The little light in my office turned on, and I knew Gabrielle was in the waiting room. There was no Kangaroo to wiggle. I opened the door to let Gabrielle in, and I broke down into sobs. Gabrielle noticed immediately that Kangaroo was not there and she realized what had happened. She hugged me and started sobbing too. We both wailed into the other’s shoulder, still standing in the door frame. We both needed to grieve and release the tar. I knew that by crying with Gabrielle I had crossed a line professionally, but there was no stopping it. My emotions couldn’t wait for the fifty minutes to be over and the door to swing closed, like projectile vomit won’t wait for the toilet lid to be opened.
The other person deeply saddened by Kangaroo’s death was Jesula. Ever since my Kremlin clubbing days, I loosely kept in touch with the nice lady who made sure the coed bathroom was always so tidy. And when Jason and I bought a house together during our engagement, I reached out to her to see if she would like to come twice a week to clean. She was delighted. It was much easier work than her other part-time job as a janitor at a sports bar in Aventura and a great way to make an extra two days of income. So she came every Monday and every Friday. She loved having Kangaroo in the house while she worked. Mr. Cat would hide in a closet every time, like he had never seen the woman before in his life, but Kangaroo followed her from room to room, keeping her company as she tidied up, giving her licks when she bent down for this or that. Jesula was so irritated when I took Kangaroo to work with me and away from her that I again rearranged my entire client schedule so that the dog-allergy people and non-animal-lovers all came in on Mondays and Fridays. That way Kangaroo would be home with Jesula, and everyone would be happy.
Jason always told me Kangaroo was a special dog. Since she was my first one, I had nothing to compare her to, but I understood. Many dogs were adorable and eager to please and well trained and loving, but Kangaroo had a wisdom to her, like she was enlightened. When Mr. Cat would stubbornly stand in front of Kangaroo’s food dish, she would wait patiently. She would never growl or nudge Mr. Cat out of the way. She would just sit, with no agenda or time frame, like Siddhartha under the tree. She would wait and wait until eventually Mr. Cat himself would get bored with his power trip and wander off of his own volition.
Once Kangaroo was dead and gone, no longer patiently waiting, Mr. Cat also felt the loss. He wandered the new house, a bright two-story Mediterranean, and looked for Kangaroo. Mr. Cat would lie in all of Kangaroo’s favorite spots, and sit in the living room nook, where her dog bed once was. Mr. Cat was also lonely and depressed. His best friend, aside from me, had just vanished one day. I tried to explain to Mr. Cat, while holding him over my shoulder and deep into my hair, patting his rump, that Kangaroo had died quickly without pain and we were all very sad, but he needed no explanation. He knew his friend was gone and that a darkness had descended on our happy home.
We all grieve differently. There is no right or wrong way. I wanted to immediately get rid of everything that reminded me of Kangaroo. Get it out of the house. Donate it all to an animal shelter, so the visuals of her absence didn’t blind me. Her basket of toys and containers of treats and myriad collars and matching leashes seemed to be in every corner and on every counter, reminding me of their uselessness.
Jesula was horrified. At first she judged me for the perceived precision and coldness with which I grieved. She refused to let me part with all of Kangaroo’s stuff so quickly, and she clung to the soft purple dog blanket and canister of peanut butter treats. But she understood it was ultimately my choice. And when she saw the sadness in my face, she was reminded of what I hoped she always knew. That I wasn’t cold. And that I was so distraught I couldn’t handle moving forward in any other way. I watched as Jesula quietly took Kangaroo’s favorite blanket and favorite toy out of the donate pile. She brought them home with her so she could grieve in her own way, with soft, faintly doggie-smelling physical reminders.
Jason was so shut down he didn’t have it in him to argue with me. But he insisted on keeping Kangaroo’s cheery yellow collar and heart-shaped stainless steel tag, which he hung on the corner of his bedroom dresser mirror. So he could see it doubly. Once as it was, and once in the reflection.
And we all forged ahead in our own ways. I knew that no matter how we individually coped, processing and time were what we all needed. What I didn’t know then was that my beloved dog’s death was only the tip of the grief iceberg.
A couple months after Kangaroo died, I found Mr. Cat hunched under a chair in the dining room. He had never been under this particular chair before, and even though I knew he was still sad and lonely without his doggie friend, it seemed odd. Even depressed, he wanted to be in bed curled up with me and not all alone in the least-frequented room in the house. I called to him to come out from under there, but he refused. I reached for him, and when I touched his flank, he hissed and tensed, clearly in terrible pain.
Rushing Mr. Cat to the animal hospital brought back all the terrible trauma of rushing the lifeless Kangaroo to the same place just months earlier. How could I possibly handle Mr. Cat’s dying too? After many tests Dr. Hamilton concluded that Mr. Cat had severe pancreatitis that brought on diabetes. His blood sugar was dangerously high. He was given insulin and an IV drip of antibiotics and painkillers. After three days in the kitty emergency room, he was out of the woods and was going to be just fine as long as I kept his eating regulated and administered two shots of insulin a day to the scruff of his neck. Mr. Cat could live another ten years, no problem. Maybe even fifteen!
Had I not spent the past several years with Jason, the diagnosis of diabetes and the idea of having to give Mr. Cat shots of insulin would have overwhelmed me. I’ve never been great with needles and often faint when I get shots. That I had braved getting my ears pierced at the mall was a miracle, but vanity beat out fear. Yet now, because of Jason, I understood diabetes, and I knew I could manage and handle Mr. Cat’s every need. And all of a sudden Jason and Mr. Cat had something in common, the same chronic life-threatening disease. And because of this Jason felt more bonded to Mr. Cat than ever before. Both their vials of insulin were kept in the fridge, clearly labeled, side by side. A friendship newly forged.
Jason once explained to me that a healthy pancreas is like a full tank of gas in a car. It doles out insulin all day long. A little or a lot, working with the body to keep everything moving along evenly. Exercise, a stomach bug, an extra slice of pizza, these are things a healthy person doesn’t think about twice. Like with a full tank, you can drive fast or slow, long distances or short, and the gas will be used as needed. But when your pancreas doesn’t work at all, and no insulin is being created and given, you have to constantly guess how much you will need. So it would be like filling up your gas tank ten times a day with only specific amounts necessary to get you from point A to point B. Sometimes you might underestimate and run out of gas; other times you might overestimate and have too much gas. Any slight traffic delay, use of extra energy for your windshield wipers to push off heavy rains, or flat tire could throw off your gas estimations completely. That dance to survive was Jason’s daily life.
And now it was my responsibility to make sure Mr. Cat did the same dance. I had to give him his daily insulin shots and ensure that he ate measured meals. It was a delicate balance, because if I gave him too much insulin, his blood sugar would plummet, and if I didn’t catch it in time and quickly feed him high-sugar treats, he would die.
This severe low that leads to death is most likely to happen when a diabetic is asleep, when the diabetic is not conscious enough to feel the warning signs of a low blood sugar. The tremors and sweat and nausea go unnoticed, and the diabetic continues to sleep peacefully. This is so common it actually has a name, “dead in bed.”
CHAPTER 30
HUMAN