I drift, asleep. The dog walks in confused circles. His footfall sounds reach me in sleep, translated. We are walking, a usual morning ten feet at a time and then a halt. How slow it is, how agonizing it seems to the passing neighbors remarking on my patience, the Bradford pears in flower and then in fruit and then in fall and in dormant twig and flower. He must tread on the same patch of narcissus along the sidewalk, each year they send green shoots and he steps on them, and I forget each spring and he breaks at least two flowers but there are always more, and then the dried brown leaves of the narcissus and he breaks those off to rustle down the curb with the afternoon fog wind.
We walk to the creek and then back each day. It is the center of my world and could not be slow enough, could not take long enough. And I will lose the center of my world, the leash that binds us will hang idle on the closet door, and I awake in wracked sobs. Becky murmurs tired condolences.
He walks in circles.
The leash hangs on the closet door. He watches me dress, curious at the hour. This is the time of night I run, and when he pushes his way toward the door with me I always rest my knuckles on his brow, reluctant both of us, and I leave him. He has learned. But tonight the leash comes off the door. I lift him down the steps.
We walk a block. He is confused, the Tramadol making him forget. He would walk slowly, slanted, off into night with me. I do not overwork him. We can walk again in a few hours, I tell him, when the sun comes up and the squirrels are out. He does not hear me. He has not heard a thing I’ve said for months. He looks off stubborn into the dark. There is nothing there to see, but it has captured him and will draw him in. The dark will take the gaze that once measured my every step or gesture, refocus it in a direction I cannot lead him, a distance the leash will not span.
If my last days were thus, I would be comforted.
I think non-humans have a wisdom we have lost, in the growth of our feeble consciousness which is wise enough to see our insignificance and our mortality, but too weak and frightened to give us comfort. No animal rages against the night as we do. They love life and will fight desperately to keep it, but when the dark confronts them, they seem to accept it without fear. I envy them that.
Late Fragment, by Raymond Carver
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
You can’t give Zeke light, or sound, or years, but this gift you gave him and this gift he gave you, and this is what matters. No doubt he’s telling you so every day.
What Sara said.
If he didn’t keep getting up to try again, he wouldn’t be a dog. I feel for you, mate. And your dog, as well.