Five Minus One

            I sometimes wonder if getting a dog was the best thing for my mental state.

            Don’t get me wrong.  Ignoring what seems to be his twice-a-day rowdy period – which we’re hoping will fade as this condition we’ve learned is named ‘dog puberty’ runs its course – he is a great dog.  He gets me out on long walks all around our neighborhood.  I can’t remember the last time in my life I felt more in touch with the seasons, noticing when the trees bloomed or the animals emerged.  Just last week, we almost ran into a wild boar together.  Granted, that wasn’t an experience I’d want to repeat, but it’s also not one I would have had if not for Murphy.  It’s probably very good for my physical health.  Having an animal you can sit with and pet is probably good for my mental health.  There are far more pros than cons on this list.

            And yet…

            He’s an irrational actor, being a dog.  If he sees another dog, his only desire is to get to that dog as soon as possible, leaping and bounding all the way.  There are dogs who are into that.  There are plenty of owners and dogs who want no part of it.  Murphy doesn’t care.  And I’m the one who is losing feeling in my forearm from all the times I’ve had to hold him back.

            Then there is the way he has started to interact with people at times.

            Earlier this month, we were away with friends from our church group.  Maybe it was being away from his normal surroundings, but Murphy expanded his repertoire from lunging at other dogs to lunging at anyone unfamiliar.  He also seemed to develop short-term memory problems, lunging at people with whom he’d made friends minutes before and even people he knows well, like the one neighbor who took him on walks back in February when we were all housebound with Covid-19. 

Then again, I can’t blame the behavior entirely on the weekend, since he had started randomly lunging at people before we left.  A few weeks ago, I forgot the garden gate was open and he chased some poor man down the street, barking his head off and, apparently, snapping at him.  But it’s also not a given that he’ll behave this way.  On some days, he’ll let 10 people walk by without a fuss, but then the 11^th person he’ll make a run at.  Other days it’s the 8^th person.  Or the 14^th. 

He’s always on a leash, so he’s never made contact.  And I don’t know if he just wants to bark or if there is an intent to bite.  I just know that every time we run into another person, it’s begun to feel like we’re defusing a bomb.

            Of course I’m telling him off every time he acts like a little old lady in the woods is a mortal threat to our beings.  But I notice there’s this trigger that’s been switched from our experiences.  I can’t sit back and think “It’s all going to be all right.”  I’ve got the other trigger switched, the one that tells me that the worst possible thing is going to happen.  So, to me, it’s a foregone conclusion that there will come a point at which Murphy bites some stranger and then we’ll end up facing fines and most likely having to put this dog to sleep.  Like, I can’t convince myself we’ll have a dog and we’ll just be happy together.  The worst is going to happen.  Because, why wouldn’t it?

            Let’s be honest.  It’s not as if I was Mr. Optimism before everything went wrong with Colin, but I don’t think I wallowed in pessimism either.  I felt like I was more of a realist.  Now we’ve gone the other direction and, yes, I find myself spending more time focusing on all the things that will go wrong.  Like, it doesn’t take much to convince me that, thanks to Russia’s invasion, we’re only a few months away from food riots and freezing in our own homes.  It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see something going wrong with my job and me suddenly sitting around unemployed (which, conversely, Murphy would benefit hugely from).  And I notice that, having taken on responsibility for this dog, it’s one more life I’m now responsible for and for which I have to worry.  And so I do worry.

            So, I enjoy having Murphy around.  But, as with so many things since Colin’s diagnosis, there’s also a bit of a taste of ash in my mouth.  I’d like to just enjoy the good.  It seems it’s still going to take me a while to get there.

It’s not that the blog has become less important to me, but it feels like every part of my life is expanding to crowd out the time I would usually set aside for writing or reading or sleeping. It certainly doesn’t help that there’s a war two countries over, which has meant I got called in for a few extra shifts this month. The war doesn’t directly affect Christina’s job, but she works for the Foreign Ministry, so a war on the continent has ripple effects through every division. She’s been working some crazy hours too. So, for the last four weeks, it’s felt to me like I wake up, walk Murphy, get people to school, work, walk Murphy again, do chores, walk Murphy again and then get to bed.

