Gravedigger
The sister calls at 10:00 PM.
The dog, 15 years old!, has died in her arms of cardiac arrest.
The poor girl, V, sobs, sobs, sobs, and everyone in the house comes together and they are all crying as the sister drives over with a dead dog.
It must be buried. The father is out of town, will be home shortly, I volunteer to dig the grave outside in the garden. I smash three fingers with the shovel against the wall, it hurts, but I keep digging, needing to feel useful. I dig about a meter then rest, my body shaking, my back sore, and wash away the blood and V, she puts Hydrogen Peroxide and ointment and is concerned.
Waiting for the father we look at family photo albums. V was a beautiful girl growing up, even as a teenage with braces. The photos of V I like so much were taken by her ex's mother, her mom tells me. "Do you want to see the one of them together?" I call my mother tonight, distressed, but of course she was asleep. Tomorrow, she says.
I waited in V's office for an hour and a half for her to finish a chart. I read my paperback in a small chair. The office has no windows, the TV is on, and I am not allowed to leave without her. Afterward we eat in a hip vegetarian restaurant with an Argentine chef and listen to Bob Dylan and the Who and Coldplay as we eat cucumbers and quinoa and drink pink chilled wine.
Earlier that day I had gone to Santa Ana to the University with a young boy today to help with the papers. He didn't need my help. My own desperation to be useful, even just to be used, made me offer him money. “No,” he says. “This is something I need to do myself.”
Where are my things to do myself? I buy V something every day. Cranberry juice, flowers, candles, lunch. I make the bed. I check my email obsessively.
Her dad says, as we are burying the dog, that his mother always said pets were necessary, that pets could sense the pain of their owners and even take on that pain, sacrificing themselves for their human counterpart. He says that today for the first time in ten years he got gravely sick on the road after lunch.
I want to believe in so many things like that. And others: that 9/11 was a conspiracy, that 2012 will bring something interesting, that marijuana is a sacred plant. But I am strangely tired, strangely hurt, strangely sad, though I did not even know the dog.
