The Last Ride

“You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you–the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.”

“Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

“It is the time I have wasted for my rose–” said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

“Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox. “But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose . . .”

“I am responsible for my rose,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember. “I am responsible for my rose.”

-The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

At this moment I’m watching one of my best friends gasp for air, spewing blood with every exhale. He’s got blood on his paws, a combination of long drips and small splatters. He offers a delayed feinted chase at a passing squirrel before remembering his condition.

In a short while I’ll take him for his last walk. It will be a slow one, I will make sure. I’ve always had a bad habit of walking in front of people. It’s rude. My favorites in life though, were the ones that could keep up, or make me faster.

Juice could do that, he could make me run. We would run and run and run and at the very end of our run we would race all the way back home. I didn’t have to say anything to him, he knew when the race began. Sometimes I won, sometimes he won, but we both always gave it everything, ending up at the mailbox huffing and puffing for air.

There’s no running anymore, only slow walks to and from the water bowl and the yard right now. Appetite has diminished, as well as social activity with other dogs and humans. He’s entering a place he’s not likely to come back from, and all I want is a few more minutes with the pup he was when he was feeling well.

Another chapter is closing, as they always do. A branch of my life, of my whole experience, is withering and heading towards the ground to stay with the rest. Am I building new branches at the rate I’m losing them? Am I expected to?

As I sit here, I begin to wonder for a moment why it is I feel compelled only to write in tragedy. Better than writing nothing at all, or having nothing to write about I suppose; both very different things, neither of which I have to worry about.

“Come closer” I can still hear her whisper, “Cuddle up.” Sometimes to him, sometimes to me. “You’ll miss these kisses” she promised, predicatively, if ever I fought either of them. Nostalgia is a universal feeling, what is it about mine from that time of my life that still strikes such a heavy chord? Is it the story? Should that story be contained or shared? What’s best for me? For others? Are moments like these lapses in judgement, or just lapses in invulnerability?

The changes are never ending, I know, but they go into warp drive at times. I’d like to think I’m used to the rollercoaster by now, and I don’t want stagnant, but holy fuck just slow down a bit sometimes.

He’s choosing his breaths now. For long periods he will go without breathing, weening towards a final “fuck it” maybe, before deciding “alright I’ll hold on a bit longer.” How much is the effort worth? Isn’t that always the question though?

We slept on the floor last night. Neither one of us slept much, his labored breaths waking us both every few minutes. I’m looking at him before bed tonight, and wondering if this is going to be the night. I’m looking for a “not yet motherfucker”, but all I got was a blank stare back. He is fading fast, and has no interest in talking. A meager tail wag is all that’s left. I do my best to keep him awake and breathing until I finally doze off, not sure what it is I will be waking up to. Every breath sounds like it could be his last, and it’s absolutely terrifying.

It’s morning now and I’m awake again from a few hours of sleep. For the past ten years he has greeted me with a big goofy smile, face in mine