NOTE TO READER: As you sip your morning coffee or down your dinner tea insert some incredibly humorous anecdote about life's challenges from Mike Royko or Erma Bombeck here. Then continue with this chapter. Your day will start with a smile on your face. You will dance out the door like Carol and Mike Brady. I loved the "Chicago Daily News" and "The SunTimes." As a kid I devoured the paper like a religion. When I try to be a writer like these iconic figures, I sound like Charles Bukowski discussing his optimistic views on humanity. "It always comes out exactly the wrong way!" It does so lately at least.
When you're a comedian you are in an enviable and unenviable spot. The nice thing is that you can say things others wouldn't dare to and not get punched out or taken too seriously. You can also take tragic human events and turn them into "jokes" to make them more digestible for public consumption. The bad part is that when you try to talk seriously about a subject people don't know if you are kidding. It is the paradox of comedic art.
As an addict I've spent 20 years in an emotional ice age. I didn't know how to feel and avoided feelings I couldn't understand. People who are "normal earthlings" don't sympathize with the breakthroughs of growing emotionally that recovery brings. They can't relate because they have been dealing with their emotions all along. They are quick to be judge, jury and executioner when an addict reaches a seemingly elementary stage of growth in emotional maturity. These people frustrate me when they say "suck it up", "be a man" and other belittling remarks when they have not walked a mile in my shoes. It is as if I were to say to a woman, "Quit bitching about child delivery being so painful, they gave you an epidural!"
It is like the non-addict judging the addict and the man convinced he knows the pain of child delivery. We can not judge another until we have slipped into their sandals for a day. If you saw a man steal a loaf of bread you would call him a thief. If your kid was dying, and you had no other means to feed them, you would steal that loaf of bread in a heartbeat and think of yourself as doing what you had to do to provide for your family. It's all in the sandals my friend.
I have a way of saying exactly the opposite of how I feel. I want to tell my wife how beautiful her new shirt is and some how she ends up going upstairs and changing, thinking I hate it. I am working on that. Sometimes my love comes out as cynicism or coldness. On other days someone who thinks I have no feelings for them thinks I'm a nut job when they find me sobbing to them about how brilliant I think they are. Dealing with reality is new to me. Saying things the right way is foreign to me. Those are my sandals.
When I drove my eldest daughter away from our home through my controlling, overbearing, speed and weed induced behavior at age 18 she fled to Peoria and then lived with my in-laws. There she became inseparable with Dakota, their yellow Lab. She renamed her "Cooter." I loved the name. I loved that she loved her dog so much. I was proud that I had passed my love for animals on to her, as well as the other kids. I hadn't been completely poisonous in my darker days.
When my in-laws were beginning to look for a new home about a year ago, I happily took her into our home. I somehow knew she was going to be our dog in the years she lived with my in-laws. I can't explain it. I just did. When we got her, her health was already failing. She had glaucoma, was half deaf, her hips were going and she had other classic Lab related conditions. She was also approaching 12 years old. That's like 90 in people years for a Lab.
Cooter slept next to my bed and laid by my feet when I wrote my chapters. She was glued to me and loved everyone in the house. She was one of those dogs that just wanted love. Period! With Hemingway in Germany and Cooter deteriorating I was faced with some tough decisions. She is coming home in a few months and I knew she was looking forward to seeing Cooter and being with her partner in crime, the companion who filled a void I created by my selfishness and insensitivity. I prayed that Cooter could hang on through Hemi's trip home.
In the last week or so Cooter stopped eating and separated from the pack. She cried 24/7 and groaned endlessly; pack behavior I am familiar with. Here I sat as the frog again. I knew it was time to let Coot go. By putting her down before my daughter had one last chance to see her, I felt I was being that insensitive prick shitting all over her again. It was about me not wanting to hurt her again, like I always seem to do. Yesterday Cooter was in good spirits for the first time in many days. My plan was to make the appointment with the Vet and do the right thing for Cooter's well being and take the hit from my daughter again. I would tell her after Cooter reached heaven.
Foolishly I posted a picture of Coot on my Facebook page and stated I was letting her go. My daughter saw the post in Germany and went into breakdown. I did it again. I was doing the right thing for Cooter by letting her go. Sometimes getting kicked in the stones by your kids is part of the parent thing. I know Coot wouldn't make it to June and Hemi would be destroyed to see her in such terrible shape.
Sometimes we learn more from our kids than they learn from us. After we talked Hemi understood and was understandably shaken. She didn't hate me. I had the doctor check Cooter out before her exit. She had developed a severe heart murmur and did not have much time left anyway. I had made the right choice. The guilt I have for taking something my daughter loved so much burns. I still feel like when I try to hand her roses there's a thorn there to make her bleed. Those are my issues. She does not make me feel that way. Maybe one day I'll get things right. Probably not! The guilt stuff will take time. I am glad I have a daughter who is brilliant and emotionally balanced unlike her old man.
Coot went peacefully. I know she is better off. Sometimes it sucks playing God, choosing life or death for a pet. The happy times they give us makes that unhappy decision difficult but possible. I would rather have loved Coot and lost her than never to have loved her at all. Hemi, I love you. Coot is with Ruby and my dad is probably saying Ruby is too fat and Coot's breath stinks in Heaven right now.
