Category Archives: grief

Humpty Dumpty

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Yesterday I took poor Gimpy Dog over to Billings to the veterinary orthopedist. Even typing that makes me feel slightly ashamed of myself — we live in a nation in which an enormous percentage of our population doesn’t even have human health care, and I’m spending how much money on orthopedic surgery for my dog? So anyhow, I was really hesitant about this whole thing — not just because of the money, but because the effect of the first surgery, which was supposed to increase his mobility had exactly the opposite effect — he fell apart entirely. But this guy is a specialist, and does a lot of orthopedic work on animals, and I figured he could give me a reasoned idea about what we were facing.

I left Owen there for about an hour or so while they took another set of xrays, and it turns out that he didn’t have the structural problems I had feared he did. His back is fine, his hips are good (one of the other docs thought his hips were arthritic), and his other knee is sound. His achilles tendon on the leg that had the knee operation is almost totally blown, and both hocks are pretty arthritic. But the vet was confident that he could fix the achilles, and that we could medicate the inflammation and pain in the hocks.

All of which was very good news. And so, I left the poor boy there and we’ll know by late this afternoon how the achilles operation went. He’ll come home with a whole external fixature device on (think the kinds of halos they use for broken necks) and we’ll go through another round of recovery and we’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed that he doesn’t blow the other achilles tendon (statistically, there’s a 50% chance).

While I’m enormously relieved that I didn’t have to put my sweet boy to sleep, I’m still not convinced that performing this kind of medical intervention on a pet is entirely warranted. Luckily, I have the money, and with any luck, this vet is a good judge of his own skills — but I wonder how fair is it to do this to an animal? I can’t explain to him what’s going on, or why we keep hurting him. All he knows is that we keep knocking him out and he wakes up with an incision, on drugs, and in this case he’ll have a device attached to his leg.

But on the other hand, I don’t have much faith in medical intervention for human beings either. I grew up in a cancer cluster in the 70s and 80s — we watched 2 kids and 2 moms in our immediate circle die long slow painful deaths, and there were probably another 6-8 peripheral people we knew who also died. When my cousin Dede was diagnosed last fall with breast cancer, her first impulse was to refuse the chemo — from what we’d seen, what good would that do? We had a long long talk on the phone, about how it was better now, how chemo actually works these days. Neither of us come from a place where our default emotional reaction is that doctors can make it better, that medical intervention actually works. I feel a little bit the same about the dog, that’s why I agreed to the operation — as I said to my mother, I can’t just kill my dog because I have no faith in medicine.

I came home from Billings absolutely exhausted yesterday. I was enormously relieved that this vet thinks he can help, and that I’ve got the money to pay for it. I was enormously relieved that I didn’t have to drive back with a crippled dog I was going to have to put down. But as emotional as this decision has been, and as much as I love my dog — I couldn’t help thinking about my one friend whose girlfriend is waging a heroic and drawn-out battle with cancer, or my other friend whose husband is currently sitting at his ex-wife’s deathbed (both, strangely enough, have pancreatic cancer) — and my heart was sore for both of them. I love my dog, and it would be a big sorrow to put him down, but it is not the same as losing a person. As tired as I was from all this, I can only imagine what they’re all going through — it’s a sad way to keep it all in perspective, but it does.

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Blue Jelly

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A million years ago, when I was still in graduate school and working at the bookstore in Salt Lake City, I picked up Blue Jelly by Debby Bull. I loved this book. I tried my darndest to sell it to people but for some reason, the folks who wanted Bridges of Madison Country didn’t want to buy this odd little book about a woman who cured her broken heart by canning. Here’s my favorite quote:

Canning may sound like a strange path out of the dark woods of despair, but all the other ways, from Prozac to suicide, are really hard on your body. And therapy – breathing new life into the story every week – doesn’t always help. When you’re really depressed, you have to do something that takes you out of the drama, that makes you detach from the big world and become king of a tiny, controllable world, like one of berries and Ball jars. Just because your heart is smashed, it doesn’t mean that all of your dreams will end in a big mess. Canning demonstrates this principle. You might argue that you could do other, easier things like baking. With cookies and cakes, you wind up with something you actually have to eat right now. And there are not enough steps. Canning is a whole world of a thing to do. It requires that you get out of your head. It’s a Zen thing. You have to be in the moment, paying attention. You boil and sterilize stuff, you time things, you measure and take temperatures: you create an orderly little world. Unlike what has happened to you, these steps take you to what you planned on. You become a person in a world in which things turn out the way you thought they would

Somehow, in the intervening years, I managed to lose, or sell, or give away my copy, and since the departure of the MH (which was sad, but not the sort of heartbreak that Bull went through), I’d been thinking of this book.

