Breaking down a dog

All the time I would have normally spent with blogging these days is spent walking Murphy, which is probably a good thing. My step count is through the roof and if we go on a long walk and don’t run into too many dogs, I get chances to listen to albums which I haven’t heard in their entirety in years.

It’s both easy and complicated. He’s our dog and we have to train him. It’s going shockingly well. I’d say he’s already housebroken after two weeks, which surpassed every expectation of mine. We’re still working on making sure he’s not too obnoxious while we’re eating dinner and we have learned to keep the kitchen door shut, otherwise you walk in and find him, paws on the counter, discovering coffee or the leftover chicken curry. But that’s the kind of thing you have to work through with a new dog.

And then it gets complicated in my head at times, probably because I’m making it too complicated. I don’t have the feel that he’s my dog yet. Like he’s happy to be here and apparently pines for me when I’m gone, but there’s still this sense that we’re roommates, not boy and dog. There is a part of me that wonders if Colin looks on from wherever he is and wonders if we’ve replaced him. I don’t think that’s a likely scenario, but the thought haunts me from time to time.

I hug Murphy all the time, because he’s a ball of fur. Then I remember how little I hugged Colin the last year of his life. I was so scared of jostling his feeding tube or his tracheostomy. And then, just as I started getting used to those, he got really sick and it wasn’t like I was scared to touch him. God, I crawled into bed with him towards the end. But picking him up and hugging him seemed like it would be too upsetting. He so wanted to be left alone in those final months and, I’ve got to say, I kind of understand it. But I would have liked to hug. And now that I’ve got a dog I can hug I realize a little bit how much I missed it in 2018 and 2019. Maybe I just miss it in general. It’s not like Emma and Noah and Christina are unavailable for hugs, but you can’t force a hug on them the way you can your dog.

And there’s this realization that Murphy is absolutely dependent on us. If he gets lost in the woods, I don’t have a feeling he’d do well foraging for himself, to say nothing of the wild boars out there. So, we need to do everything for him, from providing food to making sure he has health care. And he knows it on some level. When I left the house last weekend to do errands – the first time he and I had been apart for any significant amount of time since he showed up a week earlier – Christina said he ran to the bedroom and took my pillow to have something of mine. I mean, heart melting, but lord that’s a lot of responsibility. And then, because I’m wired for sadness, I remember how dependent Colin was on us and how we couldn’t do anything for him other than make it less awful. We could never really make it good that last year. So, there is a part of you that wonders if you can pull this off any more. I mean, I know it sounds insane, but I worry that, should I ever become a grandparent, I’m just going to freeze around the kids. Because there is a voice in my head telling me: You can’t do this.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s mostly fun. He’s so huggable. And he’s so good. He’s picking up tricks and a blast to have around. Christina said this week that she already sees a change in me, after having had him around for two weeks. I don’t see it, but then, would I? Maybe I am sleeping better. Maybe I am a little happier.

But the old feelings are never far from the surface. This week, during a midday walk, we ran into a super friendly dog and, after he and Murphy started playing, I realized that the owners were Colin’s old physical therapists, a married couple. We had this or that misunderstanding with them, but they tried so hard for Colin. I remember them coming to the hospice for a visit – none of his other health care workers did that – and even bringing one of the toys he loved to play with from their clinic. They tried so hard for him. And there we were, talking about the dogs and how I still blog and then, because it seemed like a thing to say in the moment, I noted how Colin’s grave was in easy walking distance from where we were, like “Here’s a fun place to take your afternoon walk!”

You wonder sometimes, were you to have a breakdown, how would you know? Would you know? I left them and got some distance and knew I was close to crying because of all the memories of the physical therapy center flooding my head. I sometimes reach out for Colin’s hand – and I know he’s not there – and can pretend he’s there with me while I tell him about what’s going on or what we’re looking at. I have to adjust for the fact he’d be taller now. But this time, after meeting his therapist, I couldn’t feel his hand. I didn’t have a sense of him for a few minutes and that might be the most upset I’ve been in months. Me with my dog in the pastures behind my neighborhood asking why I can’t properly pretend to feel my dead son’s hand. That feels like a breakdown, at least a little one, right?

So, that’s Murphy. On balance, he’s good for us. But, like everything else in our lives, there’s always that chance that things can veer off course pretty quickly. I suppose we’re just going to have to see how good Murphy is at keeping us on track.