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Archive for the ‘death’ Category

Maybe it’s silly, but I’m totally crying over the thoroughly unsurprising news of her death. Looks like she secured her place in the tragic 27 club.

On my way to the cabin this morning, I almost hit a wee little fawn. It may actually have bounded into the side of my wheel but still been okay enough to bounce off and go away in a safer direction.

One block later I saw some crows feasting on a dead rabbit on the side of the road which made the idea of killing a deer less traumatic, even if a spotted baby. Especially when I think that it’s highly likely (or am I exaggerating?) I will someday hit an animal while driving. Better something small that won’t also kill or injure us upon impact, right?

I’m actually not even sure it’s the idea of killing an animal that bothers me. What I think I’m really anxious about is what I’m supposed to do afterward. Ideally the animal would obviously be dead and clearly not somebody’s pet so I could just leave. I mean, I *think* you can just leave or can you? I’m also not sure if it would be genuinely hard for me to put an animal out of its misery or if I’m just afraid someone will catch me doing it the wrong way. And what the fuck am I thinking I would do? Would I stomp on a baby deer’s head or what? I wouldn’t even know where to look in our vehicle for an implement to deliver a killing blow. What if I bashed in a baby deer’s head when all it had was broken legs and another person would have taken it to the wildlife rescue people to put four long skinny white casts on it? What if someone sees me walking away from something they think it’s wrong to walk away from? What if it turns out I don’t know the difference between right and wrong at all?

There are way too many deer in our town. What difference does it make in the grand scheme of life, anyway? Why do I spend time thinking about cradling deer heads in my lap while I watch the light go out of their dumb pretty brown eyes?

I know you’re supposed to call the cops to “dispatch” the animal, though. I don’t want to sit around with a hurt animal waiting for help, but I guess if it’s in town it wouldn’t take that long. But what if we’re in the middle of nowhere? What if we have no phone reception? What if I don’t have a phone at all? Do I pick it up and take it somewhere to be euthanized or doctored up if mendable? What if it’s too big to move or if it’s so broken up it’s all falling apart in chunks? Is that how I relieve it of its pain? By ripping it in two? Or is that the effort that brings the reality of the situation home? When is it worth it to be covered with an animal’s blood and guts? Would I tell somebody, “I’m sorry I left your pet on the side of the road but I’m allergic to cats and couldn’t pick it up to bring it home to you?”

Why do I waste time thinking about things? Why is my mind so occupied with fears?

Why don’t we have a gun in our car? Why don’t I have emergency numbers programmed into my phone? Why don’t I know the name of the road I’m on and the cross street and my location on the map?

*****

Last night on a longish drive home I  wondered out loud to Delia, “have we seen any owls this year?”

No.

Three minutes later an owl flew across the road in front of us into the trees. With her wings rowing through the air the headlights made a strobe effect because of the white of her body and under her wings compared to the darker on top.

I hope I never hit an owl. But for some reason I feel like I know exactly what the right things would be to do if that ever were to befall us.

Why don’t I always have a thick blanket with me to wrap around someone that’s hurt and scared so they won’t bite off my nose or scratch off my skin when I try to help them?

*****

Sometimes I think I’m really helpless and stupid and don’t have the answers to anything useful or important or the right tools for the job.

I don’t even know where the fuck I am.

*****

Someone we know died last night and in the interest of making “normal” conversation I forgot that her death is finally a good thing, and nobody needs or wants us to be sorry that her friends were with her as she left. I forgot that it would have been okay to smile with relief when our friend told me and to hug her with celebration instead of loss.

*****

Yesterday our friend showed us something really complex he’s been working really hard on for months. It’s a teaching tool to help people make better decisions under trying conditions to dispatch the enemy with as little collateral damage as possible. In the example they are trying to maintain freedom of movement on a key route.

This is a metaphor for the rest of it but a whole lot more than that, too.