When Patrick died, it was my garden that saved me — I kept telling myself that depressed people don’t start gardens. And that first summer, I spent a hot hot August afternoon blanching and freezing enough chard to see me through the winter, weeping with terror because I was going to have to leave the next day for California for work and I was afraid that in the same way that Patrick disappeared overnight, somehow my life in Montana would disappear while I was gone. I told myself that my house couldn’t disappear, because I’d put up enough greens for the winter. I had food in the freezer. I’d be okay. That first year, I thought often of this odd little book, and the woman who canned her way through despair.

Last week my friend Margo came over for dinner — and she brought me a copy — turns out Debby Bull lives across the street from her, here in Livingston. I’ve never met her, although strangely enough, I’m now reasonably good friends with the man who broke her heart, who also lives here. Made re-reading the book a little weird.

It was so interesting to re-visit the book after all this time — it’s just as funny and heartbreaking as I remembered, and the recipes are terrific. So in honor of Canning Week here at LivingSmall — a nod of the head to Blue Jelly, a book that planted the seed in my head all those years ago, that tiny kernel of an idea — what about Montana?

And here I am, all these years later, living in Montana, surviving a different sort of heartbreak altogether by growing a garden, and learning to fill my pantry with pickles and jams and fruits preserved in syrup.

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Close Call …

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Monday night I got a phone call from my cousin Jason’s wife. I thought she was calling to thank me for the baby present I’d sent a few days earlier, but it turns out she was calling because my 95 year old grandmother, who lives on our farm with Jason and Jackie and my Aunt Molly and her husband had been taken to the hospital and was going in for emergency surgery.

She’s 95. Surgery is always daunting when you’re that old. She’s been pretty open the last couple of years about being ready to go … “I wish I lived in Oregon,” she told me when I called on her birthday. “Then I could just get a doctor to put me down.” My grandmother has raised horses her whole life, and considering how deaf she is now, how bad her sight has gotten, and how difficult it’s become to get around, I can see why she’d feel this way. I laughed at her — “Don’t tell Molly that,” I said. “You’ll hurt her feelings.” “Well,” she replied in her usual crabby way. “It’s true.”

So I have to say I was a little surprised to hear she’d opted for surgery. Turns out she had a perforated ulcer — Molly found her passed out on the floor of her apartment at six that morning (my grandmother has the ground floor of Molly’s house). Her choice was surgery to fix it, or to live with terrible pain and a condition that would kill her. She went for the surgery — although she went into surgery armed with all her living wills and DNR paperwork on the bedside table. Molly left her at two in the morning, after having reiterated to the hospital staff that there was, under no circumstances, to be a ventilator put in should she start to crash.

By the time Molly got to the hospital yesterday, my grandmother was out of bed, sitting up in a chair, her hair washed, all clean and tidy and looking very pleased with herself. If there’s anything she loves, it’s to be the star pupil — and there she was, older than anyone else in the little community hospital near the farm, and recovering more quickly and miraculously. We all just laughed. She’s always been the toughest bird in town.

As one does in these situations, I had a long talk with my cousin Jennifer on the phone yesterday morning. Jennifer lives in Arizona now, where she has two daughters who look so much like she did at 12 and 14 that their photos make me a little misty. I haven’t actually seen Jennifer since she was that age, and I was in college, and her mother (my grandmother’s daughter) died. Jennifer told me she is in no way ready for MommyJane to die — and I told her that although I know in my head that she’s going to — she’s so old, after all. Even MommyJane can’t live forever. But, I told Jennifer, it’s inconceivable to me — I really can’t imagine a world without her in it. She’s been our rock. She raised half of us cousins. Whenever things went weird, which they did a lot, we got sent to the farm.

And so, it was a great relief to hear that as always, she’s being remarkable. She’s astonishing everyone. She’s being MommyJane.

I went to bed early last night, exhausted from a day of family worry, and unlike the night before, when my grandmother was in surgery, I slept like a baby all night.

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Meditation at Lagunitas

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All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with it’s island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

From Praise, Robert Hass, 1974

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Pot Roast to the Rescue

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My dear friends Bill and Maryanne lost their beloved (and enormous) golden retriever Moja this weekend. Moja was a very special dog — one hundred and twenty five pounds of big yellow love — and he died quite suddenly of a twisted gut. It was beyond awful. There were big gulping sobs and tears all around.

All I could think to do was drive home from the vet’s office and pull the emergency stash of pot roast out of the freezer. I made it ages ago, and there was too much for just the two of us, so I froze the rest. Good thing I did. Bill and Maryanne were too upset to even think of eating until last night, when Maryanne put the frozen pot roast in to warm up. The smell of started to fill the house. Maryanne ate a little and felt better. Bill wandered into the kitchen and managed to eat a little bit. The new pound puppy they brought home because the house was just too empty watched them eat pot roast. Everyone started to feel just a teensy bit better.

And my faith in the restorative power of pot roast is reconfirmed. There is so much we can’t fix in this world. People and animals we love die suddenly and unexpectedly. Winter comes. All seems bleak. And then the smell of something warm and beefy, perhaps with a few greens thrown in, sneaks through the house to remind us that all is not lost.

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