All At Once
My high school English teacher freshman year, while reading Romeo and Juliet as a class, taught us about a particular Shakespearean trademark.
“He describes things,” she explained, “using opposites.” This technique, it had, it has a literary name that I no longer can recall. But it is this idea of both-and. The idea being: we are tired and energized. We are ecstatic. We are distraught.
I thought of that this morning in the shower, as my fresh tears pooled and slipped down the drain.
My dog: she was gentle and fierce. She was a hunter and a lover. She ripped squirrels, birds, and chipmunks apart. She held them by the scruff of their necks and shook. But with our children, with us, we never saw a snarl; we never saw her mouth folded back in anger, growling. We never saw her cruelness. Only the softness. Her velveteen ears. Her nose, like leather. Her body’s subtle lean as we scratched her tummy. Her two front paws on our thighs when we sat.
Presley, our sweet dog, said goodbye to us yesterday.
On Thursday, the day before, Presley was herself: unchanged and energized. She ate, played, jumped on furniture, nudged my hand in reminder to scratch that special spot where her ear met her skull. She walked, the night air whipping by. She pranced using those bouncing legs, the leash pulling forward, her nose smelling wildly.
But Friday, when our family woke, she had changed in the night. Her lymph-node protruded and hung, the size of a clementine. The cancer had ravaged her small body while we slept, had torn her apart.
She hid, shaking under our bed. I laid on my tummy, as I’ve done many times, attempting to coax her out, calling her name in my most soothing tone. From her I saw only the smallest acknowledgment, a single flick of the tail. No lift of her pretty head. And so, I scooped her seventeen pound body out from under my bed; the dead weight of it, no resistance but no help, either.
I brought her out to the backyard where she stood for a moment, stuck, forgetting how to move her body back toward our house. She leaned, paralyzed. And so I went to her. Picked her up in my arms. She never much liked to be held or carried. She was not a small dog at heart, only in stature. But during her last day on Earth, she finally gave into the cradle of my arms. She laid her head down on my bicep, her breathing labored. I held her tight, reminding her of my love, and more of my tears dampened her fur.
On that day, Presley’s last, I learned a new word. Degranulation. When a cancerous tumor releases all of its toxins at once. It is a cruelness and a gift. It is both-and. There was no slow, painful decline. It was all at once. We said goodbye, all at once.
I held her close and all at once she slept and all at once her heart stopped beating and all at once our lives, they changed.
When I said goodbye to Presley, it was the first time I ever watched a creature I loved take their last breath. I pressed my tear-streaked cheeks into her face, her nose. I whispered goodbye and thank you and you were a gift.
So much though, of what is shared between human and dog—the looks, hugs, scratches, and walks—it is a special kind of unspoken language. It is a language felt and not said.
We said goodbye to Presley in our vet’s office on Friday afternoon. But we’ll keep the language we shared with her forever. We’ll keep it in our hearts.
