My Old Dog

Harry is beginning to have trouble climbing the stairs, and spends some nights on two pillows by the pellet stove in the living room. He is still having a good time, he loves to eat, he loves his belly rubbed. Will you make it through this winter, my old friend? I wonder, and refuse to believe the voice that says no.

Then he develops a deadly sounding cough, and at my own checkup the doctor hears something in my heart that wasn’t there last year and my blood pressure is no longer 120 over 70, far from it. The doctor can hear the murmur only when I’m sitting up, which might be good, since I love to nap. Still, I realize, making my echocardiogram appointment, I’m mortal.

When I take Harry to the vet the doctor says he has a “pretty significant heart murmur,” which worries me, and he has his own appointment for an echocardiogram. He’s an old dog. So am I. This morning I am waiting to hear our results. There are two clocks ticking but not in unison. Tick tick tock tock. I am sitting in my big chair and Harry is asleep on his cushion.

It turns out Harry and I are both if not exactly fine, not at death’s door either. Harry has to take a diuretic, and my doctor pronounces my condition “nothing earth-shattering.” The name is horrible: “mild mitral regurgitation,” but I can live with it.

I still have to quit smoking. I impulsively dropped what I hoped would be my last cigarette into a cup of cold coffee and applied a nicotine patch to my shoulder. Then I sat there in my chair. My daughter Jennifer called and we discussed birthday presents for the twins (trucks, dresses, and Legos); I talked to my son, Ralph, about singing lessons for his daughter Justine’s birthday; I drank some orange juice and ate some carrots and watched a vampire movie and then took myself off to bed early. It wasn’t even nine o’clock.

I settled in bed with my three pillows and my three dogs, the curtains pulled, door closed, fan on, lights off, everything the way I like it, but this time my heart was pounding in my throat. Out of the blue came a fact: this body of mine, the one in pink pajamas, the one hanging on to her pillow for dear life, these pleasant accommodations in which I have made my home for seventy years, it’s going to die. It will die, and the rest of me, homeless, will disappear into thin air. I could actually hear my heart now, pounding.

But hard on the heels of this came a worse bit of news. My beautiful children, now in the middle of their lives, are going to grow old and they are going to die too. If I could somehow come back in thirty years, I might not even recognize them—white-haired, frail, they would be elderly strangers. When that thought struck, I felt an awful meaninglessness, and then nothing, and that absence of feeling was the worst thing I’ve ever felt.

The next morning the dogs woke up early, and we headed downstairs, all except Harry, who slept in. I opened the door, and Rosie and Carolina raced into the dark, noses to the ground, tails waving in the air, tracking whatever creatures had crisscrossed our yard during the night. When Harry finally got up, he barked at the top of the stairs, calling for me to wait for him at the bottom before he made his cautious way down. Before he went out, he checked everybody’s bowl. Harry’s an optimist. I love this old dog. Off he ambled into the yard, tail held high, head held high. Peeing on everything perpendicular.

Cold and gray. A long day ahead, and I don’t know how to fill it. I’m not painting, I’m not writing. I’m depressed. Morbid. I measured the water and the coffee and plugged the pot in and worried about the day stretching ahead.

Then I had a bit of luck. Yesterday I discovered a bowl of plums in the icebox that had sat there forgotten for a month, and I took the bowl into the backyard and tossed the plums one by one onto the icy grass near the woods where I’ve seen deer. A dozen dusky purple plums, past their prime: an offering. And this morning when I went out to look the frozen grass was bare, and I was filled with a joy I can’t get to the bottom of.