More Ponderations on Pet Loss and Bonding

I was sleeping soundly when I heard our kitty, Gray-C make the cat barfing sounds she sometimes does, and there in my stupor of sleep, I recalled that I'd cleaned up cat barf just yesterday - twice, and I grew fearful.  I'm having pet-loss trauma.  When I got these animals for the kids, it didn't occur to me that they'd all go and die eventually.  Death was not part of my vision for the happy childhood friends I was adopting.

Ya - the circle of life bla bla bla... And wouldn't you know that it would all converge the week that some loved ones are bonding with their new baby, and the week that Second-born Son is graduating from high school.  Graduation.  This is an ending, too.

I will grieve when Second-born Son leaves for college in August. I grieved when First-born Son went to college.  My heart coiled around itself and knotted tightly.  I knew that he'd visit again - but never really come home.  They go - all these beloveds that we bond to.  The bonding is for their survival - so that we'll attend carefully to them, and positon our lives to hover near-by to offer all the support their development requires.  But not to hover over - no - just near-by during the teen-age years.  It is a lesson in giving up the all or nothing approach to life.

Bonding deeply with our young children can heal us from our own childhood attachment wounds - open up the pathways for love to enter in, and flow beyond.

And it is finally what matures us - when we can accept and fully embrace them as we let them go.  To say that we always hold them in our hearts is literal - not just figurative.
Actually, we hold them in the neurological pathways in our brains, and in the neurons that are in our heart tissue and bowels.  The memories are laid down deep in chains of connection at the cellular level.

We bond with our spouses this way, too - but it is not always so pure and uncomplicated.
And we bond with friends who share our lives - especially where there is laughter. And of course, our animal friends too, are mapped out in our neurons and held there in our bodies, so that the loss of them wrenches us, as well - and we grieve.  I miss Dexter at 5 p.m. when I used to get his dinner.  And I still think I hear him scratching on the door sometimes.  I must say that I do enjoy walking freely through the backyard without fear of dog poo.  There is something that helps me get over my loss.  Some losses are like that.  In the absence of the poo, there is a place for gratitude.

What I Noticed at Dawn

Beauty drapes each scene - a background;
Gently shift the focus. It is found;
To bring the heart to light;
To separate the darkness from the night.

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On Listening, Bonding and Learning to Love Dexter

Something else about Dexter has come to mind – something about him that was very challenging indeed, and which also reminds me of myself, and some other people I know.

During most of his life with us, Dexter dominated every conversation, and he always had an agenda. He had no listening skills whatever.

It was part of his attachment disorder, I’m convinced, made all the more evident by his beagle nature. It was the most difficult when we’d arrive home after a brief or prolonged absence. Didn’t matter. He’d go ballistic with his beagle bugling - barking and carrying on with little leaps of his stocky body bounding on stumpy legs. It was most chaotic and deafening, and was his automatic reaction every single time. We tried various training techniques demonstrated by our more knowledgeable dog-loving friends, but to no avail.

The truly sad thing is that we couldn’t greet him with similar enthusiasm, even when we wanted to. There he was churning out all this love and adoration for his masters and we were responding with “Dexter, be quiet. Stop barking; get down!” in our most annoyed and authoritative tones. It was a total disconnect. So sadly ironic – the very thing that he used to express his desire to attach – repelled us. We’d often have to send him into the backyard to let him bark off his frenzy out of ear-shot to avoid tinnitus. His adoration of us was also a disadvantage with the neighbors, of course, reducing our popularity levels with our fellow humans.

The reason I think this was an attachment disorder is that it seemed to be about control. Dexter had an agenda –albeit an instinctual one. He thought he knew how it was supposed to go. Dexter seemed to have that high anxiety level you see in kids or adults who have bonding and attachment issues. Many people do, you’d be surprised. It is, after all, a fallen world, and many a mother and father, loving though they were, didn’t have the enormous capacity to give all the love and affection the child needed. Little people were left to cry it out often enough – and their little nervous systems learned that they were going to have to figure out how to get the love they so desperately needed in some other way. We’d have to do it ourselves, since care givers were often unreliable, and hence, we’d better be in charge. We learned to relate to others by taking charge of things – always having the answers. This is a source of emotional fuel that feels almost like love, but is not quite it.

And then it all got reinforced at school. The only way to get any positive attention was to raise our hands and say the answer, ever so smartly. Having the answer was having the golden ticket to personal value. As kids we are actually concurrently trained to never listen to anything but our own brain thinking up what we are going to say next. Even when they are quiet, most people are not truly listening. It never occurs to us that listening – and being curious and open to other people is the path to true attachment.

I was exactly like this myself once. It was excruciatingly lonely. I walked away from many an encounter – very perplexed and curious about where others were coming from. I needed a huge paradigm shift to learn to shut up and truly, deeply listen.

I was discussing this observation with Ward – telling him my theory that people are really afraid to connect deeply with others. They are afraid if they are not in control – doing all the talking; having all the answers – that they will not be loved and accepted, yet this is just the opposite of how it really works.

He disagreed. He said that he doesn’t think people are afraid. He thinks they are just clueless about relationships – clueless about needing other people in the first place – and clueless about how to value other people.

We really were saying the same thing – as is often the case when we disagree. I think I was just reflecting one facet of the issue and he another. I did agree with his facet, and he could have agreed with mine, but rather than noticing that we agreed, he noticed the differences in what we said. This is how it often seems to go. In earlier days, I would have argued with him to try to get him to see the big picture as I do. But stress breaks down most people’s bonds of love and attachment. I am not good at bonding through conflict, as some do, so I just let it go this time and enjoyed the peaceful ride in the car side by side.

