I didn’t go up to the sleeping loft for months, in part because I couldn’t lift my left leg high enough to reach the steps—a strange and passing limitation. I slept at Rita’s house for a week, and then once I went home, I found that I didn’t have the courage to go to the loft or to pick up my dog like I used to; there was no bending down and hefting her up and carrying on like always.
During that time, people asked me what was next, often posing the question with the same steely tact my mother used when asking me about why I was cutting my own hair. I had no idea, really, except that I found myself sleeping on a lawn chair cushion on the floor in the living room. It was warm enough that I could sleep with the front door wide open, ten feet from my head, twelve feet from the spot where I saw a possum trying to drink water out of a glass I’d left on the porch. I slept like that for weeks, and in the morning I’d wake up to find my dog sleeping half in the house and half out, draped across the threshold like a doorstop. I can’t tell you how much I appreciated that scene, or how it reminded me (like a surprise) that my house still fit me.
Still, sometimes I wonder if I’ll live here till I die, till I am old and can’t remember what my life could have been before. Will I always want to sit on the porch waiting for the sun to dry out my soggy disposition, waking me up to the reality of this place—this perfectly ordinary, exceptional life? Maybe. It turns out that the yard, the view, the rain on the roof, Hugh, Annie, and Rita are exactly what I want. Even the yuckier stuff, the gray days and long nights, are exactly what I want. Honest.
In late winter this year, I found myself staring out the window at the fir tree in the alley, leaning into my hand with my elbow on the table, exactly like a coffee commercial before the coffee is introduced and everything shifts from black-and-white into color. This is what I do when I’m avoiding putting on my raincoat and plunging myself into the grayness of winter, when I can’t stand the idea of being cold (again) and walking around while my dog absorbs the rain like a cotton ball.
It was early February and it felt like the rain was trying to undo me, making my brain soggy and my complexion droopy, and reminding me that I live near the rain forest, where no amount of ultra-thick underwear could keep me from feeling damp because I am damp. I wondered if my dog was going through the same soggy-brained experience. She had recently taken to wanting to go out in the middle of the night and had even peed in the bed, something she had never done even when she was a puppy. So I’d started lugging her down the ladder at two or three in the morning. I’d open the front door and she’d hop down the steps in no particular hurry, like she didn’t really have to pee after all. Sometimes I’d follow her out, stand on the porch, and watch her track right in the drizzly moonlight and then left, toward the garden, nose to the ground, and then simply stop, curl twice, and plop herself in the middle of the dried-up strawberries.
This behavior continued for months and it seemed to branch into other odd behavior: She would hide more and more in the thickets of the yard, concealing herself in the tall cool grass along the fence. She had a particularly clever hidey-hole constructed in the corner near the mailbox. You couldn’t see her at all, hidden in the grass and low shrub, until the mailman would arrive and she’d launch herself out of the foliage like a lion on the great Saharan plains.
One day, after whistling my lips off and looking for RooDee in all the usual hideouts, I crawled on my hands and knees under my little house through an opening the size of a footstool. This was the secret door to RooDee’s fort, the place where I’d seen her drag bones and where she’d go on hot days. So this was the basement of my house, a room I’d never entered. The area between the wheels and above the axles created a nice dry dirt floor with a fairly good expanse to crawl around, or if you were RooDee, you could stand up, stretch, chew on your butt, or do whatever else the day might involve. There was a secondary cave dug out under the front steps, a hollow that I never imagined as I’d wander up and down off the porch.
I looked around and relaxed a minute; it smelled like dirt and grass, and maybe just a little like dog spit and wet hair. I understood why RooDee had liked this secret little hidey-hole: it felt nicely contained, but also included a sneaky expansive view of the backyard past the front steps.
RooDee wasn’t there, and I backed out slowly, laughing, and still wondering where the hell my dog had gone, and that’s when I noticed her staring at me from the tall grass along the south fence. “What the heck, RooDee!”
Head tilt, tail wag: “What the what?”
It was like living with a spy. Someone who was constantly watching you and taking expert notes, ready to present the facts on how you stayed up too late last night and didn’t wash your hands after you peed the other day. Which wasn’t all bad; it’s good to be accountable to someone.
But then everything shifted.
Rita died. It was late April, a few months after RooDee started hiding in the yard and a day after an oxygen generator was dragged into her house by a good-looking guy who probably didn’t need to work out at the gym anymore because the equipment was so fucking heavy. Rita died four days after I sat up with her one night, her feet dangling above the floor like she was a little girl, me rubbing her back like a tired mom who simultaneously wanted to help and also to roll into the blankets and fall back asleep. We chitchatted about the postcards pinned to the corkboard across from her bed, about the things that happened twenty years ago, ten years ago, and last Christmas, when her great-niece was in the desert, wearing a red bikini and a Santa hat. Rita died twelve hours after we talked by phone, and I explained how things were going in Portland, which was “great, and I’ll see ya on Sunday whether you like it or not.”
