My Life Is a Country Music Song

You've probably noticed I haven't had much to say in the last few weeks. It's not for lack of blog fodder. Rather it's more about trying to duct tape the pieces of my exploded head back together.

But hey. THREE ENTIRE DAYS have passed without anything randomly shattering, breaking, getting decapitated, celebrating a birthday on a horrible no good very bad day, having an operation or getting maimed at school.

I think the worst may be over. I've passed through the eye of the storm and I'm sweeping up the debris now. (Sorry. All the hurricane talk has seeped in. Thoughts and prayers to everyone affected by that wicked witch we're calling Sandy.)

In the span of nine freaking days my dog died on my son's birthday, my other son celebrated his birthday on the day another of my son's died, my rear windshield spontaneously combusted, my husband is bedridden and my daughter is broken.

It's like I pissed all the Gods off and they've decided to turn my life into some poorly written country music song. Too bad I don't own a guitar and I shaved most of my hair off. I could have been the next Patsy Cline.

It was a bad couple of days.

Boo was scheduled to have some minor surgery last Wednesday and like the naive dumb fools we are, we walked into that hospital thinking life had crapped on us enough already, there was no way anything else could go wrong. After all, this was just going to be a minor orthotic procedure.

You know what happens when your husband breaks his ankle months and months and months ago and mostly refused to wear his soft cast and then puts off having his ankle surgically repaired so he can build the behemoth we lovingly refer to as the Zeppelin hangar?

Nothing good, I assure you.

So my husband's simple day surgery didn't go as planned. Oh sure, he flirted with all the nurses while his hospital gown kept showing off our family's jewels and we were sent on our merry way fast enough, but that quick recovery after a minor surgery he was supposed to have? Foiled by what turned out to be major reconstruction work.

Suddenly my husband is taking up all the space on my overstuffed and ugly leather sofa, he's hogging the television remote, he's watching SOAP OPERAS and I'm starting to worry he's never ever going to return to work. In fact I believe he's plotting on driving me insane in the mean time.

Too late Boo. I'm already crazy. It's part of my charm.

The stress of the past week and then my husband's surgery knocked whatever wind I had left in me right out. I fell face first into my pillow that night and didn't wake up until the phone started ringing the next morning at about 10:30 am.

Realizing my husband wasn't about to hop up and answer the phone, I looked at the clock, cursed and then ran to catch the call before it went to voice mail.

Panting, I answered that phone in a voice that clearly advertised the fact I had just woken up, and listened to the school secretary inform me my daughter had been in an accident and would I like to take her to the hospital or should I just meet her there?

The joy I felt at knowing I got to rush back to yet another hospital was overwhelming. It almost as fun as the moment when my heart stopped dead upon hearing, "It appears she was hit in the face by a puck. It's hard to tell. There's a lot of blood." And then, as an after thought, "But she totally took it like a champ! No tears at all."

Aw, that's my kid. You can beat her up but you can't make her cry. I'll totally bask with pride over this irrelevant and unimportant fact. Don't judge me.

As it turned out, Fric wasn't hit in the face by a hockey puck. Thank God. No, it was only her face meeting the business end of a hockey stick. Whoops.

Yesterday's nose. We're down to one black eye now! Progress. I'm still calling her Bruiser though.

After her x-rays clearly showed what her flattened nose already reflected, we sat inside the doctor's office and the doctor noticed one of us was crying and it wasn't the kid with the broken face.

I may have been having a hard time coping with stress at the moment. I'm not Superwoman (or Fric) after all. Everything finally caught up to me. My dead dog. My dead kid. Every bad thing that happened finally just got the better of me in that moment. And to be honest, my kid's lack of a nose bridge was really freaking me out.

But all of this was last week and it's been three whole tragedy and accident free days since. Plus my kid's nose has sort of popped back up. Perspective has suddenly flooded back.

Both my husband and my kid are healing. One more gracefully than the other, *cough*Fric*cough*. My windshield was replaced, my flowers fertilized. It could be worse.

That's what I told my daughter this morning as I drove her to school.

"It could have been worse. You could have lost an eye. Or your teeth! Or both! You could have been the one eyed toothless girl wandering your school halls. Noses will heal!" Look at me! The picture of grace and optimism!

My daughter just gave me a look.

"Don't look at me like that. Life is good! One day soon your nose won't be on the wrong side of your face anymore!"

Life. It's all about keeping perspective. And learning how to avoid errant hockey sticks to the nose.

 

*I love you Fric. You're beautiful no matter what colour or size your nose is.*

Gladioli Head

Warning: This subject matter could be viewed as disturbing to some. Reading it may adversely affect your opinion of me. My husband wants you to know that.

In the span of five days my precious dog died (on my son's fifteenth birthday), I had to fly across the country to give bloggers pointers on how to be funny (hahah) and then fly home to celebrate my youngest son's birthday on the very day his other brother died.

