R.I.P.

We took Bonnie to the vet today to be euthanized. Because we got to the clinic ten minutes before they closed for the weekend, we had to use a vet we didn’t know. She asked if we wanted to be present, and we were taken aback because we’re not the kind of people who avoid the presence of death. As the vet administered the fatal injection, Peggy lay on the floor hugging Bonnie and sobbing while I jabbered on about unrelated things, so you might say that I wasn’t any too present for death myself.

When we got home, the first thing Peggy wanted to do was to cuddle, but the first thing I wanted to do was to bury Bonnie. We waited overnight to bury Baxter when he died three years ago, and by that time, he was cold, stiff, and looked pitiful, so I wanted to get Bonnie in the ground while she was still warm and looked like she was asleep. I’ve been in so much physical pain that I worried that digging a grave would leave me worse-off, so Peggy helped.

Before the burial, I took Bonnie indoors and showed her to our cat because I wanted him to know why she went away. Maybe it didn’t help, but I’ve done that with other pets, and never saw any reason to think it was harmful. While Brewsky smelled Bonnie, I wondered if I could ever love him the way I’ve loved so many dogs. I can tell that there’s a lot going on in that little head of his, but I can’t usually tell what it is, and that leaves a gulf between us.

After the burial, I felt like I was in a movie in which happy images of Bonnie’s life ran before my eyes one after another. Things I hadn’t thought of in years came back like a vivid dream in resplendent color, and I beat them down as best I could. I wanted to be alone, so while I did yard work, Peggy called friends and relatives for support. I was surprised because Peggy usually avoids talking on the phone. After thinking about it for two hours, I took 25 mgs of oxycodone, and it cheered me considerably.

Some people don’t understand how anyone can grieve for a dog, but I’ve grieved more for dogs than for any of the people I’ve lost, probably because my dogs were with me all day everyday and were innocent and dependent.

Peggy won’t want another dog for years, if ever, but I already want one. On the other hand, the last three years of Bonnie’s life were tough on Peggy and me because Bonnie became blind, fearful, arthritic, and started to lose her hearing. People say that dogs adjust well to blindness, but Bonnie spent those years walking into walls and furniture, and it really got to me until I started taking Cymbalta and marijuana.

It’s also true that I started thinking of dogs differently after I had my shoulder surgeries. After two of those surgeries, Peggy was out of town for a week or more during the early stages of my recovery and, it being winter, I found it really, really hard to take two dogs (Baxter was still alive after the first surgery) walking in the seasonal drizzle everyday. I couldn’t dry them and clean their feet adequately with one hand; I worried constantly that they would trip me; and I had a hell of a time just keeping myself from getting wet. One day, a pit bull attacked Baxter, and I had to beat it off with one arm. Luckily, it was a young female and not too aggressive. 

After my third surgery, Peggy was out of town again, and Bonnie became ill with autoimmume hemolytic anemia. For at least a week, she was so sick that I expected her to die at any moment. She needed medicine every eight hours, but this meant having to shove the pills so far down her throat that she couldn’t spit them out, and I couldn’t do it with one arm, so my friends Ellie and Josh came over every eight hours. It was then that I started to think of dogs as a liability that I would be better off without. I also resented Bonnie because throwing tennis balls to her hundreds of times a week for years was probably what ruined my shoulders.

For the last two years of her 15 years and 7 months, not a day went by but what I wished she would die sooner rather than later because her infirmities were so upsetting, especially listening to her bump into things, which made me cringe every time she did it. Dogs need far more from us humans than most of us are able—or even willing—to give them, and I found this especially true of a blue heeler because blue heelers want to be on the move every waking moment. If she hadn’t been my dog, I wouldn’t have believed how much exercise she needed, and when she went blind, I couldn’t satisfy her need except by taking her walking, and my arthritic knees made even that difficult. I was afraid that when she did die, I wouldn’t enjoy remembering her because her last few years were so hard for me (they seemed harder for Peggy and me than they did for her), but I don’t think that’s going to be true. I think I’m going to remember her whole life.

If God is calling everyone into a relationship with him, why do some people not hear the call?

Maybe it’s because religion is wired into some people’s brains and not others. If this is true, it would suggest that religiosity is a organically based phenomenon rather than a spiritual calling. I will delete the many references from the following quotations from a recent study entitled “Religiosity in patients with Parkinson’s disease.”*

“Relative to other major life goals parkinsonian patients were significantly more likely to report that ‘my religion or life philosophy’ was less important than were age-matched controls. Scores on a battery of religiosity scales were consistently lower for Parkinson’s patients than those of age-matched controls.”

