after Susan Sontag
Blanca tells me to try the holistic vet down in Pacifica who’s been treating Hope, her shepherd-mix, with acupuncture. “It’s amazing,” she says. I leave three messages before the office calls back and tells me to register through the online portal to determine if my pet qualifies.
“Can’t I make an appointment now? He may not make it much longer.” The office lady says the next new-patient appointment isn’t for three weeks. I upload the info anyway.
In the meantime, a sister on the East Coast who works in a health food store tells me to get L-Theanine. “All our customers use it for their dog’s stress,” she reports. “You have got to try it.”
Then, Bermuda shorts guy from Precita Park tells me about the best canine CBD product, “We threw out all the other meds. That stuff is all you need. Look at him!” He nods toward a French bulldog lifting his leg against the stump of the tree that fell over in a storm and crushed three cars. I find both the tranquilizing supplement and cannabis elixir at Rainbow Coop, and a good thing too, because when I follow up with the holistic vet about an appointment, they tell me I need to register on the portal. Again. I already spent too much time inputting the unabridged version of our guy’s medical history — past conditions, vets, and prescriptions — onto said portal weeks ago. I decide it’s not worth the drive down the coast.
Now Sylvie, the neighborhood groomer, says to try putting tiny rubber bands around each of his toes. “People tell me they work like magic,” she offers, after I describe how he has been slipping. We find him splayed, stuck on his belly, starfished on the floor. But no stores around here carry them.
“Are you sure she’s not talking about the little rubber bands the orthodontist gives with braces?” asks the girl at from the pet supply place on Church Street because I refuse to order from that big online Destroyer. Except for the disposable male dog diapers because we were desperate and Sophia’s Shih Tzu Truman (who has a collection of sweaters and tops to die for) wears them all the time. Sophia insisted on giving us one to try. Turns out the disposable doggie diaper can be a gamechanger (if used along with the cloth ones some angel from a Facebook Buy Nothing group passed down which are good only for number two).
Krylon, who’s been cutting my hair in our kitchen since lockdown says, “Try these.” They pull out four black booties with non-skid pads on the bottom from their hairstylist tool bag. “Lord knows we have no use for them anymore.” Krylon looks about to cry. Their departed cur must have been a mini teacup itsy-bitsy something because the little doggy socks go only halfway onto our boy’s paws. But even after we find booties two sizes bigger and scatter old throw rugs around the house and dog beds every few feet, our pup still struggles and cries all night for reasons we cannot fathom.
“He’s healthy, good heart, no infections,” says Amanda, our regular vet. But deaf and blind, with worsening dementia, I remind her. And having trouble just standing. “Let’s work on keeping him comfortable, okay?” she suggests with an optimism that makes me question her hearing. “I want you to write down every time he has a bowel movement or urination, and the times he eats and drinks. Let’s stay ahead of the pain and on top of the elimination. Give him the anti-inflammatory with a meal and the Gabapentin two hours before you go to bed. If he cries in the middle of the night, try the CBD, too. If you must, a quarter of a Tramadol.”
But sometimes he just wants water in the middle of the night, I am thinking.
When his whining wakes me up, I give him water and then take him outside before we go back to bed. I take a flashlight so as not to wake the hubby. Sometimes pup wanders and I search, shining the light into the ivy, geraniums, and calla lilies, and behind the plum tree and under the hummingbird bush. “Why don’t you just call him?” Barbara next door asks after I complain about losing him underneath the house. Has she forgotten he’s deaf? Has she, too, lost interest in the minutia I can’t stop explaining to anyone standing still long enough to listen? How he passed through three different shelters and came to us ten years ago with half his face sewed back on after they found him on the side of the highway in Monterey?
At night in the dark sometimes I get scared, too. Sometimes I still do call out, even though he’s deaf: “Joey, Joey, Joey.” Or I sing his favorite Helen Reddy tune or “Golpes en el Corazón” because he liked them when he could still hear.
