Charlie wipes his nose.
“It’s kind of fishy,” I try to joke. “Every time you guys come to town, someone dies or almost dies.” We all look at each other, but no one is moved to laugh. My dad and the vet show up.
The way the vet hugs and greets me, I can tell right away she thinks I’m my mother. We look alike if you don’t know us very well, and I’m sure my cane isn’t giving me a youthful air.
“Oh, poor Clyde!” she gushes. “I’m so sorry today is the day! He has lived such a great long life with you all.”
“Thank you for being here,” I say. My dad is being characteristically quiet. We’re all standing around looking guiltily at our feet. I keep kneeling down and petting Clyde compulsively—more than I normally would—because I can tell my dad is totally checked out and I feel like someone should.
“Are we going to do it out here on the patio? It’s such a nice day!” says the vet, “Do you want to bring his doggy bed out here? He might like that.”
“That’s a really great idea,” I say, and my dad runs inside to grab the urine-steeped cushion, the deathbed.
We don’t plan it this way, but at precisely noon—the bells on the campus church tolling—the vet injects Clyde, who lies on his bed as we awkwardly circle around him, with a very hefty dose of pentobarbital into his veins. After a minute or so passes, she checks his pulse, decides to give him another shot, and then he is gone.
The vet, of course, does not know that the color of the scrubs shirt she wears and her haircut and her general vibe remind us all overwhelmingly of Patty, my mom’s hospice nurse. She doesn’t know how we gathered here out on the patio the morning after my mom died—these very chairs—and felt the first day without her creep into being, how the sun felt so similarly crushing and yet warming. She doesn’t know of our loss at all. In fact: She thinks my mom is me.
“You’ll find grief is very strange,” she says as Clyde’s paws and jowls stop twitching. She is unmarried, has just lost her fifteen-year-old dachshund this year. “You think you have a handle on it, and then you don’t at all.”
When she hugs me goodbye, she squeezes my arm. “I’m glad to see you’re doing well. I heard you were very sick. God is good.”
After she leaves, Amelia and I sit on the patio. My dad and Charlie dig a big hole in the yard on the other side of the garage by the fence where Clyde loved to lie in the forsythia. We watch them heave Clyde’s body from the dog bed into the earth, and then fill the hole back up.
“Won’t Luna want to dig him up?” I say to Amelia.
“Probably,” says Amelia darkly.
But my dad is on it—covering the wound of dirt with some junk from the garage: some pieces of plywood and a ladder.
“That should do it,” he says, never exactly one for aesthetics.
“Rest in peace, old dog,” I say, hugging my dad.
I have never been able to say that phrase about my mom. It feels morbid and clichéd. It’s etched on a Styrofoam gravestone that the boys love to stake into the front yard every Halloween. But of course, it’s what I wish most for her, for myself: Rest in peace, Mom.
“Rest in peace,” my dad says, climbing into his beat-up van to head back to work.
21. Item 18-B
John and I go talk to a financial planner because that seems like something grown-ups do. John is forty now. I’m supposed to turn forty in the spring.
The planner is nice—approximately our age, friendly, kids, knows lots of the same people we know. Seems a good match. John has told him about my diagnosis ahead of time, over the phone.
“Real sorry to hear about your situation,” he says when we come into his office, looking me in the eye, shaking my hand heartily. “Can’t imagine doing what you do every day.”
A snarky part of me thinks, Well, likewise—but I’m immediately grateful for this kind man and his clarity and his handshake and his ability to do long multiplication in his head and his bright office full of stacks of spreadsheets carefully plotting out the future. He has a huge view that looks northwest, out toward the greenest part of Greensboro.
“So tell me what your priorities are,” he says to us when we get settled. “What means the most to you? What do you want your life to look like?”
This is obviously a loaded question, but I like thinking about it. Financial planning, it turns out, is a fundamentally optimistic endeavor.
John and I look kind of sheepishly back and forth at each other, and then I say, “I guess I’d like to travel for as long as I can—make some memories with the kids.”
“Yup,” John agrees. “And I’d also really like to pee further away from the children. Like nowhere near them.” He is referring to our mutual wish for a master bathroom someday.
“Oh yeah—and for them to go to college!” I add.
“Gotcha gotcha,” says the planner, smiling. “All sounds good, doable.” We’ve brought him all the important papers of our life—bank statements, tax returns, pension reports, etc.—which at home we still keep all stuffed in one giant file marked Important Papers in my twenty-three-year-old handwriting—and which he now has duplicated in a neat stack in front of him.
“So what happens next is we’ll take a look at all this, run some numbers on our end, and then let you know what we think a good plan is next time we meet.”
I have to miss the next meeting because of a doctor’s appointment, but John hands me the impressive twenty-seven-page report when I get home: chart after chart, scenario after scenario.
“Item 18-B is kind of a doozy,” he says.
Item 18-B is a breakdown of both of our yearly income and expenses by age. John’s column goes up through age ninety-three. Mine stops at age forty-four.
“Yikes,” I say. “He doesn’t have much faith in me, does he?” My first thought is wondering if he somehow spoke with Dr. Cavanaugh and now knows something I don’t.
22. Faith
A few weeks ago, Carla—the tech who escorts me back for CT scans—taped a small square of paper onto my cane where it bends into the handle. It says FAITH, all caps.
“Believe me,” Carla said when she stuck it on there. “You gotta have it, and you’re gonna need it.”
I wasn’t sure what to think. Faith is a word I have struggled with—a cipher I can’t solve or release. I developed a habit of rubbing my left index finger over the taped tab. Sometimes out of embarrassment, self-consciousness: for wearing this word so ostentatiously displayed—as if it had anything to do with me. Sometimes more meditatively: a reminder to work harder to figure out what it’s all about, a reminder to feel more at ease with the unknown, the poorly understood.