What Sam Has Taught Me
This essay was written while I was very ill, years ago. It came from the heart and a fevered mind, and was perfect for this gorgeous anthology by Laura Lee Cascada honoring her pooch with stories of courageous animals.
Sam staggers around zombie-like, legs stiff, toes dragging and scraping on the tile floor. His depleted brain cells latch on to shards of life: a favorite toy, a drink of water, food, my smell. All instinctual. His daily patterns ingrained. The phenobarbital keeps him drugged. When he can’t focus anymore, he stops wherever he is and sinks, legs splayed, eyes closing until his head finally hits the floor with a thunk. He sleeps in twitches and jerks, and last night he growled fiercely and snapped at a bogeyman. Soon it will be time to call Dr. Death—young Josh who has been helping me care for Sam since his diagnosis. Sam is a 13-year Jack Russell Terrier. The tumor pulses in his frontal lobe, victorious over love, too large to remove.
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A mysterious illness has struck me, and I can do nothing but lie on my bed in my buttery yellow room and stare at the ceiling. I think I may be dying. Whispers float on the periphery of my closed-eye consciousness, murmurs of bodiless energy waiting in the bardo.[1] Waiting for a new form. Waiting for me to join them. I can’t, I want to shout, but I lack the energy. I brought this illness back with me from Japan. Or perhaps my body is rebelling to what I’ve come back to: a country divided. Or maybe just the shitty food. Whatever the reason, my body doesn’t want me to eat. I had returned from a two-week stay at a Zen Buddhist temple on Kyushu, where I ate twice-daily fresh food from the garden and from the sea. My first morning home, I finished half of my quinoa waffle before running to the bathroom. I haven’t been able to keep anything down since. I’m down 12 pounds and counting.
Sam’s panting by my bed rouses me out of my apathy long enough to get up and carry him outside to pee and poop. His back legs try to collapse with every attempted step as he stubbornly makes his way around the yard, wontedly sniffing, peeing like a girl dog now. One who prefers to poop in private, Sam shoulders his way into our ligustrums, returning a few minutes later to make his way back to where I wait on the front steps. We sit for a while, both staring off, remembering better times.
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Sam has taught me that life is not for the weak-hearted. He came to me from Animal Control, a dog on borrowed time. His right rear leg was almost severed, and he was waiting out the five-day period the county gave dog guardians to find their lost friends. Deemed unadoptable, he sat on a soft white towel in a small cage in a back room. His wound was kept clean, and he was taken outside to pee and poop because he refused to go in his crate. His water and food bowls were kept fresh and filled; clearly he had captured the hearts of the workers. And my housekeeper. She saw him when she went through looking for her daughter’s lost cat, and, knowing my fondness for Jack Russell Terriers, came straight to tell me about him. It was also Sam’s fifth day—just in time.
Sam and I went to the vet. Dr. Merritt examined his leg and thought it might heal up. We went home with antibiotics and Tramadol, and for the next few weeks he succumbed grumpily to my nursing. He rested and healed in his crate, but hopped around and sniffed enthusiastically when I took him into the yard to do his business. Soon the wound closed, and Sam joined our family’s daily life. We discovered his fierce independence, and his loyalty to me. He decided immediately that my 11-year-old son was in competition for my attention and wanted nothing to do with him. He tolerated my husband, perhaps realizing that he was the residing alpha male and deserved respect. He was also smart enough to learn from our Sarah, also a Jack Russell Terrier and, at three years old, the established first dog of the household.
Sarah accepted him and showed Sam the way of our family. We live on a dead-end street in an established neighborhood on a small lake. Everyone knows everyone. We have joggers, speed-walkers and wanderers, and dog-walkers, circling in front of our house daily. If we had our doors open, the dogs wandered in and out or lay about in the yard to keep a keen eye on things. At first, Sam took Sarah’s lead in who was acceptable and who wasn’t, her bark low with warning, his high-pitched and sharp. Sarah taught him when to bark for a treat, how to hide when I got out dog shampoo for a bath, and when it was time for our twice-daily long walks. Then everyone settled in. Life became filled with happy routines.