I’m incorrectly paraphrasing our friend, but most people like us have no idea what most people like them go through and what they’re like, and maybe don’t even think of them as people in the same way they think of each other, which makes them pompous hypocrites.

I’m still learning a lot from yesterday and today and right now. I even just cried and I think it was good for me.

Now I’m just going to try to “do the next right thing” which is probably a lot easier (and definitely more useful) than fantasizing about things I’m afraid of and listing all of the things I DON’T know how to do or fix or heal or change or bury.

Nico was fifteen years old and people STILL frequently asked if she was a puppy — so pretty and smaller than people expect Siberian Huskies to be (even though she was normal-size for a female husky). But if they watched her walking from the hind end they’d understand she was an old girl. She started to look like an elderly woman hobbling doggedly with a walker, dragging her hind legs stiffly forward one at a time after reaching forward to brace herself with her two front legs.

Eat as Many Treats as You Want!!

There *was* a choice of whether or not now was the right time to put her to sleep. I’m aware that there are people who would’ve put her down a lot sooner and others who would have let this stretch out forever with doggy diapers and thousands of dollars in vet bills. I’m aware that we might have made this decision for ourselves as much as for her and that I’ve been able to absolve myself of any guilt because she was really Delia’s dog and her decision to make based on twice as many years with her and a lot more love. I’m also aware that Delia gave her a good life and that she’s a HUSKY, and she couldn’t do her husky things anymore – there hadn’t been ululations for a year or more and her sickle tail was permanently drooped into brush-mode. She was confused (at times heartbreakingly comically so, like when she would stand at the hinge of the door waiting to be let out of the bedroom when the door was already open INCHES away from where she’d fixed her gaze – it WAS funny, though sad) and her mobility profoundly decreased. She’d been losing her balance (or her legs just gave out) while she pooped and would often fall over then finish pooping while lying on her side.

Anyway, there was a lot of stuff and seeing blood in her gelatinous-with-mucous diarrhea Saturday night was the clarifying symptom that it was TIME even though it hadn’t been that many days since she ran through the house as much as she could, yipping both in pain and excitement, not able to NOT force herself to go as fast as possible even after wiping out twice trying to navigate the corner between one hallway and another. If it were any other kind of dog you’d think I was describing a very fit and healthy animal, but huskies are just that awesomely driven to RUN and defy every limitation imposed on them.

So we decided to make her last two days full of good things, like her last walk in the woods. It was very very slow and the smallest hills were like giant mountains to her. She even looked at one incline so wearily that she turned around, like “just take me back to the car because I’m DONE”.

Nico's Last Walk in the Woods

During and after making the decision I’ve felt a variety of emotions: excitement looking forward to freedom and possibilities, relief, uncertainty, guilt, confusion, sadness, loss, worry . . .

Our beautiful companion's fur, walking slowly

Two women came to our house to do it after Nico had two days of walks and lots of her favorite soft peanut-butter treats and lots of love and attention lavished on her. The vet and her assistant were loving and gentle and pleasant and thoughtful and smooth and patient and respectful.

Small and short-lived.

The hardest part was the hour before they got here when we were waiting. Everything was ready, Nico was totally worn out, and there was nothing to do except know that she was about to be gone and didn’t even know what was coming (I think Delia felt more confident that Nico did actually know and was fully prepared and welcoming – either way is actually pretty sweet).  I wouldn’t trade that hour of waiting for rushing around or not experiencing that weird duality of tranquility on the outside and guts churning on the inside, though.

Waiting for the vet to come

During the process I felt a fast cycling of emotions of calm, euphoria, gratitude and resignation sort of like when I was in a car crash and had a few seconds to emotionally prepare myself to die and then was elated when I survived. But with this there were also overwhelmingly intense guts-in-the-throat needing to bawl emotions like when I was with my dad during his death.

