Scars

     I have these two scars. I've had them for over 3 years now. One runs from slightly above my navel to just above my pubic bone. The other hangs out mid-abdomen, below my belly button, on the left side, about 3 inches long, perpendicular to the first one. The first one was the result of an emergency surgery brought on by a perforated bowel from a diverticulitis attack. The second one was the closure of the temporary stoma they had to create because of the perforated bowel. They are permanent reminders of what happened to me physically; there is no forgetting. But they are also symbols of healing and compassion.

    Today, September 20th, is the anniversary of my first surgery. It all started the night before, September 19th, 2016, when I was hit with excruciating pains in my lower abdomen around 9:00 pm. The pain was unlike anything I had experienced before, and I knew it was serious, and beyond troubling. It wouldn't abate. All night, I lay in bed moaning. My son was 12 at the time and could hear me from across the hall. He kept telling me to stop making the sounds. Thinking back on it, I'm filled with a rush of sympathy for the boy he was. Nobody wants to hear a parent in pain like that. Nobody. But I was stuck because I didn't want to go to the hospital and leave him alone during the night, so I was determined to stick it out. My plan was that I would drive him to school in the morning, then drive myself to the hospital. Ever the independent woman. Needless to say, my plan never happened.

    Around 4 am, unable to stand the pain any longer, I texted a former boyfriend who I knew would be awake as he worked at a golf course. I texted him because I knew in my gut I would be hospitalized and I needed someone to look after my dog, Licorice. He had always liked Licorice, didn't have a dog of his own, was single, and likely able to help. He answered right away that he could take her. More texting resulted in him coming to pick not only the dog up, but me as well to take me to the hospital. So at 5:00 am, he arrived at my place. I will forever be grateful to this man for his help when I needed it most. I woke up my son to tell him I had to go to the hospital, texted his father to tell him what was happening and to make arrangements for him to come and get him in a few hours. Then we left.

    The rest of this story is a surreal nightmare of sorts. Although I was given attention at the hospital fairly quickly, the next parts of the trip weren't so quick at all. I was placed on a bed in the back somewhere and lay there moaning (although a bit less with the morphine drip) for over 12 hours. Fast forward to 5:30 pm when I got up from my bed, dragged my ass and the IV pole to the nursing station and made an announcement to about 5 nurses laughing and chatting that I had had enough. They had been telling me all day that I was going to get a CT scan, even made me drink a bunch of water 2 hours prior in preparation for it. Yet it wasn't happening. In a voice that shocked me with its calmness, considering the state I was in, I told them that I didn't understand why this was taking so long, that over 10 hours had passed, that I had a known intestinal condition, that I had already been hospitalized for 4 days for this same condition 3 months prior, that I was probably sitting here with a perforated bowel. I advocated for myself with all the strength I could muster. It worked. The silence at the desk was deafening as I spoke. They all listened to me, and within 5 minutes someone came to take me for the CT scan.

    After the scan, the 5 minute thing happened again. Although they told me I would likely get my results from the scan in about an hour, within 5 minutes a doctor was at my bedside informing me that they were indeed going to have to admit me because I had a perforated bowel. Fear met reality at that point for me. They wheeled me somewhere else where I waited another 5 hours to see an emergency surgeon. She told me that I had 2 options: 1. have surgery to remove my problematic sigmoid colon and have a temporary colostomy bag or, 2. wait out the night and see if the IV antibiotics would kill the infection, with the hopes that I could then have elective surgery at a later date and therefore spare me the joy of living with a colostomy bag. I chose the latter. It sounded nicer.

    Over the next 24 hours, I waited to get better. My friend and her husband came to the hospital to be with me that evening, and I am forever grateful to them as well for doing that. A few friends came to see me the next afternoon, and I am forever thankful to these wonderful women too. I was starting to learn, unfortunately, that laying in a hospital bed, hooked up to an IV, being sick and scared and vulnerable is a really shitty thing. Seeing a few familiar, caring faces was a soothing balm to my fragile state. 

