Stephanie Van Horn

Oregon Writing Project

Summer 2001

Moment

Everything this year flowers out of sequence, azaleas and rhododendrons still bringing on blooms when my roses are already past their peak. And the dog that I never thought would leave me has changed the order of my universe, too. This morning, she has finally given up eating. Three weeks ago, the vet's prescription diet seemed to suit her, and I thought of how much time I could have to spend with her, a summer, maybe a whole year before her kidneys finally gave out. And even when she refused that diet, she still would eat hamburger, rice, and canned venison. At Humbug Mountain three days ago she waded the creek, followed rabbit trails, and begged to walk the campground to visit other dogs, slowly, panting, but still the happy dog of the last eleven years. I thought in terms of weeks, at least one more. Now it's apparent that I am being taught some lessons here, each morning bringing me closer to her final day.

For nearly ten years, and now even more intensely after two days in Portland recently listening to the Dalai Lama, I've been learning about Buddhism. Understanding the Four Noble Truths, the cornerstone doctrine, is easy in theory. Now, when I am confronted with my attachment to this shaggy black cross-breed, confronted with change, confronted with suffering, I don't feel the freedom understanding these truths should give me. I feel tortured. Each thought is a blow. And just because of the death of a dog. This feels worse than the death of my father three years ago or the loss of a marriage two years before that, events that were long-drawn out griefs with histories and reasons. This death makes me a child again, blindsided by something the adult world imposes without logic.

My partner's daughter and grandson are coming tomorrow for Father's Day. I don't want to see them, don't want to have to explain why the dog that the two year old talks to on the telephone is sleeping so heavily and walks so slowly. But then it's apparent to me that I don't really want the world to revolve either. It seems so artificial to set a date, Monday, for a death. I can't imagine what the moment when that death will occur will feel like. Just planning the telephone call to the vet to ask her to please come to the house, choosing a place for the dog to die, and wondering where to dig the dog's grave makes me feel like I've run out of oxygen. I turn in desperation to another aspect of Buddhism I've been practicing, that part of meditation that focuses me on just the present moment and that alone. And I find in that process the first comfort I have.

In this moment, the view from the laundry window shows me soft fog glowing like an abalone shell with the rising sun. The roses I moved from place to place last year finally dominate the landscape in great puffs of color, like dramatic embroidery, held in place by a foreground where soft cushion stitch creates the trumpets of deep blue cranes bill geranium. Catnip spikes seem to French knots, nubs of lilac blue. Bumblebees have decided that 6 a.m. is warm enough to travel up and down the catnip's blossoms. On the porch, I see that the hummingbirds have worked one feeder down to emptiness; by noon, I will need to refill that one and the other two. With their own buzz, more frantic than the bees, the hummingbirds circle from the porch to the roses then back to the feeders in constantly changing spirals.

The dog has gone back to her deep, snoring sleep on the thrift store afghan. I don't think she remembers how far and how fast she once ran. I don't think she contrasts two days ago, when she and her Siamese cat walked the morning loop with me for the dog's last time, with the days when I could call "come" and she raced from the other side of five acres. In those moments without comparison to the past, without worry for the future, I am briefly free of this grief. I am honest about what the story is, an old dog who need not be made an icon for my self-reproaches or my dramatization of grief, an old dog just getting closer to the light, on the same continuum that all beings travel, hummingbirds, roses, my aging mother, myself, the three fir ridges piercing and dissipating the fog. Deeply into this moment, which has pain and wonder and the mundane work of folding laundry, I have a brief glimpse of what freedom might be.