And

“Several recent carefully controlled neuroimaging and neuropsychological investigations of potential brain correlates of religiosity consistently implicate neo-striatal, limbic, and prefrontal cortical networks as key nodes in the widely distributed neural networks that apparently support common religious practices such as prayer and meditation.”

This study positively thrilled me. Why? Because some of my readers have wondered; some of the atheists I’ve known have wondered; and I myself have wondered why I, a firm nonbeliever in the supernatural, read book after book and write post after post about religion. All I could figure was that I was driven to work through the childhood wounds that were inflicted on me in the name of God, yet most atheists who have been so wounded lack my interest in religion per se, so why me and not them? I even think it likely that I have a greater interest in religion than do most people who consider themselves religious. I can’t let it go, yet at the same time, whatever it is I’m searching for, it’s not God, at least by that name or in supernaturalist terms, so when I read that people with Parkinson’s appear to lose their interest in religion, I thought voila, that’s it; just as an organic process takes away their interest, it stimulates my own. 

“Aha,” some of you might say, “what is it that stimulates that part of your brain if not God?” Damned if I know, but surely you don’t mean to suggest that God favors me over most people, or that he’s more interested in me than in people with “neo-striatal, limbic, and prefrontal cortical” brain damage; and surely you realize that a mad scientist could take any of us and make us into entirely different people by rewiring our brains. There is no us apart from organic components and processes, all of which are subject to injury and disease. Our own identities, even to the deepest recesses of our thoughts and feelings, are no less organically based than the identity of a dog, an amoeba, or even a rock. Cause and effect reigns supreme, and we are its playthings. This can only mean that cause and effect is the nearest thing there is to a God, and that we have no choice about whether we worship it, or something else, or nothing at all. Or such is my long considered opinion, an opinion that gained a degree of validation from this study.

*http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2671825/

At least we're not like our parents

Peggy is afraid of grocery stores (also spiders and airplanes, including airplanes that fly over her head). Grocery stores aren’t usually a problem because I do the shopping. Two weeks ago, our friends Lee and Robin brought their new baby for a visit, and Lee also brought a pie he baked. Peggy decided that I should go buy ice cream for the pie, but I didn’t want to go. Because I usually would have gone, Peggy asked a second time before she knew I was serious, after which she went, and no more was said about it. This caused me to think about what would have happened had Peggy’s father told Peggy’s mother that he didn’t want to go to the store (or do anything else she ordered him to do, for ordered it was). Let’s just say that the festivities would have gone to hell in a hand-basket.

Peggy and I have always been fixated on me not being like my mentally ill father and her not being like her mentally ill mother, and if we’ve done nothing else in life, I think we’ve succeeded in that. To this, you might ask, “What would have happened had your mother asked your father to go buy ice cream?” We were seldom out of ice cream, and my parents never had guests anyway except for my half-sister Anne and her husband, Bill, so it probably wouldn’t have come up. If it had, my father was fond enough of Anne and Bill, that I think he would have gone, probably in Bill’s car with Bill driving (Dad’s own vehicle stayed dirty and every seat but his own stayed loaded with tools), but, generally speaking, Dad felt that he had to stand up for his independence to an extent that caused people to consider him unkind and unreasonable if not downright disturbed. I considered him all three. When things are really bad between us, Peggy and I can at least look at one another and think about how much worse-off we would be if we had married someone like the other’s father or mother.     

While thinking about my father just now, I remembered how he had spent his entire 85 years believing himself to be a woman trapped in a man’s body. For all but the last two of those years, he lived in the South, mostly the rural South, carrying within himself his shameful secret without knowing that anyone else had ever felt as he did, that is until one day during the ‘60s—my father was 56 at the time—when Life Magazine ran an article about a transsexual named Jan. I’m sad that my father waited ten years to tell me how that story—which I too had read—affected him, but at least he told me. If he had done like most white people in the South, he would have cancelled Life a year or two earlier when it started to portray the region as overrun with mean-spirited ignorant bigots (which was true, although they preferred to call themselves “Christian patriots”). If he had done that, he might have never discovered that he wasn’t alone, and if he hadn’t discovered that he wasn’t alone, he might have never found the courage to tell me about his transexuality, and I might have never been able to forgive him for the way he treated his family. Mostly forgive him anyway.