    Around 3:30 the next afternoon, a nurse came to check my temperature, and she told me it had spiked to 38.5 degrees. The 5 minute thing happened again. A group of doctors appeared at my bedside, and the surgeon that I had decided I didn't like during my previous hospitalization, looked down at me with the kindest eyes, and in the gentlest voice said, "I think you need to have surgery". I still think about and am grateful for his compassionate delivery of the news. I asked when this would happen, and he said "In about an hour". I'll never forget the panic and temporary madness that filled me as this news sunk in. Everything seemed concentrated into one point in that moment: my son. I had to text him, had to tell him I loved him, had to tell him without showing how terrified I was that I had to have surgery. I was filled with horrifying thoughts that hijacked my brain. There were many hijackers, but the most frightening of course were the ones concerning my actual life on this planet: What if I didn't make it? What if I actually died on the operating table? What would happen to my son? How would he cope? I let the thoughts do their thing for a bit, but then I decided to shut them down and go with Faith, something I don't have a lot of normally, but in that moment, I grabbed onto it like it was the biggest of life rafts in a turbulent sea. It got me through.

    By 10:30 that evening, September 20th, I was back in my hospital room. This time was of course radically different, for a few reasons. For starters, I had a transparent colostomy bag attached to my abdomen and could see my actual colon ("stomie" as I would later come to know and call it intimately) resting there, swollen and pert, looking up at me. Then there were the tubes coming out of almost every orifice of my body: a catheter drained urine into a bag attached to the bed below me, an epidural and other drugs ran into the pick line they had done earlier that day, the NG tube ran from my nose to stomach (this would eventually almost drive me mental), and finally, a tube running from my abdomen into a small pouch attached to my hospital gown that collected what appeared to be blood and pus from my stomach. I was a mess. I definitely had had better days. But, on the bright side, I knew that the offending agent- my sigmoid colon that housed the diverticula that had caused me such grief off and on for years- had been removed. I would later learn that I now had 13 cm less of my colon. But I also had 13 cm less of problematic body parts, so I decided to focus on that.

    There is much more that I could write about all of this (because of course the story doesn't end with my first surgery) and maybe someday I will. It was in many ways a harrowing journey, and harrowing journeys, despite their awfulness, often make for great stories. Today though, I decided to start with my "scars", and so I will end there. 

    As I sit here and reflect on the 4th year anniversary of my first surgery, I am filled with many feelings about my scars. When I stand in front of a mirror and look at my body, my scars look back at me and tell me things. Every time. Things about strength, courage, determination, humility, grace, suffering, pain, and yes, even love. My scars are a reminder of what I have been through, but more importantly of what I have survived. Although I think of physical pain sometimes when I look at my scars, what I mostly think about is healing and compassion. I think of the ways my body has physically healed (the human body is indeed a miracle), but I also think about the emotional healing I have gone through since then, my own personal journey to match the physical one. Another thing that happens though when I see my scars is I am suddenly filled with compassion. I can't look at my scars anymore without feeling compassion... for myself, for others, for all of the suffering that humans sometimes endure while being alive. My surgery changed me in many ways, but the opening of my heart, ironically, was one of the biggest ones. 

    

    

Be Your Own Best Friend

       It is dawning on me more and more as I get older that one of the most important things in life is to be your own best friend. This is not a new concept to me, and I am not the first person to write about this by any means, but it isn't any less significant. What is interesting is that, for many people, this idea is easier to think about than to do. I've been one of those people.

    Although I have known for a long time about the magic in this kernel of wisdom, I can honestly say I wasn't my own best friend. I was other people's best friend, or good friend, while I lagged behind somewhere. I don't even know, come to think of it, if I was even a good friend to myself on most days, never mind a best one. 

    For some reason, as I grew up and then became an adult, and then did all the adulting required of me, I found it much easier to critique and pick myself apart than to build myself up, as best friends do. I've written before of the anxiety that has traveled alongside of me my whole life, but there has been another companion too, although a much more sinister one. I will call her the "Critic", for want of a better word. 

    The Critic isn't nice, far from it. Nor is she a friend in any way. She might disguise herself as a friend in the way she offers me "advice" on how I can improve various aspects of my life, personality, character, physical self... on and on it goes. The Critic is relentless. With her, things are never good enough as they are. There is always something that can be improved. I can always be a better version of myself, and the Critic tells me I should strive to be that. Underneath all of that is the understanding that I am somehow not good enough. The Critic never says this directly... she just implies it, but she always delivers her message. 

    For most of my life, I listened to the Critic. I trusted her. I believed her. I thought she was right, that she had the right view of me, of my life, my choices, of anything really. I would do what she told me to do, thinking that this latest morsel of advice was finally the crumb I needed in order to be that better version of myself, that thing that I coveted so much. The problem was, the Critic never went away, not permanently anyway. Just when I thought we were done, she would show up again.

