Susan Donnelly

Love is our true destiny.  We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.

~ Thomas Merton

Three years ago, I was signed up for Mt. Mist 50k but didn’t start.  In fact, I didn’t even drive to Huntsville.  I was here at home and the decision to stay was so clear it didn’t need to be made.

It had nothing at all to do with running.

Some sixteen years earlier, I was driving to visit my parents where they lived in Ohio, and exited off I-65 just outside Winchester, Kentucky, to shortcut through the rolling, narrow roads lined with romantic rock walls and old money estates in the horse country around Paris.  It was spring and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.  I passed the exit’s lone gas station and neared the odd tower presumably intended to mark the site of a future industrial park in the midst of acres of beautiful, rolling pasture.  Near the base of the tower and perilously close to the road, was a black puppy.

I honked, then turned around and stopped nearby.  She was happy to see me and in suspiciously good health for a stray.  There wasn’t a living soul in sight but she had to belong to someone.  The two houses within puppy distance were estates – one with a formidable, gated entrance and a good mile of empty pasture and driveway to the stately home, another a crumbling, scary old mansion that nevertheless had a car parked outside.  The gated drive was hopeless so I pulled halfway into the scary driveway but alarm bells in my head rang “No!”

So the only solution left was to take her to mom and dad’s and drop her at the local animal shelter.  I already had four cats and a beloved dog at home and wasn’t in the market for another.

The puppy rode amiably the few remaining hours in the back of my packed Honda CRX.  The huge mixer I was returning to mom rolled over on her twice and she survived in good spirits but with a healthy wariness for the mixer.  I have no idea what happened, but by the time I got her to Ohio, I couldn’t quite imagine giving her away.

Maggie, who turned out to be a black lab mix, was my best running partner, probably my best companion.  I trained her to with voice commands so we could run on the roads (leashed) safely together every day.  She learned quick and never missed a command.  We ran together on the North Ridge Trail in my backyard most weekends.  My eyes were focused on the trail ahead but she stayed in peripheral view and I could always tell if there were someone or something ahead of me on the trail by slight changes in her body language and pace.  She could navigate a trail in the dark flawlessly and as a special treat, we do night runs on the trail in every winter full moon to enjoy the moon shadows and the way it mirrors off the creek and mountain laurel leaves.  All I had to do was keep the extra-black spot in front of my to be sure of the way.

She stuck with me even when we weren’t running.  I’d garden for hours around the yard and she’d move with me, laying down to watch the world or wandering nearby to sniff something but always in view.

I’d take her to the lake most weekends for her two true obsessions: water and tennis balls.  She loved the water so much she’d get excited about it in the car and would probably would have fetched until she drowned.  To my amazement, she screwed up her courage one day and learned on her own to launch herself off the local dock.  She also taught herself to roll tennis balls across the floor to any human who might be remotely likely to throw it for her.

I took her everywhere.  Shopping in Knoxville (and into any store that would allow dogs), Minnesota (she’d swim in Lake Superior until she was shivering all over and still want more), Arizona (she made the trip twice), Florida (she finally got to swim in the ocean but wasn’t so thrilled about the waves), and all points in between.  My boyfriend and I even took her to Mist one year and left her in the car with food and water, knowing by experience that I could finish well before she would need to get out.  What I didn’t count on was the surprise ice storm that year.  We got done and ran over to look in the car.  She woke up from her nap and gazed up at us, happily curled up in her nest of wool blankets, but we had to chisel her out of the thickly iced car.

When she was seven or so, the vet checked a lump in her chest that turned out to be an unusual cancer.  Every day for weeks, I drove her over to the UT Vet Clinic in Knoxville for radiation treatments and picked her up in the evening.  They told me her doctor let her sleep under his desk until I came to pick her up.  Recovery of her skin was one of the hardest things I ever had to take her through, but it worked and the cancer never returned.

But another one did.  When the vet said lymphoma, a lead weight settled on my chest.  She was sixteen now, in great shape for her age but not young.  I heard myself ask all the practical questions.  Treatment was chemo…it would take X weeks…different dogs tolerated it differently…it would undoubtedly be rough…her chances of responding to the treatment were good…her chances of remission were better the farther into the chemo she could go.  “Wait…remission?”  Remission.  There was no cure.

Thankfully, with her good health, the immediate decision was easy – proceed with chemo.  After years of maintaining her weight in the “ideal” range, my mission now was to keep her weight on.  Having full vet permission to spoil her was fun and she loved all the human food.  Then, on the way back from Umstead 100 in April, she refused to eat a McDonald’s cheeseburger and wouldn’t even look at the fries.  I tried everything in the grocery store when we got home but her formerly enthusiastic appetite dwindled and we eventually opted to discontinue the chemo a few weeks short of full treatment.

Though the rest of life was difficult at this time – my relationship with my boyfriend of 16 years was in jeopardy and a hugely draining work situation was only getting worse – all was well with Maggie.  I took her everywhere I possibly could and spoiled her as rotten as possible with as much swimming and running and trips to the designer dog biscuit boutique as we could fit in a day.  Knowing that it was only a matter of time was oddly freeing.  The knowledge made it easy to be present with her, and easy to let go of the need to worry about the future or fret over the past.  Nothing else mattered.  She, in the meantime, was as happy as always simply to be with her people, whatever they were doing.

At the end of November, the lymphoma returned.  She slowly started to lose more weight.  We kept her in the kitchen during the day and at night, and taped bedpads over the entire kitchen floor to make cleanup easier.  I laid a smorgasbord of “people food” out for her every morning before I left, raced home at lunch to let her out and do whatever needed to be done, raced after work to Walmart for bedpads (picture me with a shopping basket full of them) or the grocery store for a new food, and raced home from there to care for her and spend time with her.