When Dexter realized that greeting us at the door was hopeless, he eventually gave it up – so the last year of his life, he stayed in his bed, and waited for us to greet him. When we did, he usually couldn’t contain himself and got up with his whole body wagging toward us, gushing his greetings at the top of his lungs.
But there at the end, of course, he mostly slept through our comings and goings, and raised his head occasionally if he noticed some movement in the room. He’d let out a little woof now and then, if he needed help on the stairs or wanted to go outside.

It seems he’d barked himself deaf – blew out his own eardrums with the crazy-making, and he didn’t have much of a voice left either.

We’d notice a sad whimper at the door when he needed us. ‘Is that Dexter?” we’d ask. And we’d talk to him in those gentle high pitched coos that parents use with newborn babies, and sick children. “Here Boy, Let me help you.” “Aw – here’s a sweet guy.”

These are bonding tones. His heart might have swelled if he could have heard these sounds we all long for – tones of sympathy and love that attune us to the source of our comfort . He grew quieter and quieter. All of his approaches from the past had not worked, and here it was – the brass ring of love and belonging and he hadn’t the strength to even strive for it. We were just handing it to him.

In the weeks before he died, I finally relished some closeness with him – I sat alongside him as he lay on his bed, and caressed his silky sides, and scratched around his soft jowls and floppy ears. He nuzzled me closer, and gazed into my eyes. He had never before kept his head still long enough to make much eye contact. He was always wildly lifting his face to speak, and throwing his head back, so our eyes never really met.

When I looked into his sweet brown eyes, I pressed my forehead onto the warm soft plate of his, and hugged his head in my hands. I’m sure our heartbeats fell into sinc and we both felt perfectly at peace. I hold him now again in my memory and my heart whispers sadly, “Fellow living creature, if you could have just been still, we could have had this all along.”

Dexter on the paper route

 

Dexter - old and wearing socks

 

Dexter's Last Day

Today Ward and I took Dexter to the vet to be put to sleep.

As I scratched softly on the boney top of his silky warm head and looked into his sad tired eyes, I cried surprising tears of grief. It was not hard to let Dexter go – as everyone knows who knows me and the story of this adopted beagle with attachment disorders. This moment wasn’t tearing apart a bond forged through years of joyful master-dog relations. I’d been willing to be dog-free for quite some time, but it was in the doggy-hospice weeks leading up to this moment – during which he lost almost half his body weight and became so frail and light that I could carry him when his paws were too sore to walk on – that I bonded with him. It was in the humbling of him – and the quieting brought by his aging – that my heart reached out to finally attach deeply to this life I’d taken on ten years earlier.

We’d always had an understanding between us. I promised him that I’d keep him till the end of his doggy days. We would be his final home. We were his fourth owners in as many years – 5^th, if you counted that the second to last people gave him back to his previous owners who gave him to us. People didn’t seem to like him – found him annoying. He was beautiful – a tri-color pure-bred beagle – very large, and so very gentle, and yet . . .

He had attachment issues for sure – so there was never the level of love and trust between master and beast one often experiences with a loyal dog. The bond was loose – and any loyalty on his part was directed by pure self-interest. He lacked responsiveness to toys, fetching games and doggy tricks. His stubborn streak was carved like a deep trench from the tip of his nose down through his spine to the point on his wagging tail.

His love of the pack kept him close to us – ever near – but never quite reigned in.

I seemed to understand and accept his co-occurring needs for belonging and freedom. I know some people who are like this, too. I was also able to respect his lack of enthusiasm for pet behaviors, and didn’t expect much of him. He offered a couple of concessions - dancing joyfully when thrown a bone, and barking wildly whenever I got the leash out for our walk. He tugged on the leash– yanking it according to the random dictates of his nose. It was never much fun for me; but I walked him regularly – until the boys got a paper route, and then I sent him off with them at 5 a.m. each day. He didn’t go on a leash. They let him trail behind or wander ahead. He learned the route – and followed it each day with whichever boy was delivering the papers. They’d call him when they lost sight of him, and frequently the boy arrived home a good 10 minutes before the dog, but he always arrived. And if he ever got loose from our yard – he’d take off on the route again, as if he had another load of papers to deliver. We always knew where to look for him.

Of course, he was the luckiest dog on the planet with that paper route – but good things like that don’t last forever. After he lost the route he had a steady decline for about two years. One never imagines how time and illness will ravage the once young and vigorous. It will happen to all of us who survive long enough. Cats, dogs, people.

And that of course, is what I grieved, as we waited in the vet’s office for the shot that would slow his heart and finally stop it. It was age and death and loss – the fruits of this fallen world that broke my heart. And here was little Dexter – bearing this weight – displaying in his tired old body – for the benefit of my edification – the most tragic of truths. It is a fallen world.

It was sweet to let Ward hold him there for awhile in the vet’s office – and to feel Ward’s sadness too. We are the old people – stopping to mourn. The boys said their good-byes earlier – sentimental for Dexter, but not grieving. Their lives are beaming full ahead of them – too bright to let the puff of dark cloud in Dexter’s demise cast much of a shadow on them.

Ward and I can track the passage of time now in a way they cannot.

We know what happened after high school, what we majored in in college and who we married. We know how many kids we had, and what we named them. We had our dream house and won our prizes, coached our kids’ teams and redeemed the parts of our lives that broke down along the way with the loving support of good friends and much faith. Nursing the dying Dexter, we were practicing in part, for the time we would do the same for people –parents; one another.

When I am old, will you be kind?

When you are old, I will love you and care for you.

You will belong to me – and I will still respect your freedom.

I know that my Redeemer lives,
and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.

And after my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God;

I myself will see him
with my own eyes—I, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me! (Job 19:25-27)