Martha is with me up to the part about going to a pet store. After that, she tells me, I am on my own.
As it happens, there is a pet store only a few blocks from the shelter. It’s one of those mom-and-pop places that smell like wood shavings and pee. Lined against one wall are dozens of small cages, each holding a newly born pup. The dogs lie on their tummies or chew on their cage doors or wrestle in ripped-up newspaper. The whole thing is so cute I feel my glands shrivel to prevent adorable overdose.
Toward the rear of the store is the dog that will become our dog. She is fat and white, and comes wagging up to me when I kneel down in front of her. She pokes her wet black nose through the squares of her cage door.
“Can we see this one?” I ask a salesgirl.
The girl takes us to a special area in the back where they introduce dogs to prospective buyers. It is quieter back here, away from children and birds and the jangling bell that rings whenever the front door opens.
Freed from her cage, the dog seems shy and unsure of herself. I bend down to her, hold out my hand. After a few tentative moments, she waddles over and sniffs me. I stroke her head and rub her pink tummy.
“What do you think?” I ask Martha.
“She’s really cute.”
“You wanna come home with us?” I ask the dog.
“Yes,” says the dog. “I would like that very much.” (It’s hard to tell if the voice I hear is the dog’s or my own, speaking in a darling, puppyish falsetto.)
And just like that, we have a dog.
We call her Mattie. I will spare you all the enchanting dog moments we share with her because the only thing worse than hearing parents talk about their babies is hearing “parents” talk about their pets. Suffice to say, we love her. We hate her, too, because she needs to be walked and bathed and cared for like an actual living creature.
Martha and I have many early morning fights about whose turn it is to take out the dog, fights that foreshadow the ones we will have with Elijah in just a few years. Despite lessons, Mattie never learns to walk well on a leash. She pulls, gets tangled up, leaps at other dogs, squirrels, pigeons. She happily ignores oncoming traffic and chokes herself hoarse trying to lick puked-up beer from the gutter. My Baggie-wrapped hand becomes intimately familiar with the shape and texture of her poo, so much so that I grow immune to any disgust I would normally feel when handling fresh-baked feces. This is a skill that will serve me well later when I have diapers to change and asses other than my own to wipe.
Very quickly, she becomes the best part of our life together.
A couple of years later, we are living in Los Angeles. Mattie is full-grown but retains her enthusiasm for indoor barking and throwing herself on every single person who walks through our door. As a result, all of our friends hate Mattie. One friend in particular makes a point of saying so—subtly—whenever he visits.
“I hate your dog,” Will tells me each time he comes over.
Even so, when Martha and I have to go out of town for a couple of weeks, Will agrees to watch Mattie. Now that I am a parent of actual humans, I can’t imagine asking somebody who hated my kids to babysit, but that’s pretty much what we did with Will. At the time, Will needed a place to stay, so the arrangement made sense for all parties. “Needs a place to stay” is not a good qualification for a babysitter any more than “I don’t want to be an old mom” is a good reason to have kids, but whatever.
When we return from our trip, Will and Mattie seem to have reached détente. The only problem, Will tells us, is that Mattie has not been eating much.
“Is that because you haven’t been feeding her?”
Will insists he was not trying to starve the dog in our absence. She just didn’t seem hungry. This is a worrisome development, and after observing her lack of appetite ourselves, we schedule a visit to the veterinarian.
It takes a few days and some X-rays to get the diagnosis. Our two-and-a-half-year-old dog has cancer. We’re both stunned. How could she have cancer? The vet tells us it’s not that uncommon, particularly among Labs, and particularly among puppy farm Labs, the kind you might buy at a New York City pet store, say.
The tumors are spread throughout her torso, too many to consider surgery, leaving us with two options: either we try to treat her, or we don’t. If we don’t, of course, she will die. And if we do treat her she still might die. Just like with people, cancer treatments for dogs are very expensive and not necessarily effective. The doctor tells us up front that the odds of saving her aren’t very good, but we don’t feel like we have an alternative. She is our dog and we will do whatever we can and spend whatever money it takes.