This is not meant as a complaint. God knows, you don’t have to read very far into any halfway useful news feed to hear stories about people in Ukraine suffering infinitely worse than my fling with exhaustion here. I’m simply saying, I’m glad to get five hours of sleep at this point, so blogging has become quite a luxury.

Another thing distracting us from social media has been the return of the mystery gardener.

This all happened a few weeks ago, and it’s been on my “must blog” list the whole time, but here we are. The short version is that Christina called me up from the cemetery about two weeks ago, clearly agitated. Someone else had come and made modifications to the gravesite. Now, I already wrote a while back about the person who set down flowers and an angel statue that we didn’t really like. This time, the person (and for all we know, it’s a separate individual), actually put in new plants. I mean, these weren’t flowers laid on the grave, but the person dug up some soil and put these new plants in.

This created a few problems, namely:

• Christina didn’t care for these new flowers (let’s be honest, I barely notice the colors of the flowers)
• They dug up some of the bulbs Christina had specifically put in because THOSE were the flowers she wanted.

Suffice to say, Christina found time in her Murphy/chores routine to make a sign telling people we weren’t into freelance gardening at OUR family’s gravesite. As a bonus, when she went to put the sign down, she ran into Frau Krämer, who runs the cemetery. We’ve run into Frau Krämer all kinds of times since we’ve been there. I remember her asking me as we picked out the site how it felt to watch my kid die. I didn’t take the question as insensitive one. I think she was genuinely curious. But the only answer I had was “About as bad as you’d think it would be.” She’s also a hoot. Like, if I ran into her on the street, I’d assume she was a bartender at a biker bar, not a cemetery administrator. She’s all tattoos and piercings and making the cemetery as pretty as possible.

Anyways, Christina ran into Frau Krämer, who agreed that this kind of behavior was unacceptable. She kindly listened as Christina told the story and then asked “So, why is the angel still here?” Christina didn’t really know what to say, so Frau Krämer followed up with “You said you don’t like it, right?” Christina agreed and, like that, the angel was gone. To sum up: Don’t mess with Frau Krämer.

I find the odds that the person who is doing this isn’t reading the blog. Then again, I still get all kinds of exciting notes from people from Russia telling me how much they like the website and how they really want to sell me something, so who knows who’s reading this? Let’s just say: Don’t freelance decorate graves, people. Put down flowers, sure. I can’t even personally get that mad about the angel (though it wasn’t to my taste and I’m glad Frau Krämer took it down). But digging up dirt and putting in your own plants? Lines crossed, whoever you are. Lines crossed.

Our sign is up and Frau Krämer is on the lookout. You’ve been warned.

So, we are on the tail end of our own personal family coronavirus outbreak and the general verdict is that we can’t recommend it. That said, if you are going to go down this road, do it with a vaccine. Enough cold/flu symptoms got through despite all of us having our shots that I shudder to think what this virus would have done to us had we been absolutely unprotected.

It’s weird to say that the coronavirus is special to us (I mean, really, it’s a weird thing to say), but, at least in my mind, it’s been such an extension of everything we went through with Colin. We watched him die. We buried him. We took a while to recover and slowly, slowly reintroduced ourselves to the world. We started making plans to see shows and arrange really good birthday parties for the kids – I mean, they deserved that after everything we had to set aside while Colin was sick – and then came the pandemic and locked us all inside. Like, literally, Christina had been back to work for a week when everyone was told to go home the first time, in 2020. It was like the world said to us “You’re so used to being locked inside due to health concerns … and you’re so good at it. Why don’t you keep doing that for the next three months? Or six? Or two years? Who knows?”

Everything about the pandemic makes me think about Colin in some way. All the debates about the people who are most at risk of the virus and the questions posed about whether all the healthy people (who can still get the virus and die) should be restricting their movement to make sure that the virus can’t take out all the vulnerable people who would almost certainly have no chance if they got infected … they all seem so real to me. Somewhere, probably a lot closer to you than you think, there is someone desperate to keep a loved one safe from this virus because all the tubes and wires and breathing aids are not compatible with a virus that creates a pneumonia-like disease. I mean, even the fact that the virus often presents as something like pneumonia messes with my head. Until Colin got pneumonia due to the breathing/swallowing problems caused by the tumor, “pneumonia” was something that I read about in books, that hit people in far away places and times. It wasn’t a disease that snuck up on a kindergartener in Germany. Until, of course, it was.

