IN THE MIDNIGHT HOUR
For a man whose dog died just over a week ago, I’m in a surprisingly upbeat mood. Just now, with a good tune spinning on my stereo, I caught myself dancing down the hall. What is this, I wondered, and sat down here to try and figure it out.
Is this betrayal? What’s the proper timeline for wracked, immobile grief and does a goose step of happiness mean I’m already over the loss of my dog Mugsley, who I loved above all things?
Ah, but he loved me too—mightily—and what came to me as I sashayed down the hall is that in having been loved—fully, utterly, purely—I’ve been released. Love is an unbinding, isn’t it? We forget that, don’t we? We get it backwards. We pull love in and out in great gulps, but eventually, we forget to let it out. We try to keep it in, keep it ours, like a lungful of air, fearful I guess that if we let it out it won’t flow right back in. So we begin, in small increments—and then fully, tightly—to hold it in, like a possession—as if love’s breath is a self-generating current and not one that’s a back-and-forth exchange—so of course it ends up seeping out the edges, and the force of it—the flow of it—is lost, confirming our deepest fear. I knew it, we say. But maybe love is really meant to be a continuous pull and release—like a heartbeat. A breath in and then a breath out. Mugsley, struggling so to keep breathing, to keep loving, his eyes boring into mine. As if to say, This, this is the lesson. Look at me. This is what I have to tell you. This is my life’s offering. This impossible breath. The machine has failed, the love has not. Take it, then, and give it right back to me. We’ll keep doing that and it will keep me here. Keep us here. Together together together. The Mugger Man would not give up on “together”.
Grieving is a continuation of loving, and like a fully lived day it can be first one thing and then another. And so I can find myself last night suddenly reduced to hot hot pouring tears at the sight of a puppy on television who looked just like Mugs while tonight I can exult at the song’s beat as I move through my house (his house too; ours). Each action, the tears, the click of my fingers in time to the music, is part of the same thing: I cry because I love and was loved and I dance for the very same reason.
Just now, while getting up from here and walking back down the hall to change the music, I thought, There’s this too: I can dance because he did not abandon me, my Mugs. He did not reject me or outgrow his love for me. He did not replace my love with that of another. My love was enough. My love was plenty. (“Plenty” is a great word, isn’t it?)
All the way to the end it was the only love he wanted, all the love he needed. He believed in it so much that kept breathing even when he knew—when he knew—that it was time—past time—to lay his head down and close his eyes. Mugsley, Mugsley, who loved to sleep, would not sleep in the end. Because he wanted to keep looking at me. I walked into the bedroom at midnight that night and knelt down next to him and placed my hand on his heart and I could feel it slowing down—even now I believe that I heard its faltering beat—and I realized that he was dying. Really dying. Right then. Right in that moment. A being. Dying. In my bed (his bed; our bed). Home from a long day at the doggie cardiologist, newly informed, I’d been wailing for two hours at my new knowledge, at my impending loss. Falling to my knees and keening. For myself. Crying for him but mostly for myself. And when I stopped crying and walked into the bedroom and looked at him—really looked at him—I could see, with more clarity than I’ve ever known, that he was dying. Suddenly it wasn’t about me, it was about him, about what I owed him. And so I dropped to my knees beside him and urged him to close his eyes, telling him that this was the moment to rest; that he’d done his work, that it was okay to sleep, that I’d be alright, that he’d given me all I’d ever need—all those words and phrases we speak to the humans we love when we’re trying to cajole them into releasing their final fierce clench on this world. Kneeling there beside Mugsley I remembered how Linda and I had sat on either side of Karen in her hospital bed a dozen years ago and urged her on, urged her toward that damned light—all that clichéd movie-of-the-week jargon that turns out to be how it really works, or, rather, is the language that comes to us in that moment of truth. The soul clinging tight, the eyes wide with a terrible, terrifying urgency, saying No No I will not go; you need me. Mugsley’s eyes said what Karen’s had said. Mugsley, who’d been dying for days, wouldn’t let go and kneeling there, I knew it was because of me. His eyes staring into mine with ferocious intensity. (Love is ferocious, isn’t it? It’s the bite of a maddened hound.) Mugsley, I’m convinced, believed in that midnight moment, that if he kept his eyes on my face then he’d be able to hang on and that holding on was what was required. He couldn’t imagine anything beyond me, beyond loyalty and love. But I could imagine it—I could imagine release for him; the beauty of it, the rightness of it, and that vision is what I was trying to give him with my eyes.
Mugsley’s eyes, though, that’s what I remember so vividly as I sit here typing. So clear, so wide, you wouldn’t believe it. Holding mine. Saying: I see you. See me. This is what life is, this exchange, from me to you and you to me. This is what we’ve been doing all these years; this is the distillation of all we’ve been together. Mugsley, wanting to give and give and give; give love, just love, because he knew I still needed it, and knew too how much of it I’d given to him. Maybe that’s it. Maybe he was trying to fill me back up, like a transference, a rejuvenation, and maybe that’s why I can dance a little on this night nine days later, because he did it, he succeeded, he filled me back up. Love love love, moving me down the hall tonight, that urgent pulse that for Mugsley, there in that final hour, was stronger and more lasting than any that had ever pumped through the valves and pathways of his earthbound heart. (Chuck Wilson)
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