I cry at sad books, and will only watch movies after I am assured that they have uplifting endings. I have, on one or two embarrassing occasions, gotten misty-eyed at particularly sentimental movie trailers. And commercials. If I were me, I would not read this post, and I strongly encourage you to do the same.
It’s not a nice one.
When Jolie was scheduled to get spayed last year, I first manufactured a neurotic crisis that necessitated a reschedule, then huddled in the waiting room the following week, clutching my puppy and asking the staff for reassurance that it was, really, safe. It’s surgery, they told me; it’s never completely without risk. But she’s young, and healthy, and there’s really no reason to worry.
They were right, of course, and as soon as we stopped feeding her painkillers, Jolie was a force of nature again.
So this time, when she accompanied me to drop Jalouse off for her own turn, I was considerably calmer. “Goodbye, sweetie; we’ll see you this afternoon!” I trilled, laughing as she eagerly tried to both explore the office and follow us out of it at the same time. I left her with her favorite pink fuzzy sock, which I’ve given up entirely.
Jolie and I strolled home, me teasing her about not letting either of “her people” out of her sight for a second but not so much as batting an eyelash about leaving Jalouse behind. But when we got home, Jolie abruptly realized that it was rather boring to be an only dog: she kept bringing me toys, shifting, sighing, and looking annoyed.
“It’s a few hours; she’ll be biting your head again in no time,” I insisted, and decided to try my hand at baking cookies, so as to avoid the temptation of the summer sales.
It was an unmitigated disaster.
I don’t mean how the dough ended up too dry to roll, because the giant square thing that I managed to salvage hours later will probably taste fine anyway; I’m talking about how the phone rang right between the wet and the dry ingredients.
Three hours early.
You want to know the worst part about being given bad news in a foreign language? It allows for hope. It doesn’t matter how proficient you may be; that one word you miss could be the difference between…everything. I found myself shouting at our vet–in English–to just tell me: to use the words you would tell a five-year-old so that they would be sure.
Which is how I know that late this morning, Jalouse went into sudden cardiac arrest, just as he was starting to close her back up. He tried to revive her for forty-five minutes, but her heartbeats got weaker and more erratic, and after fifteen more hopeless minutes on the monitor, he called me. I understood the part about how he was going to shut it off about half a second before the beeping finally stopped, and so I was on the living room floor, an anxious Jolie balanced protectively against my shoulders, when Jalouse actually died.
Our little three-member family has been shut in tight since then, except for when Nick and I went to see her (she looked alive; it was awful) and quick outings for Jolie (she seems to be looking for Jalouse; she seems to know that her absence is the problem).
We believe that she had a congenital heart defect. We believe that she had a 14-year-old heart in a six-month-old body. We believe that no one could have seen it beforehand. We believe that it would have caught up with her sooner, rather than later, and that it’s probably best that when it did, she was already anesthetized–a bit of a paradox if you want to be stubborn, but we will ignore you. We believe that our vet did everything possible, and were touched and grateful when tears came to his eyes.
I don’t know what comes next, now, and I don’t really want to talk about it. Which is too bad for me, because I most certainly will have to do so, over and over again. I lost count of how many familiar faces lit up a couple of months ago when they saw our new addition, and I certainly haven’t kept track of how many times I’ve been asked where one or both dogs are since then. I will be asked over and over by people who have no idea, who mean no harm. She will follow us everywhere.
I just wish that she really would.