this is the third instalment!! read the previous ones (part 1, part 2) first!!!
cw: death
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Maybe it was the way N talked about Pookie’s return or my own desire to feel like there was something bigger than me, but I told myself that something good was bound to happen. I kept reminding myself that I chose to do this, that I was doing something good. It was definitely delusional, but I thought there was some trade that I could make with the world. Perhaps giving Pookie back to her family, returning her home, would mean that Lady Luck would soon smile in my favour. In that moment, I needed to believe in something greater than me, something or someone that would be making decisions in my best interest.
For the sake of narrative, I have to clarify that I don’t usually believe in God. But in that moment, I did that really corny thing where people go “if there really is a God out there… [insert wish or hope or whatever it is they want].” I needed the faith of karmic retribution: in the midst of all the confusion about my grief, the reminder of my aging loved ones, I wanted to do something good and noble, even if it hurt me, in order to get something good in my own life. I don’t think there was anything that I wanted specifically, but being hopeful felt like a way out of my exasperation, the lingering thought that life was truly nothing.
I talked about the entire Pookie situation in this way too, that there was something bigger than myself. I needed to talk about it, to make it real, to sort it out in my own head and figure out how I genuinely felt about it.
It was strange, though, similar to people saying they’re sorry when they hear a loved one has passed away. When I told people about Pookie, I found that other people had an instinct to try and make me feel better, which more often than not enforced my own need to believe that I did something ‘good’. And honestly, I’m not opposed to hearing this (luuuuuuuuv a compliment <3), but I found that as time went on and I better understood how I saw the situation, I was unsure in accepting any praise. It was funny, though, because when people didn’t tell me that I had done something ‘good’, I pushed the conversation in that direction. It was the only way I even knew how to talk about it, the only way of thinking about it that I could accept others to see it.
Ultimately, I don’t think my decision was based on Kantian philosophy (greater good, kids involved, etc., etc.), but it was easy to hear those things because it helped me absolve my own guilt. I didn’t necessarily regret what I did either, but to a certain extent, I felt like I had given up on Pookie. That I had chosen myself over her.
Eventually, I had to stop talking about it with strangers entirely (à la tendency to overshare). I didn’t want people to know that I felt guilt, shame, resentment over it. It was much easier to avoid, to distract, so I picked up a second job, and reassured myself that it didn’t matter how I felt about it because at least N and her family were happy.
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The more I focused on the greater good, the more I started to believe it. Like, really believed it. I wanted to think that if I could do this for someone else, something like this would happen to me. And it wasn’t completely unfounded: somewhere deep inside all the confusion, I think I hoped giving up Pookie would bring good karma in the form of Maria. I never admitted it, because I knew it was romantic and deluded, but I couldn’t help but feel that way. Just this once, give me something.
My time in my retirement home felt like this could be possible. While I was home, I spent a lot of time with my nainai. We never really talked about anything, but just being with her made me want to believe in a greater power out there.
In part, I see a lot of myself in her. In her youth, she was a kindergarten teacher, and when she moved to Canada to raise my sister and I, she kept herself busy with us and many of the neighbourhood kids. It was here (in ottawa lmao) that she found Buddhism, something she now practices intently. She believes that life is cyclical, that we pass but we come back in whatever shape or form the world decides. For her, childcare is thus a way to ‘give back’. Maybe it’s because I grew up with all these philosophies, but I think I now inadvertently seek people like this in my own life. They find meaning and value in the idea that they can inspire and aid those who will one day contribute. That life is a cycle—just because you’re gone, doesn’t mean humanity will be. We plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
I think an infatuation with youth (including my own), though, can be indicative of the need to feel alive: to feel that there’s still hope and chance and opportunity in the world. It’s nice to think of oneself as a part of a greater thing, that we can be of value raising and contributing to the next generation, and those to come.
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I know I’ve said this a lot, but the fact is, it’s quite easy for me to find little things to romanticize. It seems easier to look at life as a whole existence, brushing nuances away with swooping metaphors and general symbols of what anything means.
And for a long time, I’ve been able to live like this. I engaged with things that made sense to me, and anything that seems too complicated, or having a meaning that would take too long to figure out, I avoided. I lived impermanently, without regard for any long-term implications, reasoning that any consequence to come was neither real nor decipherable. Any time I found myself falling out of this detached way of life, I smoked as much weed as I could, until rendered entirely catatonic. I hoped the death of my brain would allow some other voice –perhaps God, a sudden guardian angel, or even my yeye– to tell me how to deal with everything, that it would all be okay, or that everything was actually just a dream that I would soon wake up from.
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You can only avoid something for so long, though. The truth was, I came back to Montréal and instantly occupied everything in my life with Pookie, because back in Ottawa, my parents were going through the realities of what to do with Maria.
With Maria, it was harder for me to think or talk about openly. I had known for a while that she wasn’t doing well (see list of ailments in the second entry), but I guess I had the luxury of being away, so even though I was regularly updated about her failing health, I wasn’t living in it.
In my three weeks at home, I really saw how bad things had gotten. I think my surprise came out of a combination of my parent’s attempt to shield me and my sister from any sadness, as well as my own willful ignorance to avoid accepting that Maria was going to leave me as well. The point is, she wasn’t the same anymore. She struggled to walk around the house, her hind legs often giving out on her entirely, her eyes cloudy from cataracts, her belly so large that it would make her breathing laboured and exhausted. She had become incontinent, leading my parents leave doggie pee pads everywhere in the house, just in case. She no longer went upstairs, because she couldn’t get up or down herself, and my parents were worried that if they weren’t supervising her all the time, she would pee all over the carpeting.
At night, she would cry before she went to sleep. No matter what we did, she would whimper until she was too tired to anymore. It reminded me of a small child’s cries: as if she were calling out for help, that it was dark and she was alone and scared.
