When I met Maya, we were such strangers. Our first attempts at
communication were rudimentary, at best -- Maya seemed not to have any
meaningful experience of living with human beings, and I was just
beginning to discover how overwhelmingly ignorant about dogs I really
was (really, completely, totally, damagingly ignorant).
On the
second or third day that Maya was home, I pulled out a clicker and some
cheese. I tried to "load" the clicker -- following clicks with little
cubes of cheese. Maya was so overwhelmed that she could barely eat the
cheese. In retrospect, I can see what complete insanity she must have
found those first few days or months...how overwhelming, and scary, and incomprehensible it must have been. With this cheese, she'd take a piece in her soft
puppy mouth and let it dribble out the side and fall to the floor. Her
eyes were huge, her body constantly in restless, overstimulated motion.
Using
one of those pieces of cheese, I lured her into a quick sit, clicked,
and popped it into her mouth (she swallowed that one, I recall). She
instantly popped up onto all four feet again, so I repeated the process
once or twice. Then waited. Maya sat, maybe randomly, and I clicked
and gave her three pieces of cheese in a row. She danced to her feet
again, and I waited. Then her face stilled for a second,
and she stared into my eyes for a very long time. Thinking so very,
very hard. Ever so slowly, she lowered her back end to the floor and
sat, and I beamed with pleasure, clicked and held more cheese to her
fuzzy lips. Ignoring the cheese, Maya leaped high into the air, her
eyes shining with a look I was seeing for the first time, and let out a
huge, shouting bark of pure joy. Maya had figured out that
communication with a human being was possible.
Unskilled and uncertain on both our parts at first, Maya and I began a conversation that ended up
lasting her entire lifetime, becoming more nuanced and meaningful with
every moment we were together. We started out so far apart, so anxious and uncomfortable, and we grew together until there was no space between us at all. Maya knew what it
meant when I took a deep breath before standing up, I knew what it
meant when her breath caught for a second and her whiskers tilted
forward...she's react to me standing up before I moved, and I'd react to
her shift of attention before she'd fully processed it. I would reach
my hand out in the dark to feel her sleeping side, and through the palm
of my hand, knew that everything was all right. She'd lean against me
and seem to know the same.
Paying such close attention
to each other was marvelously rewarding for both of us, I think. It
became something I did consciously and subconsciously, talking with Maya
without words and without always thinking about it. Until Maya died,
quite suddenly, on June 16th, 2014, leaving only a vast and agonizing silence.
Maya
was sick for only a few days at the end of her life. She'd had a few
bumps and scrapes before that -- a temporary limp from running headlong
into a stone wall, scrapes from plunging through tense thickets, a stomach upset here and there -- but all her worst pains were emotional. Once we worked out how to cushion her from those, she was generally a hardy, healthy, unbreakable, happy dog. Which made the
ending quite surreal, but it is some comfort to know how brief the bad part was.
She died from an infection her
body could not fight off, even with all the help the veterinary hospital
could offer, because her body had destroyed all its white blood cells.
What caused this bizarre, rare immune disorder, we do not know,
although we suppose it was probably congenital, some genetic time bomb that was lurking the whole time. It came on
fairly suddenly, and by the time we knew what we were dealing with, the destruction was too advanced to stop. I may never
stop wishing that I could have done something more, something different,
something that might have saved her. For months after she died, I choked on unbearable guilt: I would have done anything to save her, and I couldn't.
If you happen to read this, then there is probably nothing I could say about grief that you don't already know. It is the thing every person who loves a pet shares, at some point. It is impossible, indescribable, unavoidable, endurable. I went only a little bit insane, writing irrational letters to people, chasing the squirrels out of our yard with screams of fury because I could not stand the deafening silence they provoked. Last summer was immense blank misery, with occasional
razor-sharp slices of agonizing, unbearable beauty -- the sunrise turning a whole prairie
golden, even though I squinted against the light to try to see the dog who
should have been there with me; red rock mesas on a drive south stark against bluest skies; the anchor-weight of my last little rat friend sleeping warmly in the palm of my hand. Out in the world, I struggled to comprehend what people said to me, my head full of fog and dull amazement that they somehow mistook me for functional.
And then time passes, and it doesn't hurt as much to breathe. It snowed and there were no fresh dog tracks in the yard, and the stab of pain stood out the way that beautiful moments had some months before, and I realized that life was sliding back into its normal dimensions. And I was glad of it, mostly.
At various times, I tried to write something about Maya's death. I wrote a few scraps, a howl of despair, a clinical examination of events, some precious memories. I could never finish any of it. Not because I could not write about Maya's death (I could). Not because I could not write about Maya's life (there are not enough words in the world to even begin to tell that story). But because I have lived with this great silence for almost a year now, and I still cannot bear to close the conversation: I cannot say goodbye to my friend.
Instead, I think of impossibilities. I would give anything to say hello again
to her just one more time. One more chance to feel her soft ears, once
more hike into the hills, one more long and wordless look. If I could, I
would adopt Maya from the shelter one more time tomorrow -- a scared,
seven months old, big-eared, big-hearted brown dog, and I would do every
bit of it over again. Even the awful parts. Even the end.
Maya liked to be close to me. She liked to lie
nearby on the floor, and then roll over onto her back and stare at me
upside-down. Her face looked very silly from this position, and I'd
laugh at her, and she would wag her whole body. This had the effect of
moving her, worm-like, across the floor until she could squirm on top of
my feet, still upside-down so that the sharp ridges of her spine
pressed painfully into the tops of my feet. It was a good way of
getting my attention, and a good way of getting a belly rub, and just a
good thing to do. I liked to be close to her too.
She was fierce, brilliant, hilarious, and marvelous. She was mine, and I am hers forever. She liked to lie in patches of
sunshine, even when it made her overheat to a ridiculous degree. She
liked to daydream that I'd someday give her a rat to eat, even after
she'd learned to ignore them 99% of the time. She liked it when I'd
throw my gardening gloves for her to fetch, because I'd actually gone
outside to do yard work and hadn't brought a proper toy, but was never
able to resist her bright eyes and wiggly invitations to play. She
liked to run in huge looping circles, and eat snow, and she never did
really learn what to think of water, and never did trust a single stranger. She liked hiking, loved us, lived a whole life, and when I opened my eyes in the morning her whole body trembled with joy.
Thanks for everything, Maya. I had the greatest time.
