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I Am So Popular: Grumpy Old Men (Lessons Learned)
Satch died in my arms yesterday. Today is the seventy-ninth anniversary of my father’s birth. And while I have already written beyond extensively about my father’s life—namely our horrible relationship—and my oldest dog’s life (and waiting for his death), I’m not quite finished with all that yet.
Living with Satch was, at times, like living with my father. There were vast differences, of course—for starters, Satch was slavishly dedicated to me, eager for my time and attention, at the ready with a wag far more often than not. And yet, like my father, Satch was difficult, randomly aggressive, tenacious to a fault, not interested in putting things down, and extremely bossy with the rest of the pack. He snapped unpredictably, and in the end that snapping extended to me—twice in the past few weeks he came close to biting me.
It’s easy for me to understand that these near bites were rooted in Satch’s pain. It has been far more difficult for me to recognize that my father’s bites, delivered brutally and psychologically for thirty years until I cut him off, were also rooted in pain. For Satch, it was a fairly simple matter—he had really bad arthritis and even stoned off his rocker on pain meds, as he was these past couple of months, he was in chronic discomfort and even a light touch to a wrong spot could provoke what to him was merely a careful defense of his physical being.
But my father’s pain was something else entirely. For though in the last years of his Alzheimers’-ruined life he did suffer physical pain on top of everything else, it was pain of that other sort, the psychic variety, that I am starting to more deeply understand was at the root of all that snapping he did. And it was in cradling my old dog’s head, as he breathed his last and made that final transition, that I had a few moments of clarity regarding my father.
My brain fought to beat back these unwanted thoughts, flailed desperately for other, smaller things to focus on. There was the urge to just hop up for a minute and check my email. And then there was the constant returning to an absurd worry about my knitting. As I sat waiting for the vet to arrive, I had busied myself with a sock I’ve been making. I knitted and knitted and knitted as I sat outside and watched Big Red throw Satch’s favorite toy for him. I got to the last row and realized I’d fucked up but for the life of me, despite the fact I am a decent knitter, I just couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong.
And so, trying to beat back the bigger things, my brain kept trying to focus on this: I fucked up the sock. I will never unfuck up the sock. The sock will never be right.
But in the end, I could not keep those other thoughts at bay. With Satch’s life running like a montage scene, I reflected, too, on my child’s life. Because Satch was his dog first, from the time Henry was six and Satch just two months old. Hen is eighteen now, about to graduate from high school, another big transition for us and, in some ways, also a sort of death, a different kind of goodbye, a forceful push from the safety of the familiar framework of school. Because no matter what pains in the ass come with that institution, too it provides a certain structure, a kind of guarantee, a safety in knowing that even if you don’t like certain elements of the system, at least you have a good idea of what to expect. And then—here’s your diploma—you don’t know what to expect at all.
Though I got Satch primarily as a companion for a little boy, I also got him as a measure of protection. I’ve already detailed this numerous times, but to recap briefly, my first ex-husband stalked me, he was terrifying, and I hoped that in addition to whatever else he might bring us, Satch would offer me some peace of mind, which he did, protective of me to the point that I had to be careful where I walked him, lest he try to bite anyone that came within a couple of feet of me.
That marriage was such a hasty, horrible choice on my part. As was my second marriage, so filled with an angry mob of stepchildren, and yours-mine-and-ours severe dysfunction, and arrested development all around (mine included). My stepkids hated Satch, and threatened to kill him often enough. And I can look back on that marriage and frame it a thousand different ways, but at least for yesterday, I was thinking that in the end, my ex chose his kids over me, and I most certainly chose my dogs.
It was, among other things, those marriages that fed my weeping as I clung to Satch, his breathing growing more ragged by the second. I had, though certainly not intentionally, irrevocably altered and severely damaged both my child and our relationship via those awful unions. The fallout from both continues to haunt me and, I’m sure, also continues to haunt my son. I have apologized to him—aloud and in my heart—many times for those uncorrectable errors, the pain they rendered, the scars they left. But in the end, an apology is just an apology, and while hopefully time will allow us to work through some of that, I can never undo the wrong that I did to my child, regardless if I did so unwittingly, never thinking how a sudden move, seemingly joyful in execution, might lead to such an ongoing domino effect, such dark ongoing consequences.
I want him to forgive me. Of course I do. And some of that has got to be selfishly tied into some urge to be loved, and to feel that surely my actions couldn’t really have done permanent damage. But more, I want him to forgive me because I miss him so much, and I miss what felt like an easy friendship we had for so many years. And I know—I know—that some of the distance between us now is just the way it has to be. Teenagers breakaway, that is perhaps their main job. I certainly did not want to see my parents when I was his age.
Thinking about my father on the eve of his birthday, the day of Satch’s death, the week before my son’s graduation, I can’t say I felt a sweeping forgiveness for my own father. I have, over the years, tried to adopt something I learned from an analogy offered in a Buddhist study group. If you are rear ended, and leap from your car ready to scream at the other driver, you would do well to look past the immediate damage. Perhaps the guy who rear ended you was himself rear ended, and that other guy had suffered the same, and so on, in a chain that leads back to… well it could lead back to anything. Maybe the original crash was begun by someone slamming on the brakes to keep from hitting a child running in the road. And maybe that knowledge can help you get past whatever petty aggravation you feel at having had your own bumper dented.
I don’t know the catalyst for the crash that led my father to make the choices he made, which have left me with plenty to heal from, a healing that no matter how hard I work, will likely never be complete. I have some ideas, just vague rumors passed down in whispers from a few daring relatives, about what might’ve turned him from the innocent child he came into the world as into the miserable adult he grew up to be. Looking back, I think I was not exactly smug raising my son— determined that I would just do things the opposite of my old man, and that would protect us from more fallout— but I was, I see now, overly optimistic.
Because I did run into my child, jolted him forward, gave him some emotional whiplash, passed along some of the very things I vowed would never be a part of our lives—some anger, some impatience, some random snapping. And so, in the end, I was not just trying to gently usher my old dog over to the other side. Too, I held in my arms this symbol of my child’s life from kindergartener to senior, and I wept not only for the very immediate loss before me, but so many errors made, so many other losses the result.
Spike Gillespie profusely thanks so many people who sent their condolences these past days. She blogs at www.knitbuzz.blogspot.com and www.spikeg.com.
