”God forgive me, I cannot weep..”

….says an old woman in one of Tennyson’s poems, upon learning that her middle-aged son has predeceased her. OH how wrenching, I cried even reading those lines for the first time decades ago.
Now I’m faced with having to end my dog’s life. The poor animal can’t even excrete any more, I’m not sure whether it’s because she can’t squat right because of weakness in her back legs, or whether one of the mast cell tumors which are sprouting up all over her body like buboes is blocking the aperture. Whichever, this is …..it, I’m afraid. Oh she still likes eating, but I feel sick watching her relish her food knowing that she can no longer eliminate waste. I took her down to the lake today, and she enjoyed retrieving sticks I threw into the water. Much easier to move in the water than on land. On the way back she lay down in the field and I had to take my little cart to get her back to the yard.

My daughter was home this weekend, and in one way I’m glad she saw the poor puppy’s state, and got to say goodbye. SHE cried, of course, my tender-hearted darling. And made me promise, again, that I would be there with our dog when she was euthanized. I did promise and I will.
But like Tennyson’s bereft old crone, I can’t cry. I want to. Just a few years ago I wailed uncontrollably when one of our horses was put down. “Go back to the house!” hissed my BMD. embarrassed by my loud and unbridled grief .
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem, Spring and Fall, addressed to a little girl who is crying watching the beautiful gold autumn leaves fall:”Márgarét, are you grieving/Over golden grove unleaving?” He goes on to say, you don’t know why you’re crying, although later in life “you will weep and know why”, but he the poet knows: it’s the child’s nascent and unrealized intimation of he own mortality , that everything dies, and she must, too:

“It is the blight man was born for/ It is Margaret you mourn for.”

In youth you feel pity , awful guilt-wracked pity, at the spectacle of death. In age, well, you know it’ll soon be your turn. The old mother in Tennyson’s poem has happy memories of her “grey-grown boy”, she wants to cry, she should, but the tears just do not come, because she knows, she has faced the certainty, not just the far-off spectre, of her own mortality. Yes she outlived her child, but, after all, it won’t be for long. And in Hopkins’ poem the penultimate line, utilizing the ‘sprung rhythm” he’s famous for, where the meaning forces the reader to emphasize “is” even though the meter dictates emphasizing “the”. says it perfectly: we all were born inevitably, maybe even primarily, to be stricken down. It IS the blight man was born for.

At this point my friend our regular vet has retired; I will have to ask a strange VMD to do the deed, and I’m afraid he’s going to be appalled that I let her go on this long. He wont know the saga of the past three months, the time and money I have spent, trying to cure her, wanting to be realistic: yes I know she’s old, 11 is old for a Lab, but can’t we just get rid of this infection? We finally did quell it, via a virulent antibiotic that I couldn’t touch without gloves, even contact can be fatal to humans—but by then the cancer was galloping.

If tomorrow IS “the day”, and for her sake I know it should be, then I hope I will cry. It’s like when I have a sinus infection , I feel the tantalizing itchy tickle of a sneeze coming on, I am actually longing to sneeze, but the (nearly pleasurable) body-wracking explosion doesn’t come.

“Oh who could have foretold/That the heart grows old?” wrote Yeats. LET me cry, dear God, for my dog, for my self, so I can tell me I’m still young at heart.

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