Soon Mattie is on a regular chemotherapy schedule. We drive an hour each way to the clinic, where her leg is shaved and she is injected with a scary red liquid that leaves her sluggish and sick, so sick in fact that, when she pukes, she does not even bother licking up her own vomit like the old Mattie would. Old Mattie loved the taste of her own sick.
Mattie has always been terrible in the car, pacing and howling, but generally excited to go wherever we happen to be going. Now she is afraid to even get in the car because she knows where we are going, and she knows it’s going to hurt. As upset as she is by these trips, she never growls or snaps or seems to blame us for what is happening to her.
After a couple of months, her tumors shrink. Her appetite returns, she regains her energy, and we grow optimistic. Maybe the treatment worked. Maybe the cancer was like an aggressive but shallow-rooted weed that just needed a good course of pesticide. But no. The cancer returns, worse than before, and the drugs seem to lose their potency. Soon the vet is telling us we’ve exhausted our treatment options. He tells us Mattie is going to die.
The next few weeks are agonizing. Mattie lies around, unwilling to do much more than shift from one uncomfortable position to another. Some friends come over to play cards one night. She does not greet people at the door as she used to. Instead she spends the night under the card table, her head resting on my foot. Even Will is sweet to her when he leaves that night. He pats her on the head and says goodbye.
One day, she seems to feel a little bit more like herself, so we put her back in the car for a ride, driving up the coast to a small public beach in Malibu. We ignore a sign that reads: “All dogs must be on leash,” and spend a few hours throwing a tennis ball for Mattie, who chases it into the water and brings it back to me to throw again.
A few days after that she can’t breathe without a struggle. We call the vet. He tells us she is in pain. He listens to our description and then advises us to put her to sleep. Can we wait? Yes, but her symptoms will not improve. Her pain will only worsen. He can’t tell us what to do, he says, but if it were his pet, he would do it now. We should bring her in. No, we say, we want her to die at home. Does he know any good vets who come to your house to kill your pet? He gives us a number to call.
A small, quiet man arrives at our house a few hours later carrying a black leather satchel just like doctors in old movies. He walks to Mattie, who lies in the living room, her breath heavy. When he calls her name, her head lifts and she raises herself from the floor, tail wagging. He murmurs to her. Martha and I exchange hopeful looks. Maybe we don’t have to do this now. He rubs his hands against her flanks, presses a stethoscope against her side. Looks in her eyes. He tells us he thinks it’s time.
The vet gives us a few moments to talk, then asks what we want to do. We look at each other and I tell him okay. At least some of the reason I have just agreed to let him kill my dog is that I feel bad he drove all the way out here.
“Let’s do it in the bedroom, on her dog bed.”
He says that’s fine.
I ask if I can be in there with her.
Yes.
Martha says she can’t watch.
I don’t know if I can watch, either, but I want the last face she sees to be one of ours. The three of us go into the bedroom. Mattie curls up on her bed, tail still thumping. I sit on the floor beside her
while the doctor extracts his vials and syringe.
I scratch behind Mattie’s ears and tell her I love her. I go “shhh,” over and over even though she’s not making any noise. The doctor inserts the needle into her side. Mattie flinches a little at the needle prick, but after a few seconds starts to relax as the first drug, a sedative, takes hold. I feel my chest seizing up. “Shhh,” I say to her and I am crying. “Shhh.” Her eyes start to glaze over, but she is still here. I know she’s still here, I can see her watching me. Her eyes are deep and clear and she is dying. I can’t sit here. I can’t. Before I know what I’m even doing, I am on my feet and fleeing the room. Leaving Mattie before it is done is the single greatest shame of my life.
Martha stands, arms crossed over her chest, in the living room.
“Is it over?”
