March Sadly After

Yes, I'm back, after taking a short sabbatical from blogging, mainly because I really haven't felt like writing in the past few days. I'd like to thank those that expressed their concern and/or their condolences in the past stretch. I've debated whether or not to write anything more on the blog on Bandit's passing, and finally decided to write something here, not so much to 'express my feelings' on the matter but to describe matters in a one-off so I don't have to write about the whole thing again and again. Part of this is a manifest loathing on my part of repeating myself; the other is more somber, rooted in a desire to avoid the distasteful insincerity that can come with saying the same things repeatedly and exhaustively, with reaching the point after which one is moreorless just going through the motions.

All considered, my mother took Bandit's passing better than I expected, but it was, is, obviously very painful for her. As she has said, Bandit's passing -- and even the very idea of it-- was more painful for her than her own mother's death. (This is not a surprise: my grandmother wasn't exactly the personification of kindness or geniality.) I told her some time ago that when we decided to put Bandit down, I was going to be in the room with him until the end, and I think my commitment to doing so inadvertently prompted her to want to be with him, too, even though I'm sure it did her no good to see him go. (Dad waited outside, mainly, I'm sure, because there was one thing he couldn't bear to watch: Mom crying.) Somewhere along the line she decided this was 'what she had to do,' that her own desire not to see things was overruled by her belief that she was helping Bandit by being there at the last. In the end, I don't think it helped her at all, and I tried several times to get her to leave so she wouldn't see something she'd never be able to forget, but to no avail. I'm sure that memory will haunt her for a bit, unfortunately. At least she didn't see his face as he died: as I stroked his head and talked him through, I used my back to keep Mom from seeing his face, from seeing the fear in his eyes, from seeing the last seconds as his face twitched and his teeth chattered. I don't think she could have handled seeing him die. When we put an animal down, we tell ourselves that we're 'putting it to sleep,' a metaphor that is relatively apt but by no means accurate. But we use that metaphor because it makes things easier for us to deal with, and I was determined that Mom be able, as much as possible, to believe the metaphor, to believe that he went calmly and without pain. Sometimes our myths and metaphors are the only things that keep us from rending ourselves into emotional shreds.

As for me, Thursday was about doing things that had to be done, and about doing things right. I took Bandit for a last walk, even though he could only make it half way down the block because his hind legs had become so weak. It was more ceremony than walk, really; it was one last time for he and I to be alone together, doing what we used to do, as if to remember, to commemorate, how much our relationship had been built on those walks when both of us were considerably younger. There's something horribly poignant about doing something for the last time, especially when you know it's the last time. Every gesture has a goodbye in it, and every sound seems to have a note of death in it, as much as one tries not to think in such terms. And yet doing something for the last time is also an act of defiance: it accepts that an ending is coming, but seems to say 'but not yet.' In a way, for a while we were a boy and his puppy again, even if I was no longer a boy and he was no longer a pup. There was a sad lyricism to it all, as if there were a kind of tacit, reluctant acceptance of the inevitable parting of our ways.

I didn't cry, and I haven't cried, and I don't say that as if I were proud of it. I can't say I was trying to be stoic, and I can't say I 'held back.' It's been a period of sadness without catharsis, of loss without grieving. In many ways, Bandit was my best friend, and he was certainly my truest friend; he was the closest I'll ever know to a brother. As I've been writing this, I've been noticing all the sounds that I haven't heard-- the clatter of his collar, the click-clack of his claws on the linoleum, the sad thuds as he'd fall about the house. The house seems emptier without him, even a bit colder and a bit plainer. It's easy to forget how much a pet can bring to one's life, too easy.

I don't know if it eased him at all that I was with him to the end, or that my ugly mug was the last thing he saw before he died. I hope so. No one deserves to die alone. And right now, for all the knowledge that what happened had to happen and that it was the right thing to do, I find myself oddly like Fowler at the end of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, not distressed or mournful, but wishing, as Greene put it, 'there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.'

Selah. Selah.

With all that said, this blog will now return to its regular routine of performing for its own amusement and perhaps others.