    Over time though, I started to see the Critic differently. She was a meanie disguised as a nice girl. She was never happy. There was no pleasing her. Her intentions were never good ones deep down. The objective with her was to tear things apart in order to build something new. She believed that things needed to be torn apart, that they weren't good enough as they were. There was no celebration of my uniqueness, of the miracle of my life, of me, just by the very nature of being lucky enough to have been born.

    I'd like to be able to say here that I one day just kicked the Critic to the curb, said, "I've had enough, you silly b----! Be gone!", and that was that. But, it of course hasn't been that easy; the tough lessons in life never are. I haven't yet been able to make her disappear completely. No, she still shows up beside me, but there are some things that are different these days, because I've grown, evolved, come into myself a bit more. For starters, she doesn't come around as much. I can breathe more fully. One result of this is too... dare I say it?... I am starting to think I might be good enough exactly as I am. This is indeed a very cool and comforting thing. 

    The other thing that is different though, and the one that has been the most powerful agent of change has been the relationship I have been cultivating with myself over the past year since I quit drinking. I have become my own best friend finally, and this has made all the difference. Although the Critic can still deliver her acidic barbs (and this still happens), because I am my own best friend, I am much better able to withstand the onslaught. I have myself in my corner, for the most part, and this is a precious and beautiful thing. It has led me to conclude that being your own best friend is not overrated at all. It is crucial. In fact, it starts there. 

    

Do What You Love

    It is becoming more and more important as I wander through this land of middle age that I do things that bring me joy, or as Joseph Campbell said, "follow your bliss". There is a sense of urgency about it though sometimes, which I have to keep in check so I don't dive into panic mode as I contemplate all of the things I have yet to do, discover, experience, but not the required time anymore to do them. Perhaps this means I am smack in the middle of a midlife crisis? In any case, the idea of the midlife crisis is no longer a distant, comical thing for me... it is no longer an idea... it is a reality. 

    Crisis might be too strong a word for what I am describing. This is not a dangerous thing. It isn't a calamity. It doesn't involve catastrophic events that have me taxed beyond my abilities to cope. It isn't a loud thing. And it isn't a totally obvious thing either. It is more of a quiet thing. Quiet but persistent. More of a whisper in my ear when I wake in the morning, or as I go about my day, or at 3:00 am when I can't sleep and the stories of my life are swirling in my mind with a vengeance. It is quiet but it is there, and I can't help but hear it.

    It tells me things I always knew but never acted on. It jolts me, pulling me out of the humdrum and the routines and the bills and the automatic ways I do things in this life. It tells me a bunch of things that aren't new at all: life is short, time is precious, it all goes so fast. It asks me questions like, "What are you waiting for?" and "Who are you, apart from all of the things you have to do to live in the world every day?" The most pressing questions these days are also the most frequent: What is it that you love to do? What is that thing, or those things that transport you out of the ordinary, and into a realm that can only be defined as special? What is it that makes you lose your sense of time and space, that pulls you totally out of the moment but yet keeps you in it all at once? What is that thing that makes you feel connected to the deepest, happiest, most authentic part of yourself? 

    These questions have surfaced in my life often, from a young age, so I am pretty familiar with them. I've always been a person who asks big questions. What I am not familiar with though is the immediacy, the sense that I must act NOW... or else! What I am not familiar with is these questions no longer having an airy, theoretical slant to them, an intellectual pondering, something I could think about but keep safely at a distance. No, these questions have pulled me firmly to the ground and are keeping me there. They are loaded with feelings, hopes and dreams. These questions can't be just thought about or ignored anymore. My 52 year old self won't allow it.

    Although my 50-plus status has contributed to the state in which I now find myself, it involves more than just aging for me. I know deep down that one of the main reasons I am now thinking more regularly about how I want to spend the rest of my life is that I removed the wine from it. My lounge visits and tipsy lunches with friends had become like one of my hobbies really. It was something to do to fill the time between work, chores and parenting, and to take the stress off of work, chores and parenting. It was a hobby I liked, but it did take up a lot of time, and sometimes too much time was spent recovering from said hobby. It was also a hobby that took over other hobbies and interests... the other things I used to do just faded into the background.

    But lately, these other things have been reappearing into my life, one by one. I am rediscovering my love of writing, and am actually not just thinking about writing but am actually doing it. I took the plunge yesterday and treated myself to a beautiful guitar, one with a smaller body than the guitar I've had for the past 25 years, and playing it last night for 3 hours was heavenly. I am thinking about possibly singing/performing again. Basically, I am starting to remember what it is I love to do, what makes me tick, what makes me connected to who I am, deep down. 

