DAY FOUR: LIFE AFTER DUKE

Duke inspecting Clark's truck

Day Three after our loss of Duke was yesterday, and I consider it a turning point for me: I didn't cry once. Oh, I was close to it a couple of times, but I managed to get through the day without as much numbing despair as the days right before and immediately Duke's passing.

Today, is DAY FOUR. It's amazing to me how quickly my moods ride the roller coaster of emotion. I was familiar with the stages of grief,* having heard of them in magazine articles and TV psycho-babble shows (which I could only watch briefly) that masquerade as entertainment.

For those who are unfamiliar with those stages, here they are below. They represent the loss of a beloved human, but believe me, they are present in the loss of a beloved pet, too:

Stage One: Denial  - the first of the five stages of grief. It helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. We go numb. We wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. We try to find a way to simply get through each day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle. As you accept the reality of the loss and start to ask yourself questions, you are unknowingly beginning the healing process. You are becoming stronger, and the denial is beginning to fade. But as you proceed, all the feelings you were denying begin to surface.

Stage Two: Anger - a necessary stage of the healing process. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal. There are many other emotions under the anger and you will get to them in time, but anger is the emotion we are most used to managing. The truth is that anger has no limits. It can extend not only to your friends, the doctors, your family, yourself and your loved one who died, but also to God. You may ask, “Where is God in this? Underneath anger is pain, your pain. It is natural to feel deserted and abandoned, but we live in a society that fears anger. Anger is strength and it can be an anchor, giving temporary structure to the nothingness of loss. At first grief feels like being lost at sea: no connection to anything. Then you get angry at someone, maybe a person who didn’t attend the funeral, maybe a person who isn’t around, maybe a person who is different now that your loved one has died. Suddenly you have a structure – – your anger toward them. The anger becomes a bridge over the open sea, a connection from you to them. It is something to hold onto; and a connection made from the strength of anger feels better than nothing.We usually know more about suppressing anger than feeling it. The anger is just another indication of the intensity of your love.

Stage Three: Bargaining - Before a loss, it seems like you will do anything if only your loved one would be spared. “Please God, ” you bargain, “I will never be angry at my wife again if you’ll just let her live.” After a loss, bargaining may take the form of a temporary truce. “What if I devote the rest of my life to helping others. Then can I wake up and realize this has all been a bad dream?” We become lost in a maze of “If only…” or “What if…” statements. We want life returned to what is was; we want our loved one restored. We want to go back in time: find the tumor sooner, recognize the illness more quickly, stop the accident from happening…if only, if only, if only. Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The “if onlys” cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently. We may even bargain with the pain. We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt. People often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one.

Stage Four: Depression - After bargaining, our attention moves squarely into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters our lives on a deeper level, deeper than we ever imagined. This depressive stage feels as though it will last forever. It’s important to understand that this depression is not a sign of mental illness. It is the appropriate response to a great loss. We withdraw from life, left in a fog of intense sadness, wondering, perhaps, if there is any point in going on alone? Why go on at all? Depression after a loss is too often seen as unnatural: a state to be fixed, something to snap out of. The first question to ask yourself is whether or not the situation you’re in is actually depressing. The loss of a loved one is a very depressing situation, and depression is a normal and appropriate response. To not experience depression after a loved one dies would be unusual. When a loss fully settles in your soul, the realization that your loved one didn’t get better this time and is not coming back is understandably depressing. If grief is a process of healing, then depression is one of the many necessary steps along the way.

Stage Five: Acceptance - is often confused with the notion of being “all right” or “OK” with what has happened. This is not the case. Most people don’t ever feel OK or all right about the loss of a loved one. This stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that this new reality is the permanent reality. We will never like this reality or make it OK, but eventually we accept it. We learn to live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live. We must try to live now in a world where our loved one is missing. In resisting this new norm, at first many people want to maintain life as it was before a loved one died. In time, through bits and pieces of acceptance, however, we see that we cannot maintain the past intact. It has been forever changed and we must readjust. We must learn to reorganize roles, re-assign them to others or take them on ourselves. Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones. As we begin to live again and enjoy our life, we often feel that in doing so, we are betraying our loved one. We can never replace what has been lost, but we can make new connections, new meaningful relationships, new inter-dependencies. Instead of denying our feelings, we listen to our needs; we move, we change, we grow, we evolve. We may start to reach out to others and become involved in their lives. We invest in our friendships and in our relationship with ourselves. We begin to live again, but we cannot do so until we have given grief its time.
(https://grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief/
*In 1969, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross introduced the five stages of grief in her book, On Death and Dying)

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I haven't followed the stages in the order above, but I'm not surprised at myself. I tend to be different from other people :).  My stages haven't been contrived; they just happened they way they did, and I have no control over them. Here are my stages, given in the order they've been happening:

Stage One: Depression
I became depressed when we had to place Duke in the veterinary hospital. He was in pain and suffering, and we wanted to do something to help him get well and alleviate his misery. We pinned our hopes on that hospital and its staff.

Stage Two: Denial
As the days wore on (he was admitted on Monday, July 24), we were told to give the blood meds time to form platelets to stop his internal bleeding, and that it usually took three days or longer for it to begin working. I prayed so hard that we would see a turnaround in his condition.