How beautiful and floppy and light her dead body looked wrapped in a blanket with her gorgeous face exposed and then her front legs tumbling out. The looseness and complete lack of worry. The weird exciting sense of potential like you could reanimate her, so fresh and ready with all of the soreness and stiffness she’d been suffering from magically erased. She really did look like new life (and none of these pictures are communicating the reality of any of this, or at least my perceptions and experiences of these days). She was so so so beautiful.

No more breath, no more heartbeat.

*****

Helping Nico die and being present for it helped me with my dad’s death, to process it more and remember it and grieve more freely and more fast. It’s been eight years, but I really didn’t know a lot about how to be with his death and my feelings about it so it’s been a very long and protracted experience. Watching Nico die — feeling her die, touching her dying and dead — I feel spiritually more at ease than I did when confronted with my dad’s final moments. Maybe my idea of peace is wider and simpler than I must have wished for back then. Maybe my expectations for myself are lower than they were then. I don’t know, but I’m glad for it.

I am an imperfect witness, not a bumbling guide stuck with the horrible responsibility of having taken someone I loved on a journey to a brick wall on a dead end. Maybe I’m getting to be okay with nothing being perfect and not being in control and just appreciating the long moments I’ve had to absorb the profoundly ordinary in all of its individual rarity and treasure it and bask in my blessings. My dad is one of a few people I’ve had telepathic experiences with (even if they were probably more accurately described as intuitive communication or whatever) so maybe I thought I failed by not knowing what he was trying to tell me at the end or that I failed by crying and possibly making him sad or worried during his last minutes of life. There’s a lot less pressure with a dog and it was more okay with me that we were all together but alone at the same time.

The Incredible Machine

Like with my dad it took a number of minutes for her to stop all the way. “She’s not breathing anymore but she still has a very faint heartbeat”. For like four minutes. When we were kids Daddy bought us lots of National Geographic books. One of my favorites that may have impacted my worldview more than any other was “The Incredible Machine” about how humans are all electrical and mechanical and stuff. I never absorbed facts and information the way my sister could (it’s amazing how we had the same books at home and the body of knowledge her brain constructed out of them is so vastly different — and more vast in general — than mine) so what I retained from it is just a philosophy that I might not find in it if I were to read it today, but that might have been the first book I ever read to give me a celebratory nontheistic way of looking at life that was deliciously SPACE AGE eighties-style, like 3-2-1 Contact and synthesizers and stuff.

While Nico was dying it started raining and we were glad it waited until then, not starting until after her last three walks and other quiet time outside. That night the smell of the evergreens after the rain was magnified to supernatural proportions and for a minute I enjoyed imagining that Nico bestowed an enriched sense of smell on us as a parting gift.

Then I stopped wasting brain juice on that and just focused on vacuuming up as much scent as I could with each inhalation, tasting wet green dogless walks in the future moonlight, just me and my girlfriend.

*****

Delia and I have been living together for almost eight years (the first time she told me she loved me was the day my dad died). It’s a significant chunk of time as far as human measurements go but also . . . brief. Losing Nico is another transition for our relationship and maybe I have the feeling like I will contribute more as a partner now. Nico was rooted in so many years of history and two other serious relationships for Delia so she was never really “my” dog; I don’t mean that in a bitter or unloving or detached way . . . it was my way of copping out of taking care of her fully so that I didn’t clean up as much poop or let her in and out as often or get her food ready. I’m excited that we’re entering another stage together and that it’s happening now.

Pair of Trillium

I can’t complain . . . I really can’t complain or regret this loss or wish for any of it to be different. I can’t say that I wish we didn’t have to go through this or that she could have lived forever. Of all the ways of dying and lives and chunks of years of experiences out there to be had, I’d say this death and these years and our lives have been blessed, relatively comfortable with relatively little pain, and filled with pleasure. Am I still bursting into tears? Yeah, but I can’t complain.

I totally have spring fever. We can go anywhere! Do anything! The light in our house looks different. The pretending-to-be-a-grownup feeling is back when I go into my office. Maybe just because everything is intensified after so many intense days? I don’t know, but this is the first time in all these years we can leave the doors wide open and not be afraid that Nico will run away. It’s not that a husky doesn’t love her people, SHE’S JUST PROGRAMMED TO RUN AWAY FROM YOU!!