My life? It's a bad country music song. Too bad I don't own a guitar. I'd be rich. RICH!

Grief is a funny thing. It is the same monster whether you are crying for a dead dog or a dead kid. It wears the same hat and its bite hurts much the same. Maybe it even hurts a little worse when you are crying for a dead dog and a dead son at the same time.

Here's where I'd totally write a catchy chorus with a long musical interlude if I owned that guitar.

I could totally give Taylor Swift a run for her money. Only instead of writing odes about Jake Gyllenhal and John Mayer I'd be all 'woe is me; my dog died, my son is dead and birthdays are actually harbingers of death.' The royalties will make me rich. RICH!

The day after Nixon died, my husband sat down beside me, grabbed my hand and told me we had to make a decision about what to do with my dog's remains.

"I want to bury him on top of Shale. So we can have a two for one."

"No."

"Why not? It's only fitting. And it's not like there isn't space available. Shale was kinda small. He'd never even notice."

"Well besides the fact it's creepy as hell Tanis, I'm pretty sure there are some sort of laws against that sort of thing. Mixing pets with humans and such."

"Laws are merely suggestions to be ignored."

My husband, poor sweet man that he is, noticed I was slightly insane at the moment and not to be dissuaded from the great idea of stacking my dead dog on top of my dead son at the cemetery, so he took a deep breath and paused before speaking.

"I understand all of that Tanis, but the cemetery is pretty far away and Nixon was always under foot. I don't think he'd like being that far away from you." He meant well and it was a fair point but he was trying to be logical with an unhinged crazy person. I blinked back my tears, processed what he had said and then wailed, "Oh my god. I buried my baby boy so far from me. He's probably scared and alone and WHAT HAVE I DONE?"

Well played Boo. Well played.

Eventually I calmed down long enough to think rationally for thirty seconds or so and even though my husband refused to bury Nixon right underneath the house and where our bed is, we managed to agree on a location for my dog's permanent spot of rest.

It was cold and wet and the wind was cutting through both of us, and for every scoop of dirt my husband shoveled, a tear leaked down my chin and froze to my face.

It didn't take my husband very long to dig Nixon's grave and when he was finished he looked up at me, with my arms wrapped around my body and my face covered in frozen snot and tears and he asked, "Is this okay?"

I looked at the hole and burst into a new round of hysterical sobs and shook my head no. "No! Nixon wasn't that tiny! He was bigger than that! It's bad enough we put our 37 inch tall son inside a 36 inch coffin! I can't stick my dog into a hole too small as well!"

(Side note: It was either the 36 inches for Shale or a coffin over 5 feet big. I chose snug as a bug instead of swimming in space. The point being, don't expect mothers who are grieving to make rational coffin sized choices.)

My husband already upset and grieving himself, did the one thing he knew to do with his visibly crazy wife. He picked up the shovel and he started digging.

And he dug.

And he dug.

And he dug some more.

What started as a grave about a foot and a half wide was now a grave big enough to bury me in. (Which I'm sure at one point he seriously considered.)

Eventually he looked up at me and wiped away his tears and I nodded and told him the hole was big enough. So he put the shovel down and gave me a hug and my snot stained his shoulder. Then he picked up Shale's baby blanket I had brought outside and he went to wrap up the remains of the World's Greatest Dog. Forever.

I stood there, feeling the wind slicing through me and felt crushed with grief and it was like reliving the day I buried my son.

And then my husband walked out of the garage, and in his hand was Nixon's remains gently covered up with my son's baby blanket and I had to blink a few times.

"Woah. Nixon shrunk." My husband nodded. Very gently, Boo laid the remains of my dog into the oversized hole he had dug for my dog.

Turns out? I made my husband dig what basically was a six foot hole for my dog's teeny tiny head.

As he started burying Nixon, I couldn't help it. I started to laugh. Boo stopped and looked up and I laughed and cried at the same time.

"I'm so sorry Boo. I guess we didn't need the hole so big."

Boo started to laugh at the absurdity of our life and then suddenly we were standing there, in a giant hole, with my dog's head, laughing like insane lunatics.

"He's like the very best gladioli bulb I could ever plant."

"People can ask what kind of flowers you planted and you can tell them zombie dogs!"

"No! Wait! We'll just tell people we're using him for compost and fertilizer until we can dig him up and mount him over our bed!"

"Um no. We won't tell people that. And no we aren't doing that. No dog head necklaces, no dog skull mounts, NO, NO, NO," he glowered at me. "Don't even THINK IT."

Fine.

Spoil sport.

I totally want a zombie dog statue though. To put it on my husband's night table.

Nixon.

Yesterday was Frac's birthday. He was typically excited for his day of revelry. He had been hoping for a compound bow or a recurve bow, and if not that, maybe I'd purchase that submachine pellet gun he had been eyeing at the store. You know the one. The one where you can launch a steady stream of white plastic pellets at your sister's arse for 30 seconds before your mother comes out and threatens to break the gun but only after putting a cap in your arse with it.

