they died. I still cry. I would have taken your dog, Mr. Newton, I want to tell him, if only I’d known. But I suppose it’s for the best, I tell myself; the dog loved him better than his daughter ever did. They’re together in the Summer Country, if such a thing exists. I hope it does. It’s something I think of sometimes, to keep from drowning in the grief as I peddle mail amongst the ghosts, day after day after day, all these seventeen years.
Ghosts. Past and present and future ghosts. I look up from my computer and see sleeping dogs and cats around me, and I can’t help knowing that someday I’ll be looking on the still form of each as I say goodbye. There’s too much grief, ankle-deep and waist-deep and rising up to swallow me. I don’t know how anyone can stand it, when everyone you care for is bound to break your heart, unless you’re lucky enough to die first.
I would have thought, the older I got, the less grief would plague me, the more used to death I was. It could not be further from the truth. Partly I suppose it’s just that I cry more easily now, having had the floodgates pried open by love and aberrant hormones. But really, it must be a process of accretion. The grief gets deeper, and now I can never find dry ground.
“I feel stupid,” I told my lover, hardly able to speak on the phone, when old Ralph died. “I don’t know why I’m so choked up, I hardly knew the man. It’s just that he was a nice man. He was nice to me.” He always had a joke and a smile. He was kind. He loved dogs. When his son’s dog Rowdy died, they all took it hard. When there was a new dog who needed rescue -- a mutt who’d been badly burnt as a puppy that Ralphie (the son) and his wife Debbie nursed back to health – she seemed to be just as much the old man’s as the son’s. After he went into the hospital, his liver failed, the dog laid on her bench in the office and hardly lifted her head when I came in; “Rusty misses her Grampa,” Debbie told me. And now, when I see her there, I can’t help but think of that. I miss him, too.
I went to the old man’s calling hours and saw the body in the casket, a creation of the mortician’s art and nothing like the man who lived. The funeral home was crowded, with a line of mourners that took hours to pass through, paying their respects. The coffin was adorned with a few final gifts, a teddy bear and such, that it must have given grandchildren much comfort to offer. I wished I was brave enough to slip a dog cookie in his folded hands, myself, to take to Rowdy. I like to think of them together now, in some green place, walking together. I like to think of myself that way, when I come to the end of my days, returned to the ones whose love I was always sure of, who never asked me to be anything but what I was.
The grief gets deep enough to swim in; we learn to swim, because we have to. We can’t refuse to love, just because someday we’ll risk drowning in grief. We can’t sit safe in our houses transfixed by television because we’re afraid the world outside might stress us out. We can’t save ourselves one iota of pain by avoiding it, because pain, that sneaky devil, will just come around behind and kick us in the ass. Turn away from someone else’s pain to save yourself, and get it back in the face when they’re gone. Loved ones die, and they will never be replaced, but new ones come along to love, and we give it another go because otherwise we might as well be ghosts ourselves.
I went to a workshop at last year’s Fetish Flea; it was given by the incomparable Dossie Easton, on shadowplay. She said that sometimes play is more than just play, that so much of our nature is hidden in the shadow, unwanted and feared and ignored and rationalized out of existence, sometimes BDSM can’t help but touch on it, intense as it is. She was of the opinion that BDSM play that deliberately uses the shadowed parts of our natures can be therapeutic -- transformative even. (While still being hot sweaty fun – this is sex, we’re talking about, after all.)
For me, being helpless is shadowplay. Things that remind me of my childhood abuse, much of which still hides behind the wall of occluded memory, are intensely difficult, but when I engage in BDSM play that touches on them, they become less difficult. Like enduring physical pain, and proving to myself that I am stronger and bigger and more durable than the pain, being helpless and not being rejected proves something words alone can never tell me. The thing is, sometimes shadowplay is too hard. Sometimes a scene doesn’t work, and rather than say, “This is no good, I can’t do it,” the thing is to try again. Bite off a smaller chunk to chew. If it’s still too big, spit it out, but maybe, someday, try again, with a smaller bite. Keep doing it until you have something you can swallow. Because you will be fed by it; you will grow.
Ghosts don’t grow. Life is for growing.
I have lived with the same woman for almost 22 years. It has not always been a picnic. She would, I’m sure, say the same. I suppose any number of times I could have decided it was just too much for me, too much was broken, too much was missing; so could she. We held on and kept trying, with new expectations, maybe, taking a smaller bite of whatever the thing was that choked us. Shadowplay. Loved ones die, and you leave yourself open to love again, and that’s shadowplay, too, dancing at the edges of that great shadow, that great dark ocean of grief. Relationships end, and maybe you make the whole doomed trip again, with someone else, or maybe a relationship doesn’t end, and you get to try another foray into the shadow, with someone you don’t have to get to know from A. It’s hard making yourself do any of it, when everything is doomed and nobody gets out of this alive, and you’re tumbling in a wave of grief that’s trying to suck you under. It’s all shadowplay.
That Lazy Susan of grief that Anne Lamott wrote about has turned about fifteen times today. I’m tired of it. Everything is sad. I don’t remember what dry land is anymore. I don’t remember ever standing on it, even from when I was small and all I had to cope with was a father who hit people. When I was five, my mother had a back injury so severe that she spent nine weeks in the hospital and was lucky, in the end, to be able to walk. I don’t remember, but I am told that I thought she was dead. So just before Christmas, my father and sister and the hospital arranged that I should go to visit her. Children were not allowed in hospitals, back then – 1963. They dressed me in Sunday clothes and new shoes that hurt. I remember walking down the long ward, the beds lining either side, the Christmas decorations, the women all watching me and saying hello and some of them crying, no doubt missing their own little ones. And my mother, way at the end of the row, holding out her arms to me, and crying, herself. She was not dead. But I had already learned what grief was. Twenty-five years later, I started trying to put the pieces together of my broken childhood – a hard job with so many pieces missing. It’s only recently that I could look at that memory again, grieving as I always do to think of it, and understand what I’m grieving. It was one of the last times I would ever know my mother loved me.
Sometimes I think I can’t stand any more of it. I’ll drown in it. But I don’t. And the damned Lazy Susan turns again.
v v v
Heaven
by Skian McGuire
Heaven is full of horse droppings; also cow droppings, and interesting, fragrant droppings from exotic creatures never known on earth. Heaven is full of slow pigeons and chipmunks who do not know how to climb trees. Cats in Heaven do not have claws. They enjoy being chased. Bitches in Heaven appreciate noses rooting under their tails, and return the sentiment. In Heaven, roadkill turns immediately ripe, perfect either to eat or to roll in. There are no leashes. Car windows are always down. In Heaven, every time is dinnertime, except when it's breakfast, served by loving hands that taste of salt and smell of gossip, accompanied by barking. Barking is everywhere. Joyful barking for heralding adventure. Serious, heroic barking that announces and terrifies intruders, making them turn tail and run in quivering abject fear. Barking to answer distant barking, of mysterious import, calling far-off news. But especially, glad barking to welcome the beloved, for in Heaven it is always homecoming, always the shaking off of snow and the rubbing of faces on familiar chairs, rolling on unmade beds, always head-scritching and tail-scratching, side-thumps, tickle-spots, my silly fat old baby, my good boy, my good dog Fletcher, my heart, my love. Always the one high happy yip, seal-like, the bell tone Here-I-am! There-you-are! of forever-puppy glee that is here no more on this quiet Earth, that I can hear no more until I turn the knob in Heaven.
Ó Skian McGuire 2005
