Simple Good Things

Nicholai was my Dead Dog Walking. He had lymphoma and a dire prognosis: he would die of the cancer sooner or later and, supposedly, unless he underwent aggressive treatment. I opted instead for easy-going natural treatment and vowed to appreciate each and every one of the predicted few days he had left. Days stretched to weeks, weeks to months, and months to a year. What became the year and half that I walked with Nicholai appreciating each day as potentially his last, became my longest experiment in living fully attuned to the moment. Through the lens of each day on the trails with him still at my side, I gained new appreciation for life’s small gifts.
As I begin to blog again now, it’s with a renewed gratitude for the happiness I experience in life, even amidst loss and hardship. If it seems I am grieving, I am. If it seems death has my attention, it does. Yet it’s clear to me even in the wake of stunning sadness that I have been given a gift of joy that is not always given. While I might claim ‘credit’ for a good attitude and for consciously turning my focus to that which is positive and beautiful and upbeat, mostly I experience this tendency toward happiness as a gift of birth and good early child-rearing and the company of dogs.
The day after a Portland Police chaplain showed up on the front porch to inform us of our son Brandon’s suicide, I got up early, knowing the day would include a drive south to speak with the officer who found him and a trip to the mortuary where his body was being held. I wondered if I should insist on seeing his body (having hung for several days in a tree before it was found) or leave my mind with other, better pictures of the boy who lived with me for almost thirteen years. In the early morning hours, I did what I always do: pulled on clothes comfortable for hiking or jogging, laced up Keen trail shoes, and escorted two loose-lipped, tail-wagging dogs to the car.
Soon the three of us, one middle-aged woman and two youthful pitbulls, trotted along an asphalt trail on our way to the Columbia River. Soft pink wild roses scented the air with a faint sweet fragrance. As my eyes searched out the flowers, I noticed six adult Canada geese escort fluffy brown chicks to the middle of the pond on our left when they heard us approach. The April sun rose low over Mt. Hood which stood sparkling in the distance. I strode along, numb with the news that the boy-man I sheltered for so long, that troubled-child-turned-troubled-young-adult I had so recently entreated to agree to an appointment with a mental health specialist, was dead.
In minutes, I followed the dogs around a locked gate onto the gravel road that would take us to the river. Barney, an energetic and goofy three-year old bounced like Tigger, begging for a toss of his orange ball. I slipped it into a plastic chuck-it and lobbed the ball down the road, Barney racing to grab it out of the air. Kelley, a slightly more sedate five-year-old dog, grinned at me the way dogs do, tail held high and eyes twinkling. In spite of a sadness that could penetrate to the ocean’s midnight dark places where fish need chemicals to light their way, I smiled wide. It was a beautiful morning.
In that moment, I caught a slim thread of understanding why I survive and my son could not. On a few previous walks with the dogs I invited, cajoled, required, or demanded my son’s presence. He was too tired, his knees hurt, his fees hurt. If he agreed to go, he was irritated by the sun in his eyes, he was too hot, he was too cold, there was a rock in his shoe. Mt. Hood or Canada geese or even a soaring bald eagle were out of his reference range and seemed to hold little interest for him. Not even the dogs’ relentless dropping of their beloved orange balls at his feet with a soulful-eyed plea for a toss could break him out of gloom (or wherever he was) and into the moment with anything more than reluctance.
Once, I argued the need for counseling with him, saying, “I just want you to be happy.”
“You don’t get it,” he snarled in response. “I’m never happy.”
He was right. I didn’t get it.
Deep in the cells of both body and brain, I am programmed to experience good things. The sun shining delights me, Mt. Hood stirs a sense of wonder and majesty, fresh spring air caresses my skin, the protective instinct of goose-parents floods me with warm appreciation, and the ever-present joie de vivre exhibited by Barney and Kelley brings a smile to my face in the most unlikely circumstance.
If I could have given Brandon anything, and if he could possibly have received it, the one thing I would have given is this; the ability to see and smell and touch and hear and feel goodness in the simple, daily things all around.
It makes all the difference.

Grief Tides

I found this post, written and neglected. Yet it reflects well the emotional tone of the past couple of years, so here goes.

I sit with elbows on my desk and head heavy in my hands. My eyelids keep trying to slide closed, though I tell myself I have to write. I want to write. But I feel sluggish and weighed down. It's like my internal organs came unhitched from their proper places and sunk down until they're all - heart, lungs, liver, spleen, stomach, kidneys, and the lot - a messy pile in the bowl of my pelvis; heavy on the bottom, empty on the top. I force myself to sit up straight, to log in to t

he blog, to begin to write.

Sometimes I'm nearly swept away by tides of sadness. Which I don't like to admit. I prefer to cop to getting down in the dumps only once I've clawed my way out again, once I've found inspiration and remembered how and why I get happy. The past six months - shepherding my sister over the bridge or through the gate from this life to wherever the heck we go after, and then missing her, and then asking the inevitable 'what's the point of it all' questions - have not made for verdant pastures of inspirational writing.

It was bad enough when my canine pal Nicholai died. So sorry I was that cancer took him away. It was hard not to feel like I'd failed him. After a lifetime on lawns and gardens without pesticides and herbicides, after a lifetime of high quality home-made food, after long walks and heaps of love, I imagined I had given my sweet dog what he needed to avoid the nasty big "C."
I was, of course, wrong. It wasn't the first time.

In 1995, I was a non-drinking, non-smoking, running yoga practitioner, a vegetarian and sometimes vegan, forty years old when I was diagnosed with colo-rectal cancer. It might not need saying, but I'll say it anyway: it rocked my world. I believed I was living a preventative lifestyle. But I was still exposed to whatever toxins float into our skies, fill our water, and linger on the leaves and stems and fruits of our foods. It was desparately difficult not to blame myself, to search my life for possible errors. Only much later, afer I pulled through my brush with the disease that eats us from the inside out, and after my dog died, and after my sister died too, I learned of the Superfund site just a few miles from my childhood home.

I don't know if the heavy metals that leached into the ground water supplying both our well and the Ten Mile Creek that flowed behind our home played a role in the development of cancer in myself and my sister. A brother too, developed tumors and almost all seven siblings have endocrine disorders of one sort or another. Might be genetics, might be coincidence, but a person has to wonder about the arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, and zinc we took in with our drinking water.

At the end of the day, at the end of a life, it doesn't really matter why we get cancer. We'll all die of something and that's the tough reality.

Except...

I suspect ...

Many of these cancer deaths could be prevented. The half of all dogs over age ten who die from cancer, the ridiculous climbing numbers of human cancers - breast and prostate and pancreas and colon and lung and brain and lymph - the cancers in children and non-smokers ...

We'll all die one day and right now, I'm finding that in itself to suck.

But do so many of us have to die from cancer?