*****

Check out Delia’s post with more pictures of Nico and background. Contrasting pics of her in her younger days really shows how much she changed physically over the years, plus it’s really interesting to read/see more about Delia!

*****

Note: I feel EXTREMELY fortunate we had a way to pay for her to be ushered out so gently with at-home euthanasia; not everybody is so lucky. Humanely ending an animal’s life is really expensive for most people and doing it yourself is something most people aren’t equipped for (and legally/socially is a prime example of some really interesting double-standards, misunderstandings and class differences in our country). Anyhoo, if you love your pet and can afford to do it this way when the time comes, I’d recommend it as being well worth the extra money (if you can swing it) to have that special time at home and is worth finding out in advance what vets (or other people?) can help you with this when the time comes. I also feel extremely fortunate that my dad died in hospice which is much more like dying at home than like dying in a  hospital, but better than dying at home maybe. I loved it, and think it’s hugely important to be able to spend time with your dead loved one for hours, if you’re lucky enough to have that option and the kind of death you get to see coming.

Just a quick note:

We’re spending a little quality time with our dog while we can, plus our main internet connection has been down all day (apparently I am the only one in our town with this problem) so most of our cams have been down with it. We still have spycams up in the bedroom on this page on the last profile (scroll down to SpyOnUsGals), though.

If you happen to see crying, well . . . that’s life. We’ve also got some doctor appointments for ourselves coming up and a bunch of serious housecleaning we NEED to do, for a variety of reasons (example: our dog is SICK). I’ll post more later, etc. In the meantime I’m not really doing much with email, twitter, the phone, etc. so you probably will not be hearing from me this week. There is some newish stuff in my NEW members-only blog, though!

Normally I love fall, but it took so long for winter to go away this year that I’ve actually been apprehensive about letting go of the summer. Fortunately, we’ve had an extended Indian summer. Last week I *thought* it was over one night when I found myself craving heat, but this week it’s back. Sunny yesterday, sunny today . . . and clear for viewing the full moon last night and crone moon tonight.

It’s also been spider season with one lady in residence in our line of vision from bed in the corner of our sliding glass door:

Spider Lady & Half Moon

She’s been there every day and I know we should get rid of her big egg sac or we’ll have shitloads of spiders in our bedroom, but I haven’t been able to do that to her. I love seeing her there at least once a day and/or night. It doesn’t seem like the best place to have a web with us sliding the door open and closed and some of her anchors being attached to it. But I guess there’s no spot to weave a web that is completely invulnerable.

Lamp-lit spider on web.

Our dog’s much better after her trip to the vet’s. The x-rays didn’t show any arthritis but part of her spine had some degeneration, probably from aging in an area of past trauma which Delia thinks must have been from a time when she was a young dog and made a quick break out of the door of their house straight into the side of a moving car on a busy road, bounced off said car, then ran back inside never appearing any worse for the wear.

There have been times in the past nine months where Nico has seemed so old and uncomfortable and tired — and she IS old. Fourteen, I think. Everyone thinks she’s a puppy because she’s a runt of a husky and looks so young, up until recently when you see her walk, especially watching her from behind and her whole hind end just takes so much awkward effort to move. SOMETIMES. But if she’s excited? She’ll still bound and bounce and run around the house like crazy, even though, to me, her yips of excitement sound tinged with pain. I don’t think anything but the most debilitating pain can stop a husky from doing her husky things, so when we started noticing her having real problems has been at night when she can barely lie down and whimpers/cries like a squeaky wheel, circling around and around before painfully lowering herself down.

Anyway, the vet put her on prednisone, a steroid, which seems to be helping quite a bit. We took her on walks in the woods the past couple of days, which she loved even if she’s slowed down a lot since I met her and Delia seven years ago. Now her pace is really pleasant and companionable. She still runs ahead a little bit, but there are times when she actually walks right beside us, or takes breaks so she’s always close by.