An iffy friend texts: Some of us aren’t meant for ownership of animals… You did your best. Poor Joey. This passive-aggressive message feels like emotional sadism, prompting me to speculate that she has fallen off the wagon. Still I question every inch of myself and regret complaining to her how my right hand has been swollen for almost a year from carrying him around so much and that’s partly why I am thinking I may have to pull the plug.
“Don’t give up on him,” says Stefan, who bought airline tickets to Japan when he learned of a cardiac surgeon in Tokyo specializing in canine open-heart mitral valve surgery. “Poor Ziggy didn’t make it, but your guy is still going.”
“It’s so hard to know when the time is right,” says Lily, who has had to say goodbye to two dogs since I’ve known her. I confess to her alone that I considered taking one of his Tramadol pills when they spilled onto the floor at 4:00 a.m. and I couldn’t console him even with a warm bath and massage. “Hey. No. You cannot mess with your clean time,” says Lily, who relapsed on painkillers years ago.
“You need to rest your wrist,” says the body healer who works out of a garage converted into temple. “Scoop him up with your left hand; you should be able to even do yoga again in a few weeks.”
“Try swaddling him until he falls asleep,” says Eileen. Her years as an afterschool teacher at a public art school where she was known as Queen Eileen gives her suggestion more clout. “Cuddle him like he was one of your own,” she adds. Oh, I do. I do.
“No Ma, you can’t put him down,” says our youngest son stopping by to do his laundry.
Even though I have resorted to carrying him in a sling because toting 12.5 lbs. pounds of mixed-Yorkie dead weight can get tiring? Even though I knead his hips after a long nap so he can stand and walk to pee? It may be hard to believe, but not so long ago this guy could drag me to the top of Bernal Hill. And if he heard a dog barking from behind a fence or saw a snarling snout from inside a garage pushed up against a grate, he would strain and lunge forward not unlike the Grinch’s dog Max, leveraging unimaginable reserves of strength to pull the sled laden with every last Christmas present and tree from Who-ville thousands of feet up snowy Mt. Crumpit. You should have seen him trot, ears up, head high, keeping pace alongside Damian’s labrador-pit mix Jody or Tony’s English bulldog Lucky.
Our boy is still pulling miracles. He distills strangers down to a state of pure humanity, erases the divisions and polarizations separating people by keeping the focus on sweet old dog. The senior cur highlights a heretofore overlooked common denominator. Whether at gas station rest stop in the Central Valley, veterinarian waiting room in The Mission, or coffee shop in the desert, the old frail dog elicits a supernatural compassion and concern from others who understand, those needing to share their own aged-dog experiences. I send my friend, Dan, detoxing from a meth addiction that has not diminished the physical stature left over from his college football days, an image of a woman cuddling a small poodle with the caption “Can’t. Sorry. I started to leave my house, but then my dog looked sad.”
Dan texts right back: “Awe – totally – my life revolves around Skippy.” This unexpected bonus, the soulful recompense paid generously by others, has given me hope for humankind after all. Strangers cross every divisive chasm to commiserate and empathize.
Now Pup leans the whole of himself, all twelve pounds and change of fur and bones, into the wall. For support or Dear Life, I can’t tell. He faces an empty corner, cheek against plaster. “What do you want, boy?,” I ask. He looks up and out, clouded eyes staring far off in a different direction. He starts to take a step and stumbles. So I bend down and pick him up using mostly my left hand, wrap both arms around him so tightly it’s as if I am hugging myself. We stand still like that until I am sure that his heart can feel mine beating alongside. I ask once more, listen harder for the answer. “What do you want, boy?”
Anita Cabrera’s work has appeared in Reed Magazine, Acentos Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Best Travelers’ Tales Anthology, The New Guard, Litro Magazine, and other publications. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Award and performed on stage. She writes, teaches, and dances in San Francisco, CA.
