May these words serve as an outlet for my grief, an outflowing of tears and anguish at the loss of my Mazzy. I originally planned on putting all of this into a book, a memoir of sorts as well as a documentation of my grief; a timeline of my journey back to wholeness, and maybe someday it'll still be that. But I wanted to put these words out into the world as a catharsis. Maybe you also understand this kind of loss -- you are not alone, and I know that neither am I, despite it feeling like the most lonely place in the world for my heart to be.
A lot of this may seem disjointed and without flow because they are pieces written at different times.
Somehow, I’d forgotten how absolutely terrifying puppies can be.
I think there’s a kind of selective amnesia we have, similar to forgetting how exhausting are the early days of having a baby: up every couple hours at night, changing countless diapers and cleaning disastrous blowouts, pouring a cup of coffee only to forget about it and then reheat it half a dozen times throughout the day before collapsing into bed for what you hope is at least a two-hour run of sleep.
Puppies are like that, I think.
While I don’t actually recall Mazzy being as scary as Poppy currently is, I have to believe she was. We nicknamed her “devil donut” in our earliest days together for a reason. I remember walking her on a short leash with an arm stretched as far away from my body as it could go so she wouldn’t try eating my calves, or jump up and hang from my sweaters by her teeth.
And those teeth! sharp as hypodermic needles and sometimes grabbing into skin like a fish hook,
just like Poppy’s do right now.
We got Mazzy from a breeder in Delaware in March 2021. She was exactly 8 weeks old when we welcomed her home, her birthday was on January 31. She got carsick on the ride home; she heaved up her breakfast, all down the front of myself, and I didn’t even care because I was already so enamored with that perfect fluffball. Her tiny little blue merle mini Aussie body rejected any form of automotive movement for the first half a year or more.
I fell in love fast and hard with that girl, more completely than with any other animal I’ve met and known. She was the very best babe, and the year and a half I had with her was not nearly enough. An entire lifetime wouldn’t have been long enough, but our time together was cut way too short. It’s unbelievably unfair. The wound in my heart has cut so deeply that it has shattered it into a thousand pieces and I don’t even want to pick them up. I need to let them be, so I can sit amongst them and stare at them, brushing my fingers along the memories we had together and resting in the grief and anger of her life gone too soon.
It has been a week and two days since we made the difficult decision to have her vet put her to sleep, as of the time of writing this.
{it has now been almost five weeks, at the time of posting this}
Her kidneys never developed properly in the womb and they stopped functioning. The vet said it was a fluke, a mistake. Her breed isn't prone to this kind of anomaly and he didn't feel it was a genetic issue that should concern us in the future with other mini Aussies, nor with her lineage in particular.
She was just born with a tragically short expiration date
and declined so quickly in just the last two days of her life.
I’ll never forget how ill she looked, how much pain she was in, how she still snarl-smiled at us when we went to visit, despite the knowledge she must have had that her time was nearing an end.
I took poached chicken, her favorite food, into the animal hospital and tried to hand-feed her, but she didn't want it. Her appetite was gone. She was wasting away before my eyes, a weakened shell of herself, and it was the saddest truth I didn't want to believe.
Still don't want to believe.
Being with her and having a few pictures of her last moments etched into my mind will haunt me forever, but there was no other choice. I needed to be there for her just like she was there for me every single day through good times and bad.
Poppy should have been her friend. Another mini Aussie to be her sister. Poppy was supposed to be her playmate, another puppy for the puppy to play with and grow up with.
They only had two weeks together, and Mazzy’s irritability with Poppy makes sense now that we know she was masking a whole lot of pain and internal discomfort.
It shouldn’t have happened.
I’ll never stop questioning why.
You know how sometimes the tears just hang right underneath your eyes,
clinging to that sensitive skin darkened from all the other tears you've cried?
And they sit there for so long,
{unwiped,
uncared for}
that they start to burn.
And still you let them stay because somehow it makes the sadness feel more meaningful.
I doubt I’ll ever get over the feelings of paranoia that there’s something tragically wrong with Poppy, too. How do I not compare the two of them when they’re so similar in so many ways? And yet I know it does a disservice to them both, to judge them against one another. I often wonder how much Mazzy’s kidney condition affected her “normalness” as a mini Aussie.
I never would have imagined that the thing that broke me in life was the untimely death of my dog. But here I am, utterly shattered, and also feeling guilty because my grief isn't "as bad" as others' grief, when the world seems filled to the brim with tragedy and heartache.
The love I had for her was profound, far greater than any other animal I've ever had the pleasure of sharing time and space with, and even more than most humans I know.
The grief it bubbles up sometimes when it's not expected: while driving to the store or walking outside or watching a movie. But then there are other times when the grief comes and it's fully expected because I can't stop from sitting and thinking about her, and my brain won't stop spinning with the sadness of it all.
I measure the passing of time since in anniversaries. For instance, maybe it was 2 weeks since I first took her to the vet on that Wednesday because I knew something was so very wrong and I was hoping they could fix it. Could fix her. Or maybe when it had been a month since I watched her take her last breath, and I held her paws in my hands, and listened to my children wailing their own grief.
I sit here crying as I dictate this out loud. My new sweet puppy cries her own little wails when the sobs rack my body, and she knows I'm in pain, and her sweet little self wants to make me feel better -- and she does -- but I still miss Mazzy so.
Grief is a parasitic thing, feeding off of present joys and memory's sorrows.
It's weather like what we've had for days;
damp fingers leeching deeply inside bones and causing unexpected stabs of pain in the marrow.
Would that loss was not part of life's experience.
"If wishes were horses, beggars would ride."
but they aren't horses. And even with so much good,
so much blessing and bounty
grief remains, wrapped up and cozy in a
once-wholesome corner of heart and mind.
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