Watching her yesterday on the trail looking so much better than she has in a couple of months I thought about how long it took for my dad to die and how unprepared I was for that. How there were so many times where I was impatient for it to happen already, for all of us to be put out of our misery of waiting, and then having days where he was present and I was so happy he was still around and it didn’t seem possible he was anywhere NEAR ready. At least, not nearly as ready as I recently had been. I feel that way a lot with Nico where I can’t help contemplating the convenience of her death one day when she seems uncomfortable, lethargic, and droopy-faced, then feeling overjoyed the next with how well she’s doing — how alert and happy she is, how it’s so not time yet — how YOUNG (for her age) she looks.

My ninth grade (and seventh grade) English teacher did something pretty fucking progressive and unheard-of for kids as young as we were in a public school: she taught us a section on Death and Dying. Practical planning stuff about funerals and wills, the Kubler Ross stages of grief, and of course literature like some story about a brave young man  with a brain tumor (title escapes me, but not the memory of how much I disliked that book) and one I’m forever grateful for being exposed to and having TAUGHT to me (not just read on my own), The Plague.

I remember all of us talking about what we wanted to happen to our bodies after we died and everyone laughing when I said I wanted to be dressed up like the Chiquita Banana Lady and thrown into the woods to rot and be scavenged by animals. Since then I’ve changed my mind, partly because I loved my dad’s funeral including seeing him all dressed up in his coffin that we picked out with special things tucked in to go with him, including stuffed animals that were ours, but that he kept after we outgrew them. I was shocked by how much I did not want his eyes to be plucked out for harvesting; I’d assumed he was ineligible for donating because of his glaucoma (which he was, but they weren’t aware of it so the question was posed to me anyway) and I was just totally unprepared by the topic even coming up even though of course we are all listed as organ donors, but MORE unprepared by how viscerally opposed I was to having his body — especially his eyes — taken out of him when I’d been looking into them MINUTES before that.

So. Aside from it being illegal to throw costumed dead women into the woods, I realize people have emotional, albeit irrational, attachments to the bodies of loved ones and I’ve even become attached the IDEA of my own dead body and perhaps want a more traditional type of ritual to accompany me to my final resting spot. Plus I’m extremely fond of coffins.

I asked Delia if she knows if people can come to our house to put Nico to sleep when the time comes so she can be at home and we can bury her. Delia said she’d prefer to take her to the vet’s. When I heard that I experienced another one of those irrational, emotional reactions (especially since Nico is really DELIA’S dog, not mine) of not being able to bear the thought of taking her to a place she’s afraid of and have to die there. I know it’s over fast, but having done that (thankfully only once and with a kitten we’d hardly had for any time at all) the drive there is just too fucking sad and crying your heart out in a clinic standing around in that sterile setting is just not the ideal to me. I am so glad my dad died in hospice where we got to hang out with his dead body for a few hours afterward (I probably wouldn’t have understood it before, but that is incredibly comforting and helpful, not to have to be seperated physically from each other right away), but obviously a seventy year old parent is pretty different from a fourteen year old pet.

We’re all smart enough to know that television and movies are inaccurate and unrealistic, but I personally never realized how much until my dad took years to die, and then again especially during the days and hours surrounding his actual death. I felt and still feel very unprepared for the process of death by aging and protracted illness. My mind is still boggled by the concept that all of us, if we are lucky, have to watch our parents die. I don’t feel like I was taught to expect that or how to process that even though I’ve probably been given more tools and experiences to deal with that than most post-baby-boom American kids have. I’d had friends who lost parents way too young and I knew it was devastating to them and in some cases they even talked about it a little, but not nearly enough to ever intimate exactly how huge that loss was. I and my dad were not too young, it wasn’t a tragedy, and it’s still hard and has taken SO LONG. I mean, it’s still not over for me. I’m still shocked by the revelation that death is never over or never not coming and that it’s VISIBLE and active for So. Many. Years. I’m trying to accept that with Nico . . . even to use her as practice and I am flummoxed at how ill-prepared I still am . . . how disbelieving, impatient, sad, and scared I am in spite of feeling that’s not really in my nature. I feel like I’m the kind of person who should be able to embrace aging-towards-death gracefully, with serenity instead of blubbering.