Every time we saw a protest by people who didn’t want to wear masks, I saw people who couldn’t care less about people like Colin, who somehow thought wearing a flap of fabric for a few hours was somehow equal to being subjugated. And then, of course, the more time we spent in the house, the more time we had to find more stuff of Colin’s. There’s the one truth that being locked in gave us all time to clean out our attics, garages and workspaces. But, for us, every cleaning adventure led to decisions about what to keep and what to throw away. There’s so much stuff of his that had only a tangential relationship to my son that we still haven’t been able to throw away. And I wonder if we would have delved into this stuff quite so quickly if we hadn’t been so desperate for something to do after the 85th round of playing Life while waiting to see what the daily case counts were.

I understand that that pandemic was not sent to test us personally and I truly understand that we survived this bout with the coronavirus with no apparent scars. I left the house yesterday to hit the post office and Noah returned to school today. Tomorrow we’ll see about reintroducing Emma and Christina to society (you’ve been warned). But it’s still odd to have now had it after having spent so long being scared about it. Because, no matter how many times people told us that the odds were ridiculously low that the virus could hurt us, especially once we were vaccinated, all I could do was ask “Shall we look at the statistical odds of Colin having gotten that tumor?” I mean, the odds of any one person getting that tumor are so comically small it’s amazing to me that I know anyone who ever had it – much less fathered one. A friend told Christina shortly after we got the verdict that we should play the lottery, because the odds of us winning a jackpot were less ridiculous than our child getting that virus. So, yes, as well as being forced to sit inside and ponder why people are happy to write off those with illnesses, there has been an element of fear about the virus this whole time.

I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad that we now have the extra protection of having recovered. I’m hoping that this is the last variant and, maybe, sometime later this year I can finally take my wife to some of those concerts and we can finally have a kids birthday party – our last one was in May 2019 and I was nearly catatonic the whole time. I can’t even pretend that maybe there wasn’t some personal growth: Maybe it was good for us on some level being jammed together into a house instead of all running our separate ways months after Colin died. But mostly I’m tired of it and am glad to have one less thing to worry about.

I’ve got a personal project going on that I’m keeping a bit close to my chest for now, but it has involved me hunting down a lot of old family documents: birth certificates; proof of citizenship; marriage certificates. The whole works. Obviously, I have all of the documents that pertain to me personally. You can’t survive in Germany if you don’t have every relevant document at your fingertips, but I’ve had to track down a lot of documents related to my mother and my German grandparents.

Some of it has been eye-opening. I found out that my parents got married in March 1959, not April. I know they always celebrated April so, in all likelihood, they had their civil service in March and then their church service in April, which became the one they celebrated. That’s fairly common in Germany: I just had no idea that they got married on March 5. Tracking down my grandparents’ marriage certificate was an even wilder ride. First I discovered that their two surviving children had no idea in which year their parents got married, which made me feel a lot better about not knowing about my parents being married in March, not April. Then, when we did get the document, it took a team of about 15 people to sort through the old-fashioned spiderweb handwriting to figure out what year they actually got married. There was a phase when our candidates were 1921, 1922, 1923 or 1931. That’s how hard it was to read the handwriting (the eventual winner was 1931).

But what really got me thinking was the series of official stamps along the side of my grandparents’ wedding certificate, marking the birth of each of their children. There are five of them. But I only ever knew my Mom and three of her siblings because the fourth child died, I believe during World War II.

What’s strange is that I know nothing about her. I feel like I have her name on the tip of my fingers. Rosemarie? But I’m also pretty certain that that’s not right. I know I’ve seen her grave and I’m pretty sure my Mom said she died of scarlet fever, but these are 30-plus-year-old memories. The sad fact of the matter is that I know nothing about this child. Of the two surviving members of the family, only my uncle would have any memories of her, since my aunt was born nearly 20 years after the rest of her siblings. And it’s not that I don’t enjoy speaking to my uncle, but we’re also not that close. Me calling up and asking him to reminisce about the sister who died nearly 80 years ago would be awkward, at best. Upsetting, at worse.