She died with Hugh (aka “Hughie Boodleheimer one-two-three,” a nickname from when he was a little boy sitting in her lap as she read to him) holding her hand and leaning into her bed, with Annie and Kellen making their way in the early-morning dew across the yard toward her house; with me one hundred miles away, up and showered in Portland, busying myself to make a poofy spot on my hair lie flat, to look presentable, reasonable, and prepared for a day of teaching. Within a few minutes of Rita’s death, Annie had called me to tell me about it. I imagined Rita lying there with Kellen resting his teenage hand on her shoulder. In the past year, Kellen’s hands and feet, femurs, spine, and chin had grown exponentially—as if overnight, his body had shifted from the small eight-year-old boy who threw tennis balls at the garage for hours (and hours!) into that of a young man, a person capable of incredible kindness, listening when I cried at the dinner table one night, explaining that I was scared about my heart, that I was dying and I was afraid. At that moment, he had held my hand and rubbed my back (just like I had offered Rita). And now, there he was holding his dear great-aunt Rita, the matriarch who had helped raise him, who had allowed him to throw Nerf balls at her wheelchair as she rolled from the kitchen table to the living room lamp, daring her to toss the balls back as he ducked behind the couch. What was he thinking in those first few minutes? Was he safe and aware, and as shattered by reality as I was? I wondered about him as the phone static stretched the hundred-mile distance between Olympia and Portland—a thousand miles, ten thousand, the distance of the equator wrapped like a tight belt around the earth’s waist . . . and then I burst into tears.
“There’s no emergency here,” Annie whispered into the phone. “Rita will be here when you get home. We love you.”
I drove home twelve hours after Annie called, after teaching a workshop focused on tiny house building, and telling people about Rita, describing the time a few days earlier that she had wheeled into a furniture store for a new lift chair. She had dressed in her favorite skirt, a real piece of crap with the elastic totally blown out at the waist, and as she stood up from her wheelchair, and slowly turned on her heels, her skirt dropped to the floor. Without missing a beat, she casually said to Annie, “Well, there goes the skirt. But who cares? No one is around to not
ice.” And with that, Annie looked up from her focus on Rita to see that the furniture store was packed with people: an entire family, clerks, a delivery guy, and assorted customers quickly averting their eyes from the train wreck near the lift chairs. Rita finished her turn and then sat her diapered butt on the lift chair, and she and Annie finally burst into laughter.
The class appreciated that story, and as I thought about it later while I was driving home, I sobbed. I cried on the highway from mile marker 2 in Vancouver, Washington, to mile marker 104 in Olympia. I didn’t listen to the radio, or stop to pee, or try to play with my cell phone. Instead, I cried and wailed. At one point, perhaps out of exhaustion, I found myself surprised by the sound of my own crying; like a wounded animal—something unseen and moaning in the woods.
When I got home, I walked into Rita’s house to find Hugh and Annie and a small tribe of close friends. They were in various stages of noshing on snacks and crying and chatting about this and that to try to normalize things, having dropped whatever they were doing on a Saturday night to come over with food, beer, and wine.
RooDee ambled in and immediately leaned into one person after the other, gathering pats and accolades; this is what she always did. She’d meet folks as they walked down the driveway; if they were dog people, they’d lean down and pet her. If they were not, she’d give them their space and simply follow behind them as they walked.
After the meet and greet, we walked back to Rita’s bedroom to see her. RooDee crouched low, like she was crawling under a fence; ears pulled back tight to her scalp, while swinging her head back and forth, sniffing the air. What did she sense that I couldn’t? The room smelled like eucalyptus, roses, and beeswax. It was a strangely comforting smell, a kind, human smell just like Rita.
It was the weirdest thing watching RooDee; seeing how she regarded Rita’s body and sniffed the floor, the bed and her body from the area near her head to her feet.
I sat down in a chair next to the body and RooDee parked herself at the foot of Rita’s bed, curling into a tight ball and closing her eyes. She slept there for the rest of the night, and the following night too.
During the next couple of days, we all lounged about, slowly picking at our grief, including RooDee, who created a new hidey-hole just to the left of Rita’s front door stoop. She would occasionally wander up to the back door and wag her tail, imagining that Rita would show up at any minute. She’d bark once and wag her tail (her normal routine with Rita, announcing that she would like another biscuit), but Rita wasn’t there and so RooDee would slowly unwind her tail, drop it, and wander back to the front porch.
This continued for two weeks until RooDee died too.
I guessed maybe it was a broken heart, like she missed her routine with Rita even more than I did. RooDee missed how Rita would roll over to the back door to whistle, poorly (a pathetic whoot whoot whoot). If RooDee didn’t respond, Rita continued by tapping on the glass door like a woodpecker, at which point RooDee would unearth herself from beneath the little house and wander over for yet another cookie or a plate of leftover mac and cheese.
