Yesterday was an incredibly sad and tearful day…
You see… my mother had to put her beloved Golden Retriever down.
My parents added sweet Juliet to our family when I was in college.
She lived nearly 14 years {98 in dog years}…
that truly is a nice long life.
Juliet was married to Romeo, our other family Golden.
She was also the mother of our family dog, Tank.
She spent her days affectionately stealing balls away from Romeo
and carrying several around in her mouth at once…
sort of teasing him and then hoarding the balls in order to keep them all to herself.
During her life, she was fortunate enough to have two litters of puppies.
She only had two because she didn’t turn out to be the overly nurturing type
{I personally think she was a little bitter about the wide birthing hips she had acquired}.
A few years ago the love of her life, Romeo, passed on.
Tank, her son, came to live with her
{we like to say that he went into a cushy retirement after dealing with all of our kids for years and years}.
Mama and son spent the last year of her life exploring their 2 acre property in Fallbrook.
It’s been a good life.
A beautiful life.
She was very, very loved.
My heart aches for my mother,
who is the type of person who loves her dogs with all of her heart,
and also for our sweet Tank… who lost his mama yesterday.
Luckily Juliet is no longer in pain and suffering.
I am confident that Romeo greeted her at the gates of doggy heaven,
and now they’re playing ball and chasing bunnies together {smile}.
*************************
Last month I had the privilege of reading the deeply poignant letter
that Fiona Apple had written to her fans canceling her South American Tour
in order to stay home with her dying dog, Janet.
She posted the handwritten letter on her facebook page {which you can view here}.
{image via: fiona apple’s facebook}
The heartfelt letter went viral and touched so many who understood
the incredible bond between loyal canine’s and their very fortunate caretakers.
I thought I would share this with you in honor of my mother and her sweet Juliet…
Here is Fiona’s, ever so eloquent, letter transcribed:
It’s 6pm on Friday, and I’m writing to a few thousand friends I have not met yet. I am writing to ask them to change our plans and meet a little while later. Here’s the thing. I have a dog Janet, and she’s been ill for almost two years now, as a tumor has been idling in her chest, growing ever so slowly. She’s almost 14 years old now.I got her when she was 4 months old. I was 21 then, an adult officially – and she was my child.
She is a pitbull, and was found in Echo Park, with a rope around her neck, and bites all over her ears and face. She was the one the dogfighters use to puff up the confidence of the contenders. She’s almost 14 and I’ve never seen her start a fight, or bite, or even growl, so I can understand why they chose her for that awful role. She’s a pacifist.
Janet has been the most consistent relationship of my adult life, and that is just a fact. We’ve lived in numerous houses, and jumped a few make shift families, but it’s always really been the two of us. She slept in bed with me, her head on the pillow, and she accepted my hysterical, tearful face into her chest, with her paws around me, every time I was heartbroken, or spirit-broken, or just lost, and as years went by, she let me take the role of her child, as I fell asleep, with her chin resting above my head. She was under the piano when I wrote songs, barked any time I tried to record anything, and she was in the studio with me all the time we recorded the last album. The last time I came back from tour, she was spry as ever, and she’s used to me being gone for a few weeks every 6 or 7 years.
She has Addison’s Disease, which makes it dangerous for her to travel since she needs regular injections of Cortisol, because she reacts to stress and to excitement without the physiological tools which keep most of us from literally panicking to death.
Despite all of this, she’s effortlessly joyful and playful, and only stopped acting like a puppy about 3 years ago. She’s my best friend and my mother and my daughter, my benefactor, and she’s the one who taught me what love is.
I can’t come to South America. Not now.
When I got back from the last leg of the US tour, there was a big, big difference. She doesn’t even want to go for walks anymore. I know that she’s not sad about aging or dying. Animals have a survival instinct, but a sense of mortality and vanity, they do not. That’s why they are so much more present than people. But I know that she is coming close to point where she will stop being a dog, and instead, be part of everything. She’ll be in the wind, and in the soil, and the snow, and in me, wherever I go.
I just can’t leave her now, please understand.
If I go away again, I’m afraid she’ll die and I won’t have the honor of singing her to sleep, of escorting her out. Sometimes it takes me 20 minutes to pick which socks to wear to bed. But this decision is instant. These are the choices we make, which define us.
I will not be the woman who puts her career ahead of love and friendship. I am the woman who stays home and bakes Tilapia for my dearest, oldest friend. And helps her be comfortable, and comforted, and safe, and important. Many of us these days, we dread the death of a loved one. It is the ugly truth of Life, that keeps us feeling terrified and alone. I wish we could also appreciate the time that lies right beside the end of time. I know that I will feel the most overwhelming knowledge of her, and of her life and of my love for her, in the last moments. I need to do my damnedest to be there for that. Because it will be the most beautiful, the most intense, the most enriching experience of life I’ve ever known. When she dies.
So I am staying home, and I am listening to her snore and wheeze, and reveling in the swampiest, most awful breath that ever emanated from an angel. And I am asking for your blessing.
I’ll be seeing you.
Love, Fiona
{image via: fiona apple’s facebook}