Along the way, we started and grew a business; my son left and came back from college. Sarah developed a renal condition and was put on a special diet. Sam was diagnosed with Cushing’s, a chronic disease that kept his adrenals pumping cortisol and required medicine. They were a part of our imperfect little family and went everywhere with us.
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When we are ill, our world becomes small. A microcosm awareness. It is an acute and unwanted meditation, the present filled to bursting, the brain too taxed for forward thought. It is a time of pure and utter selfishness. But Sam won’t allow me the self-pity I crave. His illness intrudes into mine and pulls me away from myself to his present state. When he lies next to me, twitching in his stupor, I breathe for him. He gives me purpose. The ennui becomes a kind of peace.
Sam refuses to give in to the numbness that the medication demands. His body quivers from nose to tail tip. I watch with bleary eyes, jealous of his determination to keep following the habits of his life. I struggle to wash and brush my teeth, run a comb through my hair, and change out of my sleeping clothes. Not knowing what is wrong with me negates all decorum. I wallow in the numbness of fear.
Dogs don’t feel self-pity; at least, not in the way we humans do. They don’t like pain or sickness any more than we do, but when the inevitable happens they accept it as another aspect of their life. Acceptance … the one abiding teaching of the Buddha. If I choose to put aside my studies, my meditations, and the compassion toward others in my self-indulgent misery, this is the salve I must hold on to. It will give me the strength I need to take me through the continued barrage of tests and trials to discover the cause of my mystery illness. Acceptance will allow me to also lurch through my days, grasping the habits of my consciousness, living within the unknown. Without self-pity.
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Sam sleeps on his side: body on his dog bed, head on the cool tile floor. His nubby black tail twitches as he dreams. When it doesn’t, I wonder if he has died. I wonder if I wish he had. Then I wouldn’t have that decision to make. Sam has his karma to live out, but twice now I almost intervened, maybe changing his next life, maybe not. Maybe changing my karma, maybe not. It’s all about intention, so I must know mine absolutely if I do decide to end his life. Now is not the time because I can’t think clearly.
My tests come back negative. Endoscopy, colonoscopy, ultrasound endoscopy. Blood, stool, urine. Nothing. Yet I continue to feel like I’m fading away. The doctors have labeled what I have as “failure to thrive.” My world small and surreal, I wonder if I’m going crazy. Do we know when we are losing ourselves, or what we are even losing? The brain exists to control the functions of our human form. If the brain gets “off track,” what does it tell the body? Does its morass of illogic not lie to the body, causing it to drag along? Yet, is the opposite true as well: that if a virus or bacteria infects the body first, riddling its perfect engineering, it can make our brain stop working rationally and lead to the bubble of misery that is now, piercingly, real and dangerous? How do we know which is causing which?
Dogs don’t think about these things. Sam is dying, and he simply is. He feels the anguish of what is, but not the anguish of what is not. He has no plans; he lives in the now. Humans have a rare capability to dream in detail of the future, fueling our hopelessness when dreams don’t come true. The greatest delusion may be that Homo sapiens (in Latin, “wise man”) are the superior creation. This assumption comes from our abilities to reason and project. I posit that these abilities place us at a disadvantage. This is what Buddhism has taught me.
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Sam just had another seizure, and I missed it; I was in the next room watching Fargo and heard nothing. Yet when I walked into my room, I slipped on spit and Sam’s neck was slathered in wetness. He sits, splayed out, vacant-eyed. I wasn’t there! I wonder if it’s the first time I missed one. I hope so, but I’m probably wrong. I try not to leave him for long, but there are times I’m gone for an hour or so. If he convulsed, paced his post-seizure circles in confusion for 20 minutes—half an hour—and then slept deeply, as he does, I wouldn’t know. The saliva that flies out of his open mouth would have dried. He’s able to hold his bladder and bowels, still.
