I wrote over the weekend on Facebook and on this blog about my guide dog’s surgery and was astonished by the kindness she and I received. The response belies the notion (most recently proposed in The Atlantic) that social media is deleterious to community life. The words of support mattered a great deal to me and hence to Nira Dog. (I am, after all, her translator.)
My friend Bill Peace (known as Bad Cripple in the blogosphere) called me via the old fashioned telephone and helped me laugh–he arranged for a Mass to be said in Nira’s honor though Bill is a non-believer. Why not?
Nira is home now and sporting a purple, wrap around compression bandage and by god she’s wagging her tail. I think Labrador Retrievers would wag their tails in Hell.
Helen Keller said: “What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” I’ve always liked this and yet I’m too edgy to fully agree. My life has been profoundly influenced by three guide dogs and I keep mementoes of the first two beside me in my study. Yes my dogs are part of me–in fact I’m alive today because of them–but we do lose, oh boy do we lose. And as the poet Lorca says: “the heart feels it is a little island in the infinite.”
When my first guide dog Corky died I managed to hold her in my arms and sing. I’d always sung to her and I knew that her last moments should be good, that I couldn’t blubber and weep before her–she needed to know that everything was okay. And I managed it. And as her spirit passed I came apart.
I am learning. I walk with apples for the horses. I cry when I have to. I stand up and sing when it counts.
But something in the world of grief, perhaps grief itself, turns it shoulders, and notices us. The Labrador knows to wag her tail. I stand up and sing when it counts but my dog is wiser than I am. All my dogs have been wiser.
I’m walking around my grief the long way and hoping for the best. How is that Helen Keller?
Planet of the Blind 