Deaths and Wishes

My dog is dying. She’s having more trouble breathing every day, and her hip dysplasia is getting steadily worse. She often needs help getting her back legs under her, and squatting on the hillside that is part of our property is getting too dangerous for her.

She’s suffering more than she’s living. Because in our home, we respect death as a process, force, and absolute power, we respect that she’s ready. It isn’t sudden. It’s reasonably expected. And yes, it still hurts like hell.

Weddings reveal how people perceive you in comparison to them, how they rank you in relation to their own sense of importance. The character of the couple is shown in whether they make everyone welcome, or if they do something shitty like place someone in their 20s at the kids’ table. Funerals, and deaths in general, show you the degree to which people are self-centered, how much they objectify others/see themselves as the main character.

At my best friend’s funeral, there was just shock. A couple of chest-pounders that we all knew from the bar scene we were part of, but mostly it was “I just talked to him!” Joe was a giving guy, a little prone to drunken shenanigans, but kind to others, often before he was kind to himself. As far as I could see, as I stumbled through his eulogy and tried to comfort the family he left behind, no one even thought to disrespect any of his wishes or make it about what they thought was right. (I heard but did not confirm that perhaps some such nonsense did come from his ex-wife, but if she was present, she didn’t make herself known to me, or I just didn’t register her in my own shock and grief.)

Several years before my maternal grandmother passed, she took aside all of her children and grandchildren. She was quite blunt: “No heroic methods! No life support! I will haunt you if you try to keep me alive past when I have decided I’m done!”

Grandma and I had a complicated relationship, as the youngest child of her least favorite child, and as the physical representation of her fears about ancestral trauma. When she did have a stroke, she stayed alive for three days until I could make it from Minnesota to Ohio to say goodbye. I had to lie to my job to get the time off, and lie again to keep my job (they only allowed 3 days for bereavement leave, call centers are horrible, greedy companies.) I had to deflect my mother telling me to “be nice” to her verbally abusive brother because he was “losing his mother” as if I weren’t losing a grandmother. Granted, she was not a particularly kind grandmother, and she caused more issues for me than she solved. But for whatever reason, she was attached enough to me that I walked into her hospital room to see her standing next to her body, waiting to talk.

Mostly she wanted to reinforce the “Don’t you dare let someone bring me back to life.”

As usual, I felt disrespected, because she assumed that I was the one that wouldn’t listen to what she wanted.

Then I got back to my parents’ house, and my sister asked how it went. I didn’t tell her about Grandma standing by the body. The body was strong, and a lot of noises were being made even after three days of no food and no water. My sister, knowing damn well what my grandmother wanted, immediately said “We need to get her on life support.”

Because of course she did - what someone else wanted didn’t matter, even when laid out and legally documented. It confirmed what I knew of my sister’s true nature: the rules are for everyone else, but not her, and her feelings were somehow more important than our grandmother’s right to die the way she Very Clearly Wanted. It was one of many reasons, so many reasons, I did all I could to minimize contact with her.

I pointed out what Grandma had said. I don’t remember the response, it was just the usual self-centered bullshit.

If I understand the timing right, Grandma died while we were having the conversation. Go Grannie Go, excellent move. Her husband died near Fall Equinox, her, near Spring. I couldn’t help but think about that balance when I got the final news.

I love my dog. We sort of rescued each other in the pandemic, and she really does think I’m her pet. She shows me off to her squirrel friends when I’m dressed up, and often nudges me to go out because she thinks I need exercise. I don’t want her to go. I want to hang on to her, until she just leaves her body. But I know her. She’s going to stick around and protect until she can’t stand at all, and she’s almost there. I can’t imagine being so selfish that I put my pain over her suffering.

I can’t imagine not respecting someone’s wishes about their own death. We have to navigate so much status-jockeying, manipulation, and “this is your place” crap in our lives, the one thing everyone should be allowed is respect for their death.