    I've decided that it is okay to feel this sense of urgency and that it is okay to have the pressing questions come and visit me regularly. It is only in listening and accepting the questions that I will know what it is I need to do next, the next place to put my feet, or what direction to place them. I know now at a feeling level (not just a thinking level) that life is indeed way too short to waste it doing things that do not bring me joy, and that do not reflect my truest self. It really is. Everything that has been said about the passage of time being much too fast is completely true. There is nothing partially true about it. In the end, we owe it to ourselves to do what we love.

    

What One Year With No Wine Has Taught Me

     Recently, I celebrated achieving my goal of reaching one year without alcohol. I decided to give up the wine (my beverage of choice) on July 30th, 2019, mostly out of curiosity, but partly out of a sense of becoming aware that, for me, the benefits of wine consumption were becoming more and more overshadowed by the lousy parts of it. I wanted to find out what it would feel like- physically, emotionally and mentally- to not have any alcohol in my system for a year. So last summer, I began the journey...    

    There are so many things I could write about, as I reflect on what it has been like for me, but something that stands out for me is how giving up the booze has presented the opportunity for me to come face to face with myself, demons and all, and to handle things differently. I'm reading a fabulous book right now by Pema Chodron, "When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times" that is resonating so much with me because she talks about how we often react to "discomfort" in our lives (and I am taking this to mean mostly "emotional discomfort") when we encounter uncomfortable situations:

"Most of us do not take these situations as teachings. We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use all kinds of ways to escape-- all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain...There are so many ways that have been dreamt up to entertain us away from the moment, soften its hard edge..." (14).

    When I think of what much of the past year has been for me, it has been a meeting of my edge, as Pema calls it. I love that description. I'm not saying the past year has been awful, or miserable, because I gave up the wine. But it has definitely been "edgier". Without a doubt. And by choosing to not blunt that edge with a luscious red or crispy white, this meant I've often rubbed up against the hard spots, and as a result, felt uncomfortable. So the biggest task of this past year has been learning how to handle discomfort, instead of running from or trying to manipulate it in some way. 

    I was partly prepared for this kind of thing because I've been meditating fairly regularly for over 20 years now. Meditating has provided me often with the opportunity to come face to face with my discomfort while I am sitting, and thoughts and feelings arise, as they will. Meditation is in many ways the opposite of running, or numbing, or distracting, or manipulating. In those moments, when you experience discomfort while meditating, you simply acknowledge what is happening, breathe, and notice things. I say simply, but this is probably the wrong word to use because there is nothing simple about just sitting there while you are being bombarded with uncomfortable thoughts and feelings (which is why many people hate meditating, and why of course, they probably should do it regularly, but this is another blog entry entirely)... But I digress... My point is that meditation helped me greatly this past year.

    I've been thinking a lot of this discomfort idea, and have come to the conclusion that it is at the heart of many problems people face. Although some people on the planet grew up learning how to deal with discomfort in healthy ways, I think many of us did not. Many of us grew up thinking it wasn't desirable to feel intensely negative emotions at all and the best thing to do when experiencing them was to run, distract, ignore, etc. In fact, many of us came to think that extreme emotional discomfort was to be avoided at all costs, and that it might actually destroy us somehow should we allow ourselves to experience it fully. So we grew up believing all of that, when actually, there is a whole other story that can be told about discomfort. The truth is that discomfort is normal, okay, that we won't be destroyed by it, that it doesn't last, that we can handle it, and so on. But we only discover that truth when we sit still and stop running long enough.

    So if I had to say what my biggest lesson has been this past year going alcohol-free, it would be that I can sit with emotional discomfort now more than before without freaking out about it and without telling myself stories that only make the discomfort worse. I can meet my edge without obsessing over the wounds that the edge might cause. I can do this, and when I do this, I become stronger, more resilient emotionally. Although I could do this before I quit drinking, I couldn't and didn't do it consistently. It was only after giving up the vino that this happened on a more regular basis. So in following through with my goal, a whole new way of living has been opened up to me, and it's pretty cool.

    I still haven't poured myself a glass of wine, even though my year-long experiment is now over, and I'm not sure when and if I ever will again. When I set out to do this, it wasn't for forever, as I know that I am not a forever type of woman, but I do know that some of the gifts that have been born out of this past year have indeed been priceless to me, and so for now, that is motivation enough to continue on this path.