Tonight we trudge down our street. A few months ago, Sam would run on ahead, his body rocking, back and front legs in tandem. Now he stoically staggers, determined to keep up with my slow, purposeful gait. The aged making their way along. Are my neighbors looking out their windows and shaking their heads at our sad procession? Are tendrils of fear creeping into their hearts, down into their bowels for an unwelcome butt clench, that this may someday be them? We get halfway down the street and turn around. I pick him up and carry him back home, to his bed, where he will sleep now, worn out and twitching. As I put my forehead to his, he licks my nose. How much longer can we do this, my love?
Today is the day. Young Dr. Death is coming at 3:00, armed with syringes and kind words. He will look solemn and murmur that I am doing the right thing. That eternal sleep is preferable over day-to-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute combat for habituality. What once Sam expressed with ease—eat, sleep, poop, pee; bark ferociously whenever the doorbell rings with visitors or the mail truck squeaks to a stop in front of our house—has become a constant and unwinnable struggle for him. Josh tells me how fortunate it is that we are able to make life and death choices for our animals, because we can’t for our humans. Yet.
Sam had two seizures within 12 hours yesterday on an advanced dose of phenobarbital. It’s time.
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Sam is gone.
Not a trusting dog, Sam learned to trust me. Today that trust reached its peak as he allowed me to bring death into our home. He is on his bed, with his favorite squeaky toy and his blue collar with the stainless-steel heart-shaped tag that has “SAMMY” and my cell number engraved on it. The sun is shining in a perfect oval on his face. He is covered up to his front feet with the black-and-white blanket he has had now for 10 years. His smell is ingrained in it. I bend down and sniff deeply. We will bury him in it. But not until tomorrow. Tonight I will keep him with me in my room, in the same spot that he has slept in for years. I will likely think I hear him breathing and sighing in the night, shifting to a more comfortable position. I will likely continue crying as my heart keeps on ripping into smaller and smaller bits, drifting away, irretrievable, as I question the choice I made.
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Hanging upside down eases the pain. I push the time limits on the inversion table that is in the basement. The quiet gloominess of the large room wraps around me, soft and soothing to my wired body as I stare at the ceiling. It feels right to hang this way, to look at the familiar flipped and recompose obscure fragments to create a new known.
For months I have been the caretaker of a sick dog; for 14 years I have been a trusted pack leader. Like children, dogs require constant care and guidance. When my son left for college at the age of 18, I wandered lost for days, his absence wafting to me throughout the day. Tears would prick sharply and unexpectedly. The fact that he was only two hours away didn’t ease the emptiness. At first. Then time intruded, and a new normal filled the void. It was time to let go. The care and guidance were, for the most part, done, and I had to trust that I did the best I could.
Now as I navigate the grieving process for Sam, it is not just the passing of a beloved dog, but the awareness of time passing. Of a sweet and warm Indian summer reaching its end and the howl of cold winter winds taunting our dreams. How quickly and easily we glide through our days—our childhoods spent in anticipation of the freedoms of adulthood; our youth in anticipation of having and doing, of loving and creating—never looking too far down the road lest we see ourselves in the lines and creases of our grandparents, and then parents. But soon enough, we get there.
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The misery in my body and soul is ebbing daily. I’ve been assured by my doctors that my organs are safe, that I need to look elsewhere to find the cause of my distress. They look at me with hooded eyes. One of them suggested I try Elavil at night—just to help with sleep and to settle my “nervous stomach.” I’m not ready to go the pharma route yet, opting instead to strengthen my immune system with natural supplements and meditation.
Sam was a pugnacious, prickly dog, submissive to no one. He was also fearless and confident, demanding respect from all—but most of all, respecting himself. Every day was an adventure to be lived fully. When he lay down for his night’s sleep, it was with purpose and satisfaction, and he slept soundly, until morning light crept into our room and it was time to wake me to a new day. To start all over and find the joy of living in the ordinary routine of his life. Undaunted by his ravaged body and the cancer in his brain, in his last conscious moment he looked at me with acceptance.
That’s his legacy and his lesson to me: accept and carry on. I will try to honor him.
END
[1] In Tibetan Buddhism, bardo is an intermediate state between death and rebirth, between one life and the next.