Stage Three: Anger
This stage started coming yesterday, and is full blown today. My anger is directed at the veterinary hospital in general, the vet on Duke's case in particular. WHY DIDN'T THEY TELL US THAT DUKE WASN'T GETTING BETTER? He was getting worse daily, and she urged us to give him yet another dose of the med, another blood transfusion. She didn't tell us he was so swollen that we could hardly recognize him Thursday, July 27, when we insisted on seeing him.

I say "insisted," because when Duke had his back surgery there back in March, we were dissuaded from visiting him so that he could lie still and thus heal. If we had come, they said, he would get over-excited and thus might injure his back. He needed time to heal, and when he came home, he was placed on a month's crate rest, only carrying him out/in to do his business.

All right, I got that. So, we assumed we couldn't see him this time, either. Oh, nobody said we couldn't, but nobody said "Come on down," either. After Clark's call to the veterinarian ended on Thursday morning (he had to call them several times to find out what was going on--they weren't very good at keeping us informed like they did when Duke had his back surgery. Then, they called at least twice a day, even emailing us some photos of him as he was able to take a few steps outside!). We were expecting at least the same level of communication this time. WRONG. On his call, the vet said that no, the med hadn't started working yet, but "Let's give him another dose and try again." Keep in mind that each transfusion cost $200 (he had to have an IV instead of oral meds because of internal bleeding in his GI tract). We were shocked at Duke's appearance: bloated, lying there with an IV, and hardly even conscious. We knew he was on strong pain meds, but NOBODY TOLD US HOW SWOLLEN HE WAS, OR THAT HE WAS GOING DOWNHILL SO FAST. Nobody.

We were both upset, and I sobbed nearly all the way home (an hour away), because we feared he was too far gone to make a turnaround. I was glad, at least, that I had insisted on seeing him Thursday. I told Clark before he placed the call to arrange a visit, that I was going to see my dog THAT DAY. If they said no, then I was going up there and staying until they let me see him. I had no idea of their rules for visitation, but I was so agitated that I wouldn't have cared at the time. I feared I'd never see my Duke alive if we didn't go Thursday.

As we dreaded, Duke was no better Friday morning, and his platelet count had not improved one iota from the time he was first checked. Therefore, we could not allow him to suffer anymore and  returned on Friday to have Duke put to sleep. The vet had even called us around 8:30 that morning, asking if we wanted her to go ahead and put him to sleep before we got there in case he was in respiratory failure (doesn't that imply how bad his situation was?). We told her yes, because we felt he had suffered enough. He lived, and when they brought him in to us in that depressing room, he was more alert (because they had him on oxygen, something we didn't know about or see when we saw him the day before).

While in the waiting room on Friday, I happened to see the hospital's slideshow on the TV monitor there. We were kept waiting for nearly thirty minutes after our appointment time, so I had plenty of time to see that slideshow. It said something to the effect of "while we often dissuade pet owners from visiting their ill pets while under our care, we decide on a case-by-case basis. Visits must be approved and arranged 24 hours in advance by the attending veterinarian," and so on. I hadn't asked permission to see my dog on Thursday: I demanded that we must see him. But the vet agreed to let us see him that day, and asked us to name the time. We asked for 4:30 p.m.

Stage Four: Acceptance (I'm still working on that one)
I suppose that's where I am today. Of course I've revisited Duke's last few days over and over in my mind. You ask yourself if you could have done more to assure his survival. You berate yourself for not picking up on his illness sooner. And, you blame yourself for allowing him to suffer. It's a normal thing, but why does it seem so abnormal?

I am still angry that the hospital put a veterinarian on Duke's case who had only been in our country for a week. Her accent was such that we could not understand her on the phone, and was only slightly less difficult in person. Now before I get hate mail for disliking foreigners, please remember I am grieving and distracted. I am sure, when I am in my right mind, that she was doing all she could, and her lack of communication to us was probably because she was overwhelmed, being new on the job and in the country.

My Christian worldview makes me realize that she tried her best, even though after Duke was put down, she made us wait another 40 minutes to place him in a transport box and bring him back to us so we could take him home to bury him. I will look more kindly upon her, but the focus of my anger vacillates from her, to the hospital (for putting her in charge and making our dog a teaching tool), to us (for not going to see him sooner).

Am I being logical right now? Probably not, and even I realize that, but I'll take anger over despair.  Did you notice I didn't list the stage of bargaining? At no point did I ever bargain with God about allowing Duke to live. Oh, I begged him to do so, if it was His will. But as a Christian, I don't make bargains with the Creator of the universe. I submit to His will, however difficult it is and however long it takes me to get to that point. You see, it's about Him, not me, in the scheme of things. He knows our suffering, and I cling to one of my favorite verses in the Bible:

"And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose."

New King James Version (NKJV)

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Where do we go from here? We hold no one accountable for Duke's passing. It was our decision to have him put out of his suffering, no matter what the extenuating circumstances were. Yes, I am angry. Perhaps you've faced a similar situation and are angry right now, too. Even through clinched teeth, I must type these words: You and I have to turn our anger over to God, because it is not good to have it. This might take some time, but I've acknowledged to Him that I have it and that I want to help others in this same boat. That's where the "work together for good" comes in. I want to help you. I'm no miracle worker, but I know Who is. 

Again, thank you to all of you who have sent me words of comfort and kindness. God is good all the time, and you are all a part of that. Thank you so much.