I can only shake my head no.
A few minutes later the doctor emerges from our bedroom, his black bag zipped tight. I write him a check, thank him, and he leaves.
Twelve years later, Nibbles dies in his cage. It’s not a surprise. He’d been fading for days: his eyes were closed, his annoying nocturnal wheel-running had ceased, and he suddenly looked old. Yes, a hamster can look old. They get kind of gray around the muzzle and they start asking you to speak up.
It was obvious to us that Nibbles was on his way out. Martha tried to prepare Elijah for the inevitable, but to no avail. He kept saying things like “I don’t want to think about it,” which I believe is the correct way to approach any problem. Denial. He also retained a certain amount of optimism about the situation. His diagnosis: “Maybe Nibbles is tired.” Indeed. Tired of life, boy. Tired of life.
We had no way of determining Nibbles’s age. The lady at the pet shop told me hamsters live to be three. We’d only had Nibbles in our lives for eight months, but it’s possible he was geriatric before we even got him. We didn’t know his age. We didn’t know his gender. Nibbles, there was so much about you we didn’t know.
When Nibbles finally succumbed, Elijah at first said he was okay with it, and did not miss Nibbles very much. (Step One of the Five Stages of Death, according to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, of course, is Denial.) Next came the tears. Elijah started crying, which made Ruthie cry. Soon they were both keening over the dead hamster. Mourning in the free and unself-conscious way that children cry, their tears feeding other tears, followed by desperate exhortations to the gods: “Why?” my son asked. “Why?” (Step Two: Anger.) He was choked up and tearful, which was both very sad and very cute. (Step Four: Depression.) After Martha suggested he eat dinner in front of the television, a never-before-granted privilege, he cheered up immediately. (Step Five: Acceptance.) It should be noted he skipped over Step Three: Bargaining, in which the bereaved attempts to bargain with God. I guess he didn’t think of it.
We bury Nibbles in the backyard, right at the edge of the woods. He will be returned to the earth, a boy’s beloved pet and friend. For Elijah, burying his first pet is a solemn rite of passage. For me, it is another weekend chore.
We still have Mattie’s ashes in a small aluminum container tucked into a little dresser upstairs. For some reason, we never buried them. I don’t know why. It’s hard to let go. Of a hamster, a dog, a parent, a way of thinking about one’s self. Everything is always changing.
Elijah was six when we got Nibbles. In a few years he will go to college and Ruthie will follow a couple of years after that. The monsters that lived with us as babies are gone, replaced by lovely children who clear their dishes at night, sometimes without even being screamed at to do so. Soon they will be adults, and maybe one day, parents themselves. But right now they are still young and they want a cat. Everybody does, except for me. This Saturday we are getting a cat.
CHAPTER 19
i hope he’s nice
I am twenty-seven years old, Martha is twenty-nine. In six months we will leave New York. In eighteen months our new puppy, Mattie, will be dead. Three years from now we will have a son, and two years after that a daughter. One day I will be writing these words and trying to remember what it was like to be twenty-seven and about to join my life with this girl that I love. If I could reach back to that day and tell myself anything, it would be this: “You guys are going to be okay.” I could have used the advice because right now, when we are planning our wedding, she is being a huge pain in my ass.
Martha wants to be married in a Catholic church. I do not. I would prefer to be married in a more secular setting, one that has some personal meaning for me: a riverboat casino perhaps, or a Taco Bell. But Martha is unyielding, and in the spirit of pretending to compromise, I have agreed to attend this meeting.
Despite my misgivings about even being here, I like the priest right away because of his Australian accent and because his name is Edmund, a name as creaky and charming as the old oak furniture in his office. Father Edmund is Martha’s favorite priest at the church she sometimes attends on the next block down from our apartment building. He is a lanky guy, around fifty. He is also a Jesuit, a distinction I do not really understand other than I know it involves the mastery of kung fu.