I asked her priceless, irreplaceable, godsend of a vet when I’d know it was time, and after a long and unsatisfyingly vague discussion, said the best advice she knew was “when she’s having more bad days than good.”  Great.  Nothing about this was going to be easy.  I loved being with and had tried all her life to give her the best care humanly possible and now had to balance that with the dread that I might mistakenly prolong her suffering.  It drove me nuts for a few days until I fell into the daily habit of stepping outside my preoccupation with the avalanche of things to do for a moment and check – “was it a good day for her?”   In the meantime, I searched the internet to try to quantify “bad days” but kept finding the same answer…“you’ll know.”

I needed someone to talk to, just to listen, but when I mentioned even small details to friends or people at work, most of them well-meaning but seriously misguided, regaled me with pet death horror stories (including two people who happily dropped their dying dogs off at a clinic for the vet to take care of and left), or asserted cheerfully that I’d feel better when I got another dog (by the way, respectable grief for a mere animal is apparently one day), but a shocking number actually warned me about not prolonging her suffering, and one in particular actually accusing me of mistreating Maggie because I should have her put down at the first sign of lymphoma.  Each encounter added a lead brick to my load. Had this been a person I was caring for, no one would have dreamed saying these things, yet Maggie was the daughter I never had.  I didn’t take the situation lightly and never expected these reactions.  I quickly stopped mentioning it.

The week before Christmas, my boyfriend moved out.  I took a sleeping bag into the kitchen to sleep with Maggie and so I could let her out in the night if she needed, and paid a neighboring pet sitter (who required full price per visit) to come in once or twice during the day and let Maggie out, but honestly have no idea how I managed the following weeks.  While it may have been a relief to give Maggie my full attention, the one thing I remember from this time is that it was physically, mentally, and emotionally the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, far harder than all the 100 milers I will ever do rolled into one…and I’d make the same choice again.

The days went on.  My attempts to find food she’d eat for more than a few days got more exotic (yes, even caviar…a total no-go but certainly worth a try) the acceptable menu options dwindled.  I’d literally leave 10 or 15 bowls of various foods lined up along the cabinets when I left for work.  For a vegetarian, I had an amazing number of meat products in the fridge.

And lo and behold, one day while watching her wobble a little more frailly up the driveway to pee than usual, something told me – for her – that it was time.  I called my boyfriend, we talked it over and cried a lot, he came over and after being with her for a while, agreed with me.  I called the vet who (I can never repay her for this) set up a house call for the coming Saturday at noon, after their offices closed.  It was Mist day and though I’d entered it to grab a desperately needed handhold up the cliff of my current life, Maggie trumped everything else.

Thursday, one of the three cats, Elsa, got sick out of the blue with kidney problems and had to be left at the vet’s overnight.  I raced around the house looking for antifreeze, a poisonous plant or a clue of anything else she might have eaten.  No luck.  On Friday morning, she hadn’t improved so the vet and I decided to leave her at the hospital over the weekend.  I sat with her that Friday after work before the hospital closed for the evening, talking and singing to her in her incubation box.  It was the only way I could imagine to help.

For January, that Saturday was a warm, incredibly blue-sky, birds singing, almost-spring day that was itself a celebration of life.  My boyfriend brought her a sausage biscuit, which she gratefully appreciated but didn’t eat, and we took turns cuddling with her on the futon like we used to, coaxing out a few small but heartfelt versions of her contented snort-sigh (dog people will be familiar with this wonderful sound).

As the morning warmed, we made a cushy bed for her on the driveway and took her outside to enjoy the glorious weather.  We alternately walked her around the driveway and let her snooze contentedly next to us in the sun. It may sound strange, but instead of the impending sense of doom I expected, there was instead a deep sense of peace.  I couldn’t get over the gift she’d been in my life and the incredible things she’d taught me.  She was a real wonder.

We were ready when the vet arrived.  The three of us shared years of funny, happy memories about Maggie while she basked in our presence and the warm sun.  When we were done, the vet talked us through the process, we said our goodbyes and we held her.  Then she was gone, leaving peace and happiness behind.

I can’t explain it but for days, I’d been looking fruitlessly for the meaning in all of this, some way to make sense of the impact she had on my life and some way to deal with her impending absence, but minutes after she was gone and the vet had left, I had the distinct feeling, awash in buckets of brilliant sunlight, that she wanted me to know it was all about love.  Her gift, the feeling said, was the knowledge that love is why we’re here and that what I felt for her is what love is.

A few days before, while searching for that meaning, I’d stumbled on a short essay titled  “Expand Your Notion of Love.”  It made the point that we’re here to “open our hearts to the majesty and mystery of the human capacity to care for and about other beings.”  Thinking of love as only romantic love, the essay continued, meant missing out on all the other ways we could find it and be happy…as I had with Maggie.  When I first read it, I was relieved someone was saying what I wanted those friends and coworkers to say, that it was okay to love her like a daughter and to grieve for her that way too.  When I got Maggie’s message, I remembered the essay in a new way.

So I read the essay and it’s last paragraph every year at this time:

“In loving and being loved, we become most truly ourselves.  Through this experience and expression of our essence, we create a sense of true joy… No matter what we do, say, accomplish, or become, it is our capacity to love that ultimately defines us.  In the end, nothing we do or say in this lifetime will matter as much as the ways we have loved one another.”

Elsa passed away the following evening before I had the chance to see her again.  It was unbelievable, but she was so like Maggie in personality, I like to think her work too was done and they left together.

So every year this time, I look back and remember they proved the essay right.  Running is what I’m meant to do and like breathing to me, but no race finishes or race times or any other accomplishments in any part of my life matter more than the way we loved one another.

Posted: Monday, February 1, 2010, 9:21 pm | Tags: Blog | Respond | Trackback