Of Dogs and Greek Philosophers.

My head always hurts after I cry.

My eyes feel like they’re half a size too big for their sockets, and my nose feels heavy and wet.

I’ve been emotional lately. Enough so that I may say some stupid things, but I’m not sure I care enough right now. It’s okay.

A few weeks ago, I bought myself a copy of "Flatliners." If you don’t know the movie, it’s a Joel Schumacher flick from 1990 about five medical students—Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin, and Oliver Platt. I finally sat down to watch it tonight. Keifer, the brilliant and arrogant young doctor, has this crazy idea to research what really happens after death by actually going to look himself. One by one, the rest—save Oliver—follow him, dying, then being resuscitated by the others. They each find that while you can’t take most things with you, your sins follow you, both there and back again, and you can’t run from them until you set things right.

I debated buying this thing. I did. Last year, I wrote at length about the terror of death I have, my panic attacks in the middle of the night about ceasing to be. The image that keeps coming back to me is a snake, trapped under someone’s foot. No matter how the rest of the snake writhes around, one end of it’s always going to be still, fixed. It’s not a good visual, but it’s inescapable for me. Don’t ask me to explain my subconscious—it’s good for some things, but I never said it was coherent.

I found myself, as the movie starts wrapping up, crying. Julia Roberts finally understands what drove her father to kill himself when she was five, and there’s a scene between them where she just hugs him, sobbing, and saying, "Daddy, I love you." I love my Dad—absolutely, don’t get me wrong. But I feel like he left me somewhere along the way. He’s still there, but emotionally, he’s pretty distant. I’m not sure he knows I feel that way. I miss him. The flip side, of course, is that Mom and I get along pretty well when we’re not screaming at each other. My sister…well…she’s always going to be my sister, and much as I generally want to slap her, I do love her. She married a good man, and the baby’s just…well. She’s just fabulous.

But back all those months ago, I wrote about the drumbeat I hear in my head, speaking, "Loss, loss, loss" in my skull and my heart. It’s been a hard year or two: I’ve lost friends, not just to death, but to inaction and atrophy. I lost the first long-term relationship I’d ever had—and with it, I lost, among other irreplaceable things, some ideals. I lost some of the rose out of my glasses. The world got greyer. There will always be some things about my ex and that time that I miss, but most of all I miss the cocoon I lived in before I met him. On some planets, we call it naivete. I know it’s better to be aware, and to know you have to fight the good fight, but still. Still.

I’m sitting here now, though, with a photo of the hardest thing of all to lose. At the end of the movie, Kiefer faces the spirit of the child he wronged, and the child smiles, and turns, and walks away, with the spirit of the family boxer trotting alongside him towards the light. That was what really set me off. Now I’m sitting with a picture of Kayli. That’s her, up in my avatar. Yes, she was a dog. She was also my baby, my sister, my child. She was my responsibility. I was the Good Dog Mommy.

If you’re not a dog person, I can’t describe what it’s like. I don’t particularly feel the need to: you either get it, or you don’t. But there are a few things I can say.

I’m a pretty solitary person. Since I moved out, except for the months that Richard lived with me, I’ve always, even when I had roommates, lived pretty much alone. My space is my space, and I don’t share it well. I’m intensely private, and I like it like that. It’s not that I don’t get lonely, it’s just that this is who I am. There are very few people for whom I’d open up again. I can think of one at the moment, but even had we that kind of relationship, he’s much like me: we don’t share space well. We come together every once in a while, he stays for a night, and he’s gone. I love him deeply and I miss him terribly, but again, I know this is who I am—at least now. I live best alone.

Except for Kayli.

I don’t mean to say she was simply here to fill a function—to take the edge off my solitude. She was her own creature: she was utterly gorgeous, sweet, elegant, affectionate, and stubborn as all hell. I may have had the opposeable thumbs, but she had the teeth and the attitude, and she knew where the trash can was. Especially when company was due. She was a living, breathing, thinking creature, and she was a companion and a support. She was lousy in the conversation department, and she wasn’t a great dinner guest, but she was a big chunk of my life. I’m a dog person, and she was my very first all-my-own dog. She was the first living thing for whom I alone was responsible. I suppose that means she was a large part of my becoming, inasmuch as I have, an adult.

So when I left her with Mom and Dad and went to a wedding in Indiana, and she staggered and fell over on the rug under the dining room table, and they rushed her to the hospital, all as I knocked around Ohio on a long, slow, social ride back, I feel like I abdicated my responsibility. I should, through some inexplicable, illogical magic, have known it was coming, that I should have been with her. There’s a touch of the witch in my family—just ask my mother, whose own quite-dead mother came to tap her on the shoulder the night of my car accident. It wasn’t the first time. The precedence is there. Why did it fail me so spectacularly?

By the time I got to Kayli in the ER next day, I knew by looking there wasn’t much hope. She was barely responsive. We spent thousands of dollars and I’ve never prayed so much in my life. And then, that same week, my sister stopped feeling the baby kick, and for 24 hours, we were even more numb—but when Sarah started her Rockette impression again, I heard the news and broke down on the floor of my parents’ kitchen: I knew Kayli would die.

I held her in my arms as the doctor injected her. I felt her die. I felt the life seep out of her, and after my rage and confusion ebbed, I laid down her lifeless head and left her there. I remember how limp she was, and how obscene it seemed.

I didn’t understand then how much I felt like I’d failed. Like it was some great experiment in being an adult, and I’d just failed. Like the classic high school parenting lesson nightmares, I’d broken the egg. I’d dropped the sack of flour. I don’t think I really understood what a cloud it laid out over me, and how I’ve felt, at least subliminally, all this time.

But cut forward nearly two years and a lot of perspective, and I’m just maybe starting to see that cloud a little more clearly. This isn’t school, and there’s no teacher with a red pen. So maybe there’s something I’m missing. I’m not used to giving myself a break, and part of me will always feel like I deserve the guilt—perhaps that’s genetic. But now that I think about it, after my good cry, maybe I have to change the way I think. Matter of fact, I know I do. I know I have to look more at the fact that my dog lived, pampered and loved, for eleven years. The average lifespan of a collie is thirteen—she didn’t do so badly. She was deaf, and starting to get creaky. She’d had a good run. I wasn’t the perfect dogmom. But she was a happy dog.

Maybe I have to stop waiting for the rite of passage, the moment when I get the star marks and ace the test. There is no test—or it’s all a test but you never get graded. I have a new dog now: not a replacement life, because nothing can ever replace Morningstar’s Michaela Patrice. But another companion, and another responsibility. I haven’t started again: I’ve just kept going.

I had a psychologist tell me once that I was afraid of dying because I haven’t really lived yet. I fear emptiness, I suppose, because I’m secretly afraid that I’m filled with it. I look at the things I’ve done and weigh them by their endings, not value them for their own weight. I so expect things to end that I don’t appreciate them in the middle. And I’m so focussed on that possible—but never definite-- bad end that I’m missing the learning and achieving of the now.

It’s a hard thing to wrap my brain around, this new way of thinking, and I have no guarantees it’ll help me with my phobias and regrets. But perhaps it’s a new mantra for me: it’s a sort of cut-rate daily affirmation: I haven’t failed, because I haven’t finished. Or, put another , rather appropriate way, it’s my personal version of Solon’s quote, "Call no man happy until he is dead."

After all, the way my puppy is looking at me, I can’t be all that bad.