    

    

    

    

Comfy Slippers

    I've been thinking a lot lately of an often referenced quote as I approach my goal of giving up alcohol for a year, "Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore" (Andre Gide). When I think of this quote as it applies to my life today, I find myself asking, "What is my shore?" and "What are the new oceans for me?" 

    I can't think of the quote without thinking of comfy slippers. They go hand in hand. For me anyway. I gave up wearing my comfy slippers last year when I made the decision, on July 30th, to give up wine for a year. At the time, I wasn't aware that I'd actually have to yank off my slippers and go barefoot for the duration of my "experiment". I think I thought I'd just make one change in my life, but be able to basically keep the rest of my life as it was, and keep wearing my slippers. I was mistaken.

    As the year has progressed, I've come to see how my slippers are basically the shore I had to leave in order to do what I needed to do. They are my coziness and my predictability, my routine comforts. They are the known, the tried-and-true. They are the ways I have dealt with discomfort, sadness, irritation, anger, and all the other yucky stuff that life sometimes brings. They are a light and breezy glass of white wine, or a smooth and soothing red. They followed me into many a lounge booth and hugged my feet at family gatherings and other outings, always comfortable, and always familiar. They were on my feet a long time. 

    And the new oceans, what of those? They are me, floating on a raft in the middle of the unfamiliar, alone and wondering, "What in the hell have I done?!" They are me leaving behind those things that I was able to hang onto. They are the place with no handles. In fact, in order to survive here, I've had to release quite a few attachments, both literally and figuratively. But as chaotic as things have sometimes been in the middle of this new ocean, there has also been at times a rich calmness and depth of experience that was often lacking when I was a slipper wearer. As scary as it feels to have not much to hang onto, it also feels liberating. There is an authenticity in being in these waters that I didn't feel enough while at shore. 

    It's not that complicated to understand though really. Anytime you leave the shore and venture into the ocean is to go into the unknown (unless you're a sailor or a captain of a well-traveled ship of course!). You do this when you decide to make major changes in your life. And any time you do this is to catapult yourself into the chaos of the unknown, so this act requires courage, on many levels. But the first act of courage, as Gide said, is to "lose sight of the shore", and I think he was right about that.

ANXIETY

"Anxiety- got me on the run/Anxiety- yeah, I just need someone/ Anxiety- can't get nothin' done/ Anxiety- spoils all the fun" - Pat Benatar, Anxiety (Get Nervous).

    Ever since I can remember (a long time surprisingly), I've walked alongside of anxiety. I haven't called it anxiety forever, because way back when, it wasn't commonly called that. There were other names or other ways of talking about people who were frequently anxious. For example, I grew up being told I was a "worrier" and that I "worry too much". And nobody was wrong about either of those things. I was a worrier, worrying about multiple topics at a dizzying speed, from a very early age.     

    I still sometimes have flashbacks to 6, or 8 or 11 year old me, laying in bed, trying to fall asleep but not being able to before navigating a series of troubling thoughts. The thoughts ranged from banal topics like, "Oh no, my library book is overdue, am I going to get in big trouble for that?" to not-so-banal topics like "What happens when we die? Do we just stop existing forever? And how long is forever?" Looking back now, I am amazed that the child me was even able to sleep at all after playing some of the more  harrowing scripts in my little mind. 

    The anxiety didn't leave me once I hit adolescence either of course. No, it stayed with me, tagging along as I navigated teen friendships and intimate relationships, and school pressures, and my changing body. It hung around, whispering in my ear all of the things that could go wrong, or that were already wrong with me, or with my life. Its favorite thing to whisper was "What if...". Those 2 words would then be followed by other words, words that were capable of instantly breaking my spirit. "What if he doesn't like me back?" "What if they don't include me?" "What if I fail the math test?" "What if they think I'm ugly, or fat, or boring, or not cool?" Anxiety was constantly by my side, but hardly my friend.