Father Edmund begins the meeting by asking us some personal questions about ourselves. He does not seem put off by the fact that we are living in sin. Nor does he seem to care that I am Jewish. In fact, he asks if we would like to incorporate Jewish wedding traditions into our service. The only Jewish wedding tradition I know is the one where you stomp on a wineglass. Can we do that one? He says of course we can. What about jumping the broom, like black people do? He says he’s not sure if that would be appropriate.
He asks if we will be raising our children Catholic. I tell him I have no plans to raise anybody Catholic, least of all my future offspring, but I don’t mind if Martha wants to give them Catholic instruction as long as I can balance it with “Everything your mother tells you is lies.” He responds that as long as the kids are exposed to the church, he feels that’s all that can be asked.
Where is all the condemnation I was dreading/secretly hoping for? Where is all the righteous indignation I was expecting/totally psyched to see? Where are the lectures about fornication? The admonishments? At the very least, I expected him to swat me on the knuckles with a ruler the way I have so often seen portrayed in movies about Catholics. In fact, throughout our conversation Father Edmund is so reasonable and nonjudgmental that I am beginning to suspect that he might not be a priest at all, or if he is one, he appears to be terrible at it.
After you are married long enough, an inevitable question arises: “Which one of us will die first?” We have not discussed this question except as it relates to life insurance and the writing of wills. But because she was the one who insisted we get both life insurance and wills, I am confident that she thinks I will be the first to go.
Statistically speaking, she is probably right. Men have shorter life spans than women. Four and a half years shorter, on average. That is four and a half years for her to think to herself, I won.
There is also some (controversial) evidence that lefties like me die sooner than righties like Martha. The length of the differential varies from eight months to nine years, depending on which study you choose to believe. So that sucks. Then, when I factor in genetics, I’m really screwed.
Martha’s family tends to be long-lived, particularly the women, who remain spry well into their eighties. Her grandmother just died at ninety-two out on the scrubby Montana frontier. After Martha’s doctor tested her cholesterol recently, he told her she could eat nothing but bacon and eggs for the rest of her life and be fine. Her blood pressure is low. There is little cancer in her family. Plus, she goes to the gym, which has the double effect of making her healthier while simultaneously making me feel worse about myself. A negative self-image reduces life expectancy by seven and a half years.
My family’s health history is not so rosy. Among lots of other ailments, we’ve got cancer up the wazoo. Literally, up the wazoo. Colorectal cancer is as common in my family as whining. As a consequence,
I keep a careful eye on my poop. Anything out of the ordinary poop-wise yields an immediate call to the doctor. I have also begun getting weekly colonoscopies.
I am not going down like that. In fact, I am not going down. The one advantage I have going for me in my mortal battle with Martha is that I plan on living forever. This is no idle statement. Sometimes when I am not looking at pictures of Fat Kevin Federline online, I read articles about advances in gerontology and life extension therapy. Although I comprehend almost none of what I am reading, I am convinced that the work being done in these fields will provide enough breakthroughs within my lifetime to allow me to remain alive for at least a couple of hundred years. At that point, computer technology will have advanced enough to allow us to upload our consciousnesses into a vast, interconnected neural network, which will allow us to “live,” essentially, indefinitely, or at least until somebody accidentally kicks the extension cord out of the wall.
So that’s my plan. Maybe it sounds far-fetched, but once upon a time I bet the idea of stuffed-crust pizza seemed pretty far-fetched, too. A lot of people make the argument that they wouldn’t want to live forever but I do because for an atheist like me, death is the least good option.
I am not an atheist by choice. Were it up to me, I would become a devout follower of whichever religion offered the best food and most holidays. The problem is, I lack whatever that thing is that allows people to believe in a supreme entity who cares every time a butterfly flaps its wings. Which is not to say I am without faith. I do have faith, just no place to deposit it. So I end up just kind of carrying my faith around like a pocketful of foreign coins.
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