He didn't get any of that. He got a watch. Don't look at me like that. Punctuality is important. I could have gotten him socks and underwear but I'm not completely heartless.

Frac's birthday is always a tough birthday for our family to get through because it will always be the reminder of what was to come in just five days. Frac's birthday was the last thing we celebrated and shared as a whole family. Five days later life ended for Frac's little brother and none of us has ever quite recovered.



That was the last photo we took of Shale. It was the night of Frac's birthday, the boys were high on attention and birthday cake and goofing off and when I saw the giant shadow on the picture I tossed the photo into the trash. Days later I dug it out because I couldn't bear to lose one single more piece of my dead son.

This time of year is always rough on us. It's compounded and worsened by the fact that when we adopted Jumby, his birthday is Oct 21. The day Shale died.

Six months after Shale died, my kids were floundering, my mental health was deteriorating, and my husband had left the building (literally) to start working out of town in an effort to cope with his grief.

I didn't know what to do. I could barely breathe. But I couldn't sit for one more day and watch my children slide further into the pit of despair I was trapped in, so I went out and I got a dog.

He wasn't the dog I wanted. The one I wanted was brown and white and barked a lot but the women who was giving me the dog, having heard my story, my loss, handed me this runt who never barked and said, "Trust me. He's the one you want."

And so I grudgingly took home this puppy who was the wrong colour and looked kinda weird and wondered what the hell I was doing.

I named him Nixon. And I wrote my very first blog post about him here. 

It turned out that strange lady knew what she was doing. Nixon was exactly the glue I needed to keep my heart together and he helped heal Fric and Frac who were only 8 and 9.

We were inseparable, him and I. He was never more than five feet from me wherever I was, and he'd bite anyone but me if they tried moving him away from me.

He was my warrior spirit and my protector. He listened to me talk softly about the son I lost and he let my wipe my tears on his fur and he always slept next to me, pushing his weight against mine so that I would never feel alone in the darkest parts of the night.

He let me abuse him for blog fodder and dress him up for amusement and he never even sighed when I brought out the iPhone and told him to smile.

 He hogged the monstrously large oversized couch whenever he could, he sat like a grumpy old man and he was always on the one rug he wasn't allowed to be on. Whenever I chastised him he would look up at me with those big brown eyes and say, "What? You love it and you know it."

He would burrow his dirty body into the mountain of warm laundry, fresh out of the dryer and he liked baby carrots better than any dog treat.

When he slept he snored so loudly you could hear him across the house and when he farted his silent little 'Poof' bombs, he could clear a room. Which he did. Nightly. With great glee.

Nixon was more than the family dog. He was the embodiment for all the love that we had for a son, a sibling we lost and we didn't know what to do with it. So we transferred all that love and attention onto a DOG.



He was our four legged brother, my doggy son. He saved me from myself when my child died.

He was the best dog ever.

Yesterday, just before lunch, I noticed he was missing. Nixon doesn't go missing, because he was too much of a pansy to leave the yard. He never strayed far from me. Ever.

A panicked search ensued, where I found myself cursing our property, because how the hell was I supposed to find my dog if he was injured on a land so vast. Needle meet haystack.

My husband, and all our neighbours continued the search long after I called it quits.

A mother always knows.

I knew.

Nixon could have one leg and been on his death bed and he would come to me when I called. We were inseparable.

Nixon love bombed me. So gross. And yet I miss it so much.

My husband eventually came in, and between the tears streaming down his face, he told me he couldn't find Nixon. Some of the other neighbours reported seeing a big feral black dog traveling with a coyote. The duo had been terrorizing my neighbours yards for the past couple of days.

He didn't find Nixon. But the Rottweiller helped him find a very large pool of blood. They followed the trail until it disappeared but with that amount of blood it was clear what had happened.

I spent the afternoon worrying my dog was out there slowly dying a torturous death on the afternoon of his brother's 15th birthday.

How do I tell my son our dog died on his birthday?

Nixon was found, later that night due to the generosity of a friend, and a kindness I will never be able to repay. There isn't much left of him, but enough that I can give him the goodbyes he's earned.

I can't give back my son his birthday. I can't erase all the pain that seems to swirl around this date. I don't know how to make it better for any of my kids, most particularly Frac.

I can't stop the flow of my kids tears.

I can't bring Nixon back.

He deserved better and it will haunt me for a long time that he didn't get it.

My children deserve better. It will haunt me forever that I can never seem to give it to them.

I miss my dog.

And my kid.

Rest in peace Nixon. You will be sorely missed.

Nixon, a.k.a Snickerdoodles, Fartmonster, Snixon.

April 1, 1996 - October 15, 2012

World's Greatest Dog. Forever.