I don’t even know how my mom has handled the past thirteen years, seeing her own dad’s decline and death, living with and taking care of my dad/her ex-husband (they continued to have a fond and extremely helpful dysfunctional relationship even after his death), packing up the house she grew up in and moving her mom out of it and into first one home, then another, and now a third offering an even higher level of care. I really do not fucking know. I don’t think she really knows either, but I know it’s a lot harder for her than she’s gotten help for, and my distance from her doesn’t help. What I still idiotically fail to GRASP is how this is THIS LARGE a part of life. Because tv never taught me that and even though my family has always talked openly about these things and plans for when we die, I still can’t remember exactly what I’m supposed to do with my mom’s ashes and I still can’t believe that IF I AM *LUCKY*, I will live through many more loved ones’ deaths. I read so many young adult books about death — GOOD books about a girl whose dad was shot about a kid with Lou Gehrig’s disease about drug addicted kids . . . about pretty much every kind of unanticipated death you or someone you know could have but not so much about the deaths we all aspire to without any proper planning.

What is the life span of a spider? I have no clue. I am still trying to brace myself for the day this season when I look out the window and in the cracks around the sides and she’s not there and doesn’t come back.

Everyone’s been talking about Bettie Page’s recent death. I felt almost guiltily unphased by it, especially considering that I cried when I heard Bernie Mac died.

Tonight I burst into tears upon reading that Majel Barrett (Gene Roddenberry’s wife) passed away.

I’m a latecomer to Star Trek; even though the original series did make an impression on me as a little kid, it was of alien go-go boot sexiness and little else. It was only after Delia and I watched Trekkies that I got drawn in and we watched all of Next Generation from beginning to end. Gene and Majel Roddenberry’s work and values have come to mean a lot to me; I’m thankful and inspired by the positive and progressive ways Star Trek depicts gender, sexuality, aging and ethics.

Whenever I see Majel on tv, a burst of love, appreciation and adoration swells up inside of me and I SCREAM it to her.

Her characters are inspirations to me and the work she and Gene Roddenberry did together and legacy they’ve left behind are models of working relationships, vision, humanitarianism and hope that make me feel richer, happier, and better about myself and other people.

We’ll miss you, Majel.

When people make fun of The Golden Girls I always experience a wave of cognitive dissonance; they dismiss it as something “old” and irrelevantly feminine when I never did and WILL never perceive it that way at all. For me? The Golden Girls was a groundbreakingly progressive, hysterically funny, humanist show. Sitcom television at its very best next to a few others on my list: Laverne & Shirley, The Office, Married with Children and maybe a couple others. In terms of sitcoms having a major inspiring influence on me, The Golden Girls might actually be unparalleled (Laverne & Shirley would be a second, though).

I watched this show with my grandparents and at the time didn’t even realize how dirty, biting and often macabre the jokes were. I watch this show NOW and am amazed by how edgy it STILL is. To me, a pornographer. Suicide Girls? NOT edgy. Sex and the City? Not really edgy. Golden Girls? YOU CAN’T TOUCH THEIR EDGINESS! You can always count on Rose for some naively delivered bestiality stories or to be fucking a midget or a dead guy. One of The Golden Girls fucks a new guy in every episode, but not in that hyperfocused SATC way.