    By early adulthood, anxiety was so much a part of me that I often struggled to know who I was apart from it. Around that time, a new companion, depression, crept into my life and set up camp. The two of them showed no mercy, bombarding me with awful thoughts and feelings on a regular basis. I started devouring self-help books in a frantic attempt to fend them off. I figured I was doing it all wrong, that I should be doing something to help myself, that the problems were all mine, that I had created them and so I could fix them. And sometimes this worked. Sometimes, my anxious and depressed companions would fade into the background. But this was always temporary- a few days, weeks or rarely, months- and they would always return, grabbing both of my hands with a vengeance. It didn't matter where I lived, they followed me. For years, my adulthood was spent moving or traveling to different places, or changing apartments in an attempt to "start over", in the hope that the old me, the worrier and depressed me would disappear. 

    In my late 30s, and with the help of a therapist, I began to see that the depression that had brought me to the therapist in the first place was really just exhaustion from being anxious all the time. My mind and heart had finally surrendered and a strange hopelessness and fatigue with life set in. I understood that the anxiety had become stronger than I was, knocking me over more days than not. But I also understood that I was letting this happen. I was letting it define and defeat me. We began to talk in therapy about recognizing the anxiety but knowing that it didn't have to incapacitate me. I started reading about "Acceptance and Commitment Therapy", and I started to look at my anxious sidekick differently. I also started to understand that the anxiety was never going to leave my side as long as I lived, and so I was going to have to learn how to deal with it.This was a big revelation for me, and a turning point. In retrospect, however, although I began to understand all of this, it would take over another 10 years for me to live this truth fully. 

    One of the ways I had dealt with the anxiety, since the age of 18 really, was with alcohol. I never used alcohol regularly, as in, never daily, but I did use it most times when socializing. In my 40s, newly split from my partner and raising my son alone half the time, I socialized more, therefore drank more. I started to have a new routine of sometimes stopping by the liquor store on the way home from a lounge visit with friends to buy a bottle of wine just to keep the buzz going. I would then suck back a few more glasses while phoning people; this meant I wasn't drinking alone. The alcohol was the one thing that could quiet the anxiety beast at my side. The anxious thoughts would diminish and a calm would overtake me; it didn't matter that it was an artificial calm. It worked and that's all that mattered. The problem is it worked to induce a calm state but there were just too many negative consequences for me to choose that as my main coping mechanism. So I decided to quit.

    These days, my main way to cope is to meditate, bombard myself with uplifting self-talk when I need it, and to exercise. As corny as it may sound, I hold hands with my anxiety more often than not now. I meet her where she needs to be met, let her have her say, but then I do my own thing. I understand her fears, her vulnerabilities, her raw, sore spots. I'm okay that she walks alongside me. But she isn't me. She never was, even though sometimes I struggled to see that. I now know that there is a me apart from the anxiety, a bigger me, a healthier me, a wiser one. And I can sometimes even look at the anxiety now as my companion, rather than my enemy. In the spirit of observation and compassion that meditation has taught me, I can say, "Oh there you are again. What is it you would like to say to me today?" I can listen, but not be defeated by it. We just walk together, side by side, my anxiety and I.

    

    

    

Licorice

    A little over a month ago, I had to do one of the hardest things I've had to do in this life. I had to put our lovely dog down. It wasn't a surprise. I had known it was coming because two months before, I had taken her to the vet for an ultrasound to see what all the mystery had been that was causing her troubles and I saw the huge mass in her chest cavity staring at us from the screen. "How long does she have?" I asked, surprisingly matter-of-fact. "A few months," he answered. His assistant then asked me if she could give my dog a few treats and then said, "Enjoy every moment you have with her". I nodded, started to tear up and wandered bleary-eyed out the door, stopping to pay at the desk on the way out. I remember looking at a young couple waiting with their puppy, and looking down at my own dog's face, now thoroughly sprinkled with grey, and thinking it really wasn't that long ago that she was an adorable pup herself. 

    But it was that long ago, almost 11 years ago, to be exact. She had grown up and gone through all of her changes with me; I was by her side through it all. When she came into my life, it was at the request of my ex, who suddenly, around Christmas time that year, decided we should get a puppy. I was on the fence, leaning more towards the "No!" side, but I ended up caving. My ex was persistent, and part of me had fluffy dog fantasies that won in the end. So we picked her up from the Humane Society... well, my ex picked her. She was the puppy he wanted, barking frantically at us from her cage as we looked at her. The barking of course hadn't escaped my notice. "That one? Really?" I said. "She's pretty loud". A few minutes later, we were in a room, just the three of us (my ex, me, our 6 year old son), and a young woman brought her to meet us. I remember feeling reluctant, as she wasn't the one I would have picked, but there she was nudging her face against my legs, there she was nestling her small 3-month old body against mine. I was the first one she chose, as soon as she entered the room.

