Upheavals! It is impossible to keep ahead of them!

No simple, easy way forward

Remember a recent post which I titled “Much Too Much (Happening)”? Every time we think we are done with crises and drama, something else comes down the pike, and so it was that the Artist found himself once again in the Emergency unit of Northern Cochise Community Hospital, this time diagnosed with COVID-19. Mind you, both of us are triple-vaxxed and have been crowd-wary for what seems like forever! 

 

COVID is no joke. Feeling as if you can’t breathe is a terrible feeling. He thought he was having either a heart attack or a panic attack (and was naturally panicked at the possibility of a heart attack). Then came the diagnosis. We were stunned. Really??? 

 

The day before, I had gone to visit a litter of puppies and see if the one whose looks we liked also had the kind of temperament we hoped to find, and everything seemed good, so I put down a deposit. Then --! Well, I wasn’t even going to say the word ‘puppy’ in the conversations we were having through the hospital window, talking on our cell phones with David inside and me outside shivering in the shade, but he brought it up himself. He’d been looking at pictures of her, admiring her cuteness, and thought we should go ahead. Really???

Picture I saw online

The Artist had another issue besides COVID and so, beds being scarce everywhere and NCCH not having much besides the most basic care (and maybe you know, too, that Cochise County turned down COVID relief?), he was transferred once again to the Phoenix area, this time to Chandler Regional Hospital, with surgery scheduled for next week. He is doing well, blood oxygen levels steadily improving, such that his need for supplemental oxygen has gone from 6L to 1.5, a significant change for the better. Sometimes he sits up in a chair with no extra oxygen at all. He’s having brief physical therapy sessions, too: they are not letting him lie around to risk pneumonia! 

 

I made the 400-mile round trip on Wednesday and suited up like a spaceman to be allowed in his room so we could have 20 minutes together, and we both thought the time together was well worth the travel. The next morning, on the phone, he said, “Get the puppy. Play with the puppy. Read books. Take a break! You can come again to pick me up when I’m discharged.” Really???

 

On the one hand, it seems crazy, both the not-being-there (if only to hover in the geographical vicinity and fret) and the puppy-getting. On the other hand, what hasn’t been crazy lately in our lives? And now that the Artist’s breathing problems are being addressed, he is looking forward once again to the future – to making beautiful paintings, getting back to making sculpture, and to having a little canine companion with us once again. Since December, our life has been a steady (though rollercoasterish) series of upheavals, emotional and medical, one crisis after another. We are more than ready to share some happy times again, and those seem to be – we certainly hope! -- coming closer with each passing day. 

 

The puppy was given the name Juliet by the woman who owns her parents. A good name, but I wanted to add to it, and so she will be our Sunny Juliet. 

 

What light through yonder window breaks? 

It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!

 

That was my first thought, and right on its heels came another: “Yesterday my life was filled with rain….” Yes, the hit song recorded by Marvin Gaye. When I told a friend about this, her response was immediate: “She will ease the pain!” Sunny!

7 weeks old

I asked the Artist if we would ever love another dog as much as we loved Peasy or Sarah (he thinks that won’t be a problem, but I’m not sure), and then I asked him what Peasy would think of our having another dog. His response was that Sunny will be our “dog of atonement.” My sister (bless her heart!) did not like the sound of that. She feels we did a wonderful job with Peasy and don’t have to atone for anything. Okay, maybe not rationally. I’m pretty sure most people would say we made the right decision about Pea and have “nothing to regret.” But emotionally? It’s not that easy. 

 

Here’s what we want now: We want to give Sunny the kind of life Sarah had, the life we would have given Peasy if only it had been possible … a life where nothing bad ever happens to her … a life in which she is sheltered and feels secure and knows herself to be loved … a life in which she meets and makes new friends every day … a life of play and adventure but never want or fear … the kind of life every dog deserves to have … the life our Peasy should have had, right from the beginning.

 

I heard on the radio today that Daniel Pink has a new book called The Power of Regret. Rather than chiding readers over feeling regret, Pink looks at the emotion in terms of its positive value. His subtitle is How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. And that’s our idea with Sunny, our dog of atonement: going forward together into the happiest tomorrow we can create together, helped by the regret we feel over poor little Pea.

Eight weeks old

But my main message today is not about dogs! It's this: If you are not vaccinated against COVID, get vaccinated! Without those three doses we got, I would be sick, too, and the Artist would be much sicker than he is. (I don’t even want to think about how awful that could have been!) For us, these frightening medical separations have only underlined what we already knew, which is that we need each other and belong together. And that we are not ready to leave this beautiful earth!

 

One more thought. Whenever life’s various challenges start getting me down -- the kind of challenges you never want to have in the first place, but there they are, and there’s nothing to do but deal with them – I turn to Ellen Airgood’s first novel, South of Superior. The protagonist Madeline’s expectations, the anger she carries and judgments she makes against others all come gradually face to face with the reality of life Up North. For instance,

 

Madeline looks woeful. “Nothing’s the way I expected, now.” 

 

“Ha,” Mary said. She didn’t mean to laugh at the girl but if that wasn’t the story of life, nothing was.

 

Then farther down the same page, we catch an important glimpse into Mary Feather’s life and thoughts:

 

…Mary gave a piercing whistle that brought Jack running and put a hand on his head. Much as she’d groused to John Fitzgerald, the truth was that a dog was a good thing to have. A dog steadied you. Just the smell of a dog, the feel of its fur, the way a dog lived, up front and simple. She stared at her feet. And then she said, “What you have to do here, you have to accept. You have to – lay down before the way things are.”

 

I don’t know. Maybe these two passages, if you haven’t read the book, will seem completely random. (So read the book, already!) The thing is, I could have chosen from a couple hundred other passages, because my point here is that Madeline’s story steadies me. It helps me to accept the way things are -- and at the same time it strengthens my resolve to do what I can to make things better. I take a deep breath and call on all my sisu. I see also, in this latest of many readings of South of Superior, that one of its messages is one of the messages also to be found in The Little Prince. But I’m not here to preach, so read both books yourself, and you’ll see what I mean.

Thanks for reading my blog post today.

 

Thank you again and again, Ellen!