When my parents got home from their vacation, I was angry. I couldn’t believe they had let her get to this point. I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t thought to do anything, why there were no medications, preventative measures, being taken.
They didn’t take it sitting down, instead explaining to me how they saw it. Looking back at it now, though, I think I was too frustrated with everything in my own life to even try to understand them. The fact was, they had tried; this was their reality and they were trying every day, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. Everything the vets had suggested were followed with an ominous “but, this won’t treat it forever.” The cataracts would come back, the arthritis would still be there, and the Cushing’s would require a medication that would just lessen the pain, but there was no guarantee that anything could bring her back to what she used to be.
It was with this knowledge that I returned to Montréal, late November, after a month in my retirement home. The emotions were mixed: I was glad that I didn’t have to be in Ottawa anymore, but I felt guilty that I couldn’t do more about Maria, or even spend more time with her. I had to reason to myself, though, that what would I even do if I was back in Ottawa? Maria hardly recognized me anymore, instead, she spent all her time sleeping, only waking to eat.
These thoughts took a lot of my headspace in this time. My parents were calling me and my sister more often, mainly to discuss the realities of putting her down. Everyone in my life seems more pragmatic than I, but maybe that’s just symptomatic of my own abilities of avoidance (alternatively, delusion). My behaviour was erratic and inconsistent, because as much as I didn’t care to be in the day to day reality of when and how to put Maria down, the death felt inevitable. My parents were more hesitant. At the time, I was irritated that they were even thinking of prolonging her pain. I couldn’t understand how they were being so selfish about the whole thing, how they could put their desire for ‘normalcy’ or ‘routine’ above the suffering of a being.
And as they say, hindsight is 20/20, because I can now see two important things that I couldn’t even fathom understanding at that time. First, I think my parents didn’t want to play God. For them, it was difficult and sad, but it was life. If she were really that sick, she would’ve died already. It wasn’t about keeping the facsimile of routine for them, but a fundamental difference in our philosophies of living. They believed that life always takes its course, and what will be, will be.
Second, I’m very clearly a deeply impatient person. The way I saw it, was that the vets had told us that Maria didn’t have that long to live anyways. With the way the stars were lining up (w all my recent sadnesses), it seemed likely that Maria would die when I wasn’t in Ottawa; it would be another situation similar to my yeye’s, where I wouldn’t be able to be there to really say goodbye. I couldn’t ask my parents to keep her dead body until it was convenient to me to return home, so I thought that if there was any time to do it, it was now.
And perhaps it’s this second realization, that I have trouble with patience, that really sums up how I behave. My parents’ belief was a stark opposition to mine: that we should be patient and let things play out. I believed, however, that if we knew the imminent outcome, if there was nothing we could do to change it, then we might as well just get it over with. It all comes back to my mindset of impending doom: I just couldn’t sit around and wait for another tragedy to happen to me, completely helpless to direct any of it.
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Though I had told my parents that it was ultimately their decision, I couldn’t help but think that putting Maria down was a minimization of pain. It culminated to a lot of strange conversations where my parents remained hesitant, and I ended up sounding like a crazy evil person, urging that my dog should die. It’s strange how people work, though, because when I stopped insisting, they decided to do it.
My sister and I coordinated which weekend we could both be back (she’s in her third year of nursing and does a lot of in-person ‘classes’ in hospitals). When the time finally came, everything was set up: my parents had found a dog euthanizer through one of their friends, he would take her body back to a crematorium, and within a week, we would have her ashes in a customized marble urn.
On that Sunday morning, we gathered in the living room. The dog euthanizer man was kind and tried his best to be stoic in an otherwise depressing situation. I instantly hated him, not for who he was, but because I couldn’t process it as anything more than this man was going to kill my dog.
When he injected the substance that would put her to sleep, she was already sleeping. Maria didn’t do much else other than sleep—she had lived a long, eventful life, and she was tired. She didn’t seem afraid nor too concerned about what was happening. She reacted slightly to the needle, but no more than that. Within minutes, she was asleep forever.
I cried, but it was a numb cry. I had stopped taking my antidepressants the week before, realizing that it was making me numb in my life overall. I wanted to sob, to cry, to feel the sadness of a loved one leaving me, in the comfort of my parent’s home where it was safe to do so. It wasn’t that, though.
It was empty, like there was nothing inside of me. Instead of expressing my emotions because I felt something deeply, I worried that I no longer had the ability to feel anything at all. That there was something wrong with me –perhaps sociopathy– where I didn’t feel things the way a living, breathing human should, but that I just ‘felt’ things because that’s what was expected of me.
And beyond that, maybe there was nothing out in the world, watching out for me. All this time I spent praying to a god, any god, hoping that the natural forces of karma would give me happiness in my life, were reduced to nothing. My exasperation became solely that: exasperation, without hope. All this talk of being resilient and hopeful, or being sad and nihilistic, meant nothing in the end. They were all just ways that I could give myself a semblance of living, that I was feeling and thus, still a person.
I didn’t know what else to do, except to accept it and move on. That’s what I was taught to do, anyhow. There was no God out there, no one to guide me in the right direction. I was an ant in the grand scheme of things—something small and irrelevant, condemned to working towards something without ever being greatly rewarded, or even seeing the fruits of my labour. Nobody was looking out for me in the spiritual sense, making sure the trajectory of my life was going well.
I had been reduced to a version of myself that had no agency, no control, and no guardian angel. Karma wasn’t real, and I couldn’t just sit around and wait for someone (anyone!) to save me from this apathy hole I’d dug myself into (Gott is tot!). And (perhaps the scariest realization) if I wanted to stop feeling this way, I’d have to figure it out on my own.
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acceptance / exasperation / karma / depression / joy