punchdrunkmom

Melancholy and the infinite requests for a hamster

I got a text last Wednesday from Kai's aid asking if our dog had died. Kai had apparently started to cry at school, and when they asked him why, that was the explanation he gave. It happened with his aid, it happened with his special ed teacher. He was sensitive around the other kids.

I felt so bad for him, and had begun to beat myself up over how I'd handled telling him. I wished I'd given him more time to say goodbye to Elliott. I wished there'd been more time for him to get used to the idea that Elliott wasn't going to live much longer. But I thought we had more time.

We always think we have more time.

I printed out some pictures of Elliott like Kai had asked me to, bought some frames for them, and, anticipating his request, made him a t-shirt with Elliott's face on it, which was my singular best achievement in t-shirt art.

I showed it to Kai when I picked him up.

“I don't want a t-shirt,” he said. “I want a hamster.”

“You're not getting a hamster,” I said.

Kai's teacher tried to talk up my shirt. “Look at this shirt your mom made!"

Kai held up his hand to block the shirt from his view. “I don't want that shirt,” he repeated.

I was disappointed that I hadn't cheered him up with the shirt, and so I suggested going for ice cream.

Both of the kids heartily agreed.

Ryan gamely ate her cone (vanilla with sprinkles) and chatted happily about school. Kai (two scoops of chocolate) ate his in silence. The silence itself was not unusual, but the look on his face was, the unmistakable sadness in his eyes.

When Ryan suggested we hit up a playground, I thought that would be a great idea—a good way to avoid going to our dogless house for a little while.

I caught a glimpse of Kai while we were driving. He looked so sad, so dejected. I'd never seen him look like that, not when he flooded the house, never when he broke a toy or got hurt. This was different, a persistent and pervasive sadness that I was powerless to fix with t-shirts or ice cream.

“Kai, are you okay?” I asked.

“I just miss Elliott so much,” he said. “And I want a hamster.”

“You're not getting a hamster.”

“You could go to the pet store and buy one,” he suggested. He sounded almost belligerent.

“No.”

We drove in silence for a while.

“I would never let it out of its cage,” he said.

“That, Kai, is the biggest lie you've ever told.”

:::

I lost him at the park, which was packed on a day that felt like spring but was really only 55 degrees.

I finally found him sitting in a tree, gazing out into nothing, the slump of his shoulders telling me everything I needed to know.

“I miss him too,” I said, reaching up to rub his back.

:::

I thought about Kai all day, kicking myself for not giving Kai the chance to hug the dog one last time, for knowing this would happen and not finding a way to better prepare him.

Guilt gnawed at the edges of my belly in the way guilt does. I played out the ways I could have handled the conversation, what I could do now to help him though this.

And it suddenly it dawned on me what was wrong. I don't know why it took me so long to recognize it, but I knew I wasn't being realistic thinking I could just kiss him and make it all better.

Kai had a broken heart.  

:::

I told Scott how badly I felt about not giving Kai a chance to say goodbye to Elliott.

“Oh, my God, really?” he said, sounding incredulous. “That would have been a disaster.”

“You think so?”

I wanted to believe that, and it made sense in a way. I pictured Kai trying to give Elliott a hug, and Elliott, who had always eschewed Kai’s company, panting and heaving and struggling to run away.

I decided I could stop beating myself up, stop thinking I was doing this all wrong.

After all, if you’ve ever heard a single song on the radio, you know that there’s only one way to heal a broken heart.

And it is definitely not a hamster.

 

In which we say goodbye to a friend, and do our best to stand firm on the hamster situation

On Saturday night, the dog fell down the last few stairs on his way to the kitchen get some water. Scott and I heard it happen, and launched ourselves out of bed to see if he was okay. We got him righted and we led him to the water bowl. I brought his bed downstairs so he wouldn’t have to go upstairs anymore, and after that, I think that he kind of gave up.

He was getting harder to feed, refusing the rotisserie chicken I’d been giving him, and later the steaks, and finally, just to get some calories into him, I fed him half a package of hot dogs. On Monday, I bought him a Bacon Clubhouse burger from McDonald’s, which he did eat and later threw up. It was to be his last meal.

On Tuesday morning, I knew the dog’s life would be measured in hours, maybe 24 of them.

Elliott wouldn’t get up, and he wouldn’t take his prednisone, the medicine that was supposed to be keeping him comfortable and which I placed in ever-more tempting packages—wrapped in salami, wrapped in bacon, wrapped in chicken sausage, wrapped in prosciutto.

I called the vet.

“Megan,” he said, “you’ve fallen all over yourself to get him to eat. Negative energy intake plus cancer and there’s only one humane choice.”

