My little family is traversing a very tender threshold as we seek to deeply listen, with our treasured four legged friend, to come to an understanding of when just the right time might be to say the long goodbye, as an aggressive and largely untreatable osteo-sarcoma grows behind her eye, making her increasingly uncomfortable.
Despite her conspicuous unfriendliness towards small people and other dogs, to her human friends Rue has been so fiercely loving, loyal and constant. She is supremely fond of a good belly rub and in only the recent past, has been passionate in her pursuit of any hurtled sticks that came her way. She has however had a propensity to bury whole, expensive blocks of organic butter in the vegetable garden if the butter was left unattended on the kitchen bench outside of human eyesight.
As a dog with a history of early trauma, some of our wounding’s delivered by the same hand, it is an ineffable mystery to me, the way that her unwavering presence, her steady breathing and warm pressure by my side at night, has performed such a gentle and slow miracle on my fraught nervous system. So many times over the years, her tenacious love, and longing for connection and care, would restore to me a simple and wholesome sense of compassionship and belonging, in my own sometimes dysregulated states, over the sometimes troubled decade we have shared our lives together, side by side. That was supposed to read companionship, but I have chosen to hold to the misspelling of compassionship, because I like it, and maybe that’s actually also an accurate description of what was happening. Together we made a boat of compassion to sail the stormy waters in, together. The rhythms and the pulsing tides of our shared breathing, our synchronised heartbeats, a healing space of sorts.
Not always an easy dog, there have been a few times over the years when I wondered if I could hold to her. Her fear-aggression has been a sometimes mortifyingly problematic affliction, that has blessedly been nullified by the fact that we could offer her 60 acres of bush to roam upon, without the risk of her attacking someone else’s unassuming hound. But even this, became a deep soul lesson for me, a continuous confrontation with my own intrapsychic fear of aggression, of animal instinct, and the sometimes misguided impulse to protect and defend when we are afraid and uncertain, stirring an unavoidable inquiry of what it means to be an angry and hurt female. Of how trauma shapes us, leaves us irrevocably changed. Of how we can adapt and appease some of these injuries with our presence and love and careful attunement. And at the very least, how we can hold to each other in the places that are challenged and fraught, maybe even broken within. Each to each, we have done this for each other, profoundly.
Her fathomless love, despite sometimes seeming burdensome, has been such a healing and generative force of ballast and strength and tender restoration to my mind body system through many very difficult years. And now watching my three children grieve so beautifully for her, seeing the love they carry, bone deep, for this canine creature of our hearts, kin and kith, ally and protector, is so exquisitely sad and beautiful. To witness the depth of their sorrow, and so poignantly, the depth of their love, and the sense that Rue has come to embody something, to carry something for, or of, each of us in our time here together. My son in particular has resurrected Rue with his exuberant love and claiming.
We are all doing such a good job of feeling it all, as we say goodbye, to fathom what it might be to release her from suffering when the time arrives.
I imagine her chasing that one last stick up into the vast blue expanse of sky. I wonder whimsically if she is going to join my childhood companion Clover, up there in the big muddy paddock in the sky, in some other mysterious realm where dogs frolic and howl and chase and scratch and eat and jump and lick and have their bellies rubbed forever, in a timeless place? But if this is all there is, this one precious life, then I can assuredly say, that Lady Queen Ruesophine has been profoundly loved and cherished by her human kin, and that the shape of her sable liveliness, her dark velvet ears, her hazelnut eyes, the lovely thick ruff at the nape of her neck, are indelibly etched in our hearts forever. So grateful are we for the doggy beauty of her in our lives.
And so we are here praying to the great mystery and all the gods and goddesses of the inbetween.