    Fast-forward almost 11 years later and I was still the one. My ex became my ex not quite a year after we got Licorice, and a year after that, in a new relationship, he informed me that the dog could no longer go to his house anymore. We had an agreement that the dog would follow the kid, but the new love interest's disdain for dog hair meant that I was now a full-time dog owner. Countless conversations in cozy lounge booths with friends followed wherein they would all shout out vicious insults about my ex, indignant that he had left the responsibility of the dog to me. I lapped all of that up of course, because I was angry, resentful, bitter and felt trapped. My ex suggested at one point that we get rid of the dog because "neither of us wants her". He was kind of forgetting the seven year old who had furiously attached himself to the animal in a way that only "only children" do. 

    I obviously didn't get rid of the dog. I couldn't do that to my son. But I remember realizing the definition of the word sacrifice, as if for the first time; everything about the dog seemed a sacrifice to me. She came to represent all that I had to give up. When I looked at her, it was through the eyes of entrapment. I'd sometimes go into mini rages as I observed myself, yet again picking up dog poo in the backyard, yet again vacuuming up endless dog hair, yet again grabbing her leash to take her for a walk, motivated by guilt alone. In those first few years after our split, the resentment filled me too frequently.

    But then, things changed. One day, after a particularly tiring day at work, I pulled up to the back of the house, turned off the ignition and just sat in the car for a few minutes, thinking of all of the chores I still had ahead of me that day. One of my obligations was to take the dog for a walk. I started to feel the irritation squirming and growing inside me, started to play the same over-worn script in my head (the "poor-me" one), but suddenly, a thought popped into my brain, "You need to be a stoic about this. This is your life. Accept it, deal with it, and stop complaining". Later that night, I did my usual and looked up the definition of stoic online, and found one that summed it up nicely: a person who can endure pain or hardship without showing their feelings or complaining. I knew then that I had to set that task for myself. I owed it to the dog, I owed it to my son, and I owed it to myself. So I did.

    After I made that decision, life with Licorice (or our "Black Beauty" as I sometimes called her) was a lovely, fulfilling adventure. I no longer bemoaned all the things I had to do in order to have a dog. I welcomed them... for the most part. I no longer let resentment overtake me, no longer let my mind tell stories that made me a victim in the long-running drama that was my life. I saw Licorice for what she really was-- a sweet, beautiful, loving family pet-- and I owned her finally, fully and completely.

    When the diagnosis of cancer happened, the first thing I had to do was tell my 16 year old son. I picked him up from school, pulled over to the side of the road and told him the bad news. We spent the next 24 hours crying together and deciding what we were going to do. Both vets that were involved at the time told me that there was a strong possibility that the tumor in her chest would rupture at some point, leaving her in "severe respiratory distress". We didn't know if we should risk that, so we thought of putting her down within the next few days, even though she seemed, outwardly, mostly like her usual self, just an older version. But then we just couldn't do it. 

    We got two more months with our black beauty, and we savored our time with her. The last day of her life, I took a few selfies of the three of us before we went to the vet's, realizing regretfully that I had never taken pictures of the three of us in the past nine years, pictures of our little family that could sit on the bookshelf in the living room, and show everyone what we meant to each other.

    When it was time to put her down, my son and I were together with her in a quiet room, plowing through a box of kleenex together. The clinic was empty that night as we were the last clients of the day. I held Licorice's head in my lap and her heavily sedated body offered no resistance. I kept looking at my son who couldn't speak, crying softly beside me. My heart ached for his suffering. Because he couldn't speak, I spoke for the both of us, "We love you Licorice. We love you, black beauty. We'll miss you sweetheart". When she had the final injection and her body jerked suddenly a few seconds later (the vet had told us that would happen), I felt her spirit leave, and in that moment, my tears fell harder. In that moment, I understood fully what I was losing.

    Watching our pet die was one of the most painful things I have experienced, but there was a strange beauty in it too. I remember thinking as I was going through it all, holding her body in the room, "I am doing all of this right now and am completely in the moment. I am present, fully aware, conscious. And I will stay present afterwards because I'm not going to have a glass of wine to numb the pain". I realized that I was feeling excruciatingly painful feelings, but I was still okay, that I would be okay. I realized that my son was feeling the same feelings, but that he would be okay too. I realized that I was role-modeling for my son how to deal with suffering. And that is a beauty all its own.