I’m guessing people who mock The Golden Girls have never watched it. If so, the reasons they mock it are telling; it MUST be bad if it’s about old people and ESPECIALLY bad if it’s about old people who are WOMEN. I can’t abide anyone who doesn’t appreciate The Golden Girls or dismisses that show with a condescending chuckle. It’s like a slap in the face from someone with really bad aim; it doesn’t physically hurt, but it makes my blood boil.

When we went to see Sex and the City the movie we all discussed which girl we are or which one other people think we’re most like. And you know what? I’D RATHER BE A FUCKING GOLDEN GIRL. And I don’t mean that as a huge dis to SATC, I really mean The Golden Girls are my idols. I believe that show was more proactively feminist than anything on network television. EVER. When I grow up? I want to be a Golden Girl. I can barely think of a higher aspiration.

Anyway, Rest in peace, Estelle Getty.

When I woke up in the middle of the night to pee, I looked for our dog, Nico, before I stepped out of bed; she likes to sleep sprawled out RIGHT NEXT TO ME on the floor so between her and my nightstand, I have to perform circus tricks to get out of bed without stepping on her.

All that was on the floor in Nico’s usual spot was a pillow and a blanket that had fallen off me. Then, because I’m a dipshit, I felt I needed to go looking for her in her dog bed; she wasn’t there either. I found her at the foot of the bed, lying very still (the way most living creatures do in the middle of the night).

I don’t know when it started, but I’ve developed an irrational need to make sure people and dogs are still breathing in the middle of the night. I think I started doing it when Delia was still drinking and then it got worse when my nephew was born. Or maybe it was all those years of my dad being sick and watching him die; seeing how easy it could be to just stop breathing without anyone noticing. Also, Nico is getting old; I think she’s fourteen now. Anyway, I feel compelled to pop out my earplugs and hover to see if the object of my concern is still breathing, getting close to look for a rising and falling chest or the soft sound of exhalations. My loved ones are apt to wake up to my face in theirs, inquiring once I’ve woken them up, “are you alive?” Duh. Are you crazy?

It was hard to see last night, so I put my hand on Nico’s chest. She didn’t flinch or move even a tiny bit. Her thick fur felt cool under my hand. I couldn’t feel ANY movement and feared she wasn’t breathing so I rubbed her a little. NO RESPONSE. It was like she’d been dead for an hour or two! Then her hind legs relaxed a little bit, but I thought it was just because she wasn’t stiff yet and I’d moved her.

I woke Delia up by shrieking, “honey I think Nico’s dead!”

Delia woke up and crawled to the end of the bed as I told her I couldn’t feel her breathing and she wasn’t moving. She gently put her hand on Nico’s chest and belly, too and couldn’t feel anything so she sharply said, “NICO!” and snapped her fingers.

Nico came back to life, then. It was like magic. She lifted her head and shifted her body to a “should I get up now?” position. Delia flopped back to sleep, I went pee, and when I got back from the bathroom I still couldn’t believe Nico hadn’t been dead. I felt like she came back to life just because we love her. She was standing at the foot of the bed looking at me; instead of going back to sleep right away, I held out my hand to her so she would come to me and I stayed awake petting her until she settled down to sleep by me. Her body is so little under all of that fur.

*****

You would think I could stop myself from doing these breath-tests by reminding myself I’m being crazy. No one is going to just die in their sleep, at least not anyone who was perfectly healthy the night before. But I don’t really believe that so the only way I can stop myself is to tell myself if they’re dead, what can you do about it? Just go to sleep and take care of it in the morning. I’m not kidding. That’s the only line of reasoning that sometimes works on my three am head. But mostly I figure there’s no harm in checking so I do. But there IS harm, when I imagine someone’s dead even when they’re alive and make my heart start pounding and wake up other people to verify. It’s embarrassing and weird.

I cannot sleep in the same room as our nephew anymore because I just stay awake listening to him breathing. If I manage to fall asleep, I still keep waking up with compulsions to listen and check. He’s not a tiny baby anymore so the crib death thing isn’t really an issue, I’m just painfully aware of his mortality. His and mine and everyone’s, I guess.