My voice broke when I thanked him for his candor. Scott came into the kitchen, and when I hung up the phone, he put his arm around me and we cried for a long time.

:::

Earlier that morning, I sat down with the kids at the breakfast table.

“You guys,” I said, “Elliott’s really sick and he’s going to die.”

I’d started that sentence so many times before, but always diverted the sentence at the last second: Elliot’s really sick so you can’t…roughhouse with him. Or Elliott’s really sick, so…no playing ball in the house.

But this time I didn’t dodge it.

“Oh, no!” Kai said, surprise and concern etched in his face. “When?”

“I don’t know,” I said. This was before I talked with the vet.

Kai thought it over.

“Then when Elliott dies we could get a new dog. Or a hamster.”

:::

At the vet’s office, we were ushered into a room I’d seen a thousand times before on previous visits, mentally naming it the Room of Sadness, because it could only be for one thing. It was painted mint green, which someone had obviously decided would be soothing, but it was not. Scott and I sat on a plastic-y couch, getting up at intervals to get tissues until I finally grabbed the whole box and put it between us.

We waited with Elliott, who stood in the middle of the room, panting heavily and leaning to one side as though he barely had the strength to remain upright, which he probably didn’t.

:::

I picked up the kids for therapy that afternoon, and before we got into the car, I told them that Elliott had died.

“Oh, no!” Kai said.

“Elliott loved you and you loved him, and we’re going to miss him and it’s okay to be sad,” I said.

The kids climbed in the car just as another mom came over to say hello to me. We talked about the recent Local School Council election and the fundraising party, a conversation I didn’t really want to have but I also didn’t want to tell her the reason why and so I had it.

When I finally got in the car and turned to look at Kai, I realized I’d left him alone with his thoughts for too long.

“What does Elliott look like dead?” Kai asked. He looked stricken.

“Oh, honey.”

I didn’t know how to answer that.

“Elliott is going to go to a special cemetery for pets.”

“He’ll need a stone that says ‘Elliott,’” Kai said.

“He sure will. I thought we’d make him one for our yard and we can bury his collar and leash.”

“I’m going to miss him,” Kai said.

“I know. You can ask me any question you want about it.”

Kai thought it over.

“I want to ask you for a hamster.”

I laughed.

“I said you could ask me questions. I said nothing about favors.”

:::

At the therapy center, Ryan and I hung out in the sibling play room while Kai was in OT. There is a woman who comes there with her grandchildren, one of whom gets therapy while his sister waits just like Ryan.

The grandmother is a former special ed teacher. She’s really nice, though she likes to chat me up during the forty-five minutes we spend together, minutes I could be answering e-mail/reading/sleeping/staring at the wall instead.

For some reason, she chose that day to ask Ryan about her pets.

“Riley,” she said, because she calls Ryan “Riley” and it’s been going on too long for me to correct her without explaining why I never did. “Riley, do you have any pets?”

Ryan thought for a minute. “One,” she said. “A fish. We had a dog, but he died.”

Today, I thought. We had a dog and he died today.

“Our dog died, too,” the granddaughter said.

I was afraid Ryan would provide that one last crucial detail, and I would have to listen to the grandmother tell me how sorry she was, ask me what happened, and I just couldn’t. I couldn’t explain to a stranger the loss of this dog, who lived with me in my single girl days and sat on the couch with me while I watched Survivor, this dog whose fur I cried into over life drama and on the morning of 9/11, this dog who moved with me into Scott’s condo and then with us into the house we bought together, this dog who kindly tolerated my two children even if he was not particularly overjoyed by their arrival in his life. The loss and guilt and sorrow of it all was still too personal and still to raw and I didn’t want to cry in front of this grandmother.

“Hannah has a new dog named Lady, don’t you, Hannah?” the grandmother prompted.

The conversation moved into safer territory, and I took the opportunity to go to the kitchen and get a Diet Coke out of the machine.

:::

On the way home from therapy, we passed the cemetery again.

“Is this where Elliott is?” Kai asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I’ll find out where the special cemetery is and we could maybe visit.”

“I’m going to miss Elliott so much,” Kai said, and this time, he started to cry.

I pulled the car over and got out, traffic zooming by us on the busy six-lane street. I walked around to Kai’s side of the car, opened his door and put my arms around him.

“I’m so sorry, buddy,” I said.

“Can you draw a picture of Elliott for me?” he asked. “I’ll put it in a frame and hang it in my room.”

I agreed to do that, as well as provide him with some pictures.

When the tears subsided, I got back in the car and drove back to the city, the kids attentions diverted to my iPhone, my thoughts free to wander.

When we got home, Ryan skipped through the kitchen with her Happy Meal, stopping short when she noticed that Elliott’s food and water bowls were gone.

“Where’s Elliott?” she asked.