I fell asleep in the backyard the day we took RooDee to the vet for cremation. I was listening to the hummingbirds buzz near the purple flowering plants in front of the little house; they seemed to have just now discovered the “bushes of unknown origin,” as we called them, since we had no idea what they were. Everything was so normal and profoundly not normal at the same time; RooDee wasn’t there. She wasn’t sitting nearby, snapping at bugs who landed on her, frightening the birds, and Rita wasn’t inside her house with the screen door open so I could hear her yell, “Rooooodaaaaeeee,” followed by her really crappy attempt to whistle.
I fell asleep on RooDee’s blanket and woke up with dog hair stuck to my upper lip like a crazy press-on mustache. So I went into Rita’s kitchen to wash it off and drink a beer. Everyone was gone; Hugh, Annie, and Kellen were at a soccer game. Keeva was in Africa, and I was alone. I couldn’t even watch TV—it was time for the six-o’clock news, but the TV cable got turned off when Rita died, so I couldn’t watch Brian Williams, Mr. Weepy Eyes as Rita called him (a name he earned by looking like he was going to cry at any minute as he reported on the world’s mayhem and missing goodness). So instead, I decided to drink my beer and mope around, and generally feel sorry for myself on this, my first day as an orphan.
I am a creature of routine. Maybe most of us are . . . we wake up, hop in the shower, make a cup of coffee, make breakfast and a bit of lunch; we wake up our kids, kiss our spouse, and let the dog out for a pee. We go to work, punch a clock (even if it is metaphorical), and chip away at our day. And in the meantime, we come to know a little bit about the neighbors, the lady at the coffee stand, the bus driver, and the guy across the street who is probably running an illegal chop shop because he’s up late at night with a torch, cutting up cars in his driveway (and even though I believe in freedom and the Declaration of Independence, I am really annoyed by his tendency to use a ball-peen hammer at one in the morning). But even inside the stuff that bothers us, even inside the banality of so much of our day, we appreciate that everything is predictable and safe. Everything is clear, and you can navigate around the things that bother you and steer toward the things you love. And then someone dies and fucks the whole thing up.
Clearly, given my use of cuss words, I am mourning. Earlier, I’d thought about wearing black like Johnny Cash for the rest of my life. But everyone in the Pacific Northwest wears black—black raincoats, black hoodies, black jeans. And besides, black doesn’t really describe how I feel; I am far more empty than full of tar. I feel like if I move too quickly, my shoulders will fall down and hit my kneecaps because the stuff in between is just air. So it is important that I sit very still in the backyard and do nothing, which causes me to notice there are a thousand different birds picking around at the fur that RooDee deposited in the strawberry patch. And it’s easy to see that the day is perfect (not too hot and not too cold, and not raining or misting or threatening to move my pity party inside). RooDee would have loved this day just like every day, and likely wouldn’t have put up with me moping around for long.
I wasn’t just sad about losing Rita and RooDee themselves. I was grieving over every single pattern in my day-to-day that was now busted; how I couldn’t figure out how to take a shower without asking someone (maybe Annie or Hugh) for permission to use Rita’s bathroom. It was a habit, no less powerful than the way gravity can drop you to your knees.
There are two things I don’t want to admit but will tell you as long as you pinky-swear not to tell anyone else and swear even bigger that you’ll never ask me about them even if we become best friends who talk about everything. So here goes: The day after RooDee died, I crawled under the bench in my little house and curled into a ball the size of my four-year-old niece. Once I was shoved in there, I scream-cried into a down bootie that was sitting nearby, so no one would hear me and no one would have to know how deeply disturbed I was feeling. I kept my head down and hands over my head like a tornado was about to rip through my house (and it felt like that could happen at any moment), but it didn’t and instead I ended up pulling a muscle in my abdomen, crying and blowing snot all over my down bootie. I cried like that for a half hour, and then the storm passed and I crawled out and drank some water like nothing had happened and I was normal again.
The second thing I did (and again, this is just between us) was punch the ceiling of my house very hard. I punched it five or six times while I was lying in the loft, crying about how the last time I had come to the loft everything was different. Rita was alive. RooDee was with me.
The few weeks since Rita had died, I had been sleeping downstairs because RooDee needed to get up a thousand times in the night, pacing around, shifting her weight trying to get comfortable, and I was afraid she’d launch herself off the sleeping platform so had started sleeping downstairs on a lawn chair cushion.
So there I
was: comfortable in my “real” bed with the quilt that my mom made, and the skylight window over me showing how the moon really does sometimes look like a banana, which is funny and I would have said it out loud, and RooDee would have ignored me and instead would have sighed and scooted her butt farther into my knees. But RooDee was never going to do that again, so I punched the wood ceiling five or six times very hard while I cried.
I woke up in the morning with my knuckles scraped and bruised. Every time I reached for my coffee cup I felt embarrassed, ashamed at losing my shit in a way that included punching a four-thousand pound object. “Who does that?” I wondered.
Grief makes normal behavior a real pain in the neck, like the day after RooDee died and I went to get a pizza. I ran into a friend who asked, “How ya doing?” And I just stared at him, not sure how to respond: Should I go with “Okay and not,” or maybe “Okay, and I feel like my heart is the size of a pebble, sitting at the bottom of a very deep, very dark well”?
The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir Page 19