How is there so little known about this child? Who was (is?) my aunt. What does it say about my efforts to keep Colin’s memories alive? Is some grandchild of mine going to sit down in 60 years and try to remember the name of that one uncle he heard about, but really isn’t more than a ghost of a memory at that point? Then again, does it even matter? I never met either of my German grandparents. There’s one hysterical story about my grandmother tying a child to a chamber pot in a potty training episode that went horribly wrong. Everyone seems to remember my grandfather hauling away the carcass of a dog that got hit by a car. Oma was apparently very strict. Opa was apparently very nice. That’s not a lot of details to slap together a fake memory for someone like me. And they had full lives. There are days when I feel I just need to accept that Colin will be forgotten and it’s enough that I remember him.

But I hope Emma and Noah, if they have kids, talk about Colin. I hope they have some memories they can pass on. It would mean a lot to me if a little of Colin got into the next generation along the line.

His eighth birthday was this week. We trekked there as a family, as crummy as the weather was, ignoring the sign that said no dogs are allowed in the cemetery. It’s funny: I could swear Murphy grew nervous the further we walked into the cemetery, and I don’t think it’s because he can read and he was worried about getting thrown out. The mystery person who leaves a birthday candle for Colin every year showed up again: There was an 8 on his headstone. We lit candles and sparklers and tried to do some magic wish paper, but the weather didn’t really cooperate. I couldn’t do much of anything, trying to keep Murphy on a short leash as I was. But we were remembering him. And, as sad as that is, that’s about all we can do for him. We just have to keep doing it for as long as we can.

(Note: The document pictured above was not the one we were working with when we were trying to ascertain my grandparents’ wedding date, for all of you who feel the need to point out that this one clearly reads “1931.” Trust me, the handwriting was much more challenging on the document we had.)

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.

A lot of things happened as December breezed by, at least one of which I never expected to see: We got a dog.

I mean, there’s no reason my family is automatically indisposed to having a dog. We’re nice and responsible and not skittish about picking up poop, so there was nothing stopping us from having a dog, aside from long-standing resistance from one family member, who seems to have made the mistake of skimming animal shelter websites and falling in love with a picture of this particular puppy, who joined our family yesterday.

The friend who seems to inspire half of these posts told me recently that a friend who had suffered a death in her family had also unexpectedly gotten a dog and how that acquisition “changed the temperature” in the family. I suppose we’ll see how our new puppy works for us.

Everyone, of course, is in love with him. After an epic debate that would have made the UN General Assembly blush, we settled on the name Murphy. Runners-up were Hobbes, Crowley, Taco and Spiro Agnew. His mother was a street dog in Romania (and she’s about half his size, so that raises some questions about family dynamics there). She was rescued off the streets and gave birth to Murphy and a sibling about 10 months ago. He was brought to Germany by an animal rescue group about four months ago and here we are, learning to integrate him into his family. We are finding that his opinions about being able to sleep on the sofa are almost as strong as our opinions that he not be allowed to. Ditto his deep-held belief that he ought to be able to launch himself onto the dining table during meals and help himself, versus our opinion that this is behavior unbecoming. It’s Day 2 of an adventure: We shall see how it goes.

There are all kinds of thoughts that hit as we go through this, and I’m only speaking about my mental processes. A month or so ago when we had to have segregated meals because we were worried Emma had the coronavirus, it upset her that we were back to separate meals, like we’d been during the worst of Colin’s illness. Getting him socialized means I’m almost holding him away from the table with one arm (great for the biceps!) while everyone else eats, after which I can have my meal (unless it’s something I can eat one-handed). It’s nowhere the same as either of the above examples, but the idea that we were keeping a new family member separate flitted through my mind at one point. I also wondered if anyone would think we were trying to replace Colin with Murphy. Then I realized that a) we’re not and b) what do I care if someone thinks that. Maybe the family needed a dog. Maybe Murphy just needed a family. It at least feels like a normal thing families do, and that feeling has been in short supply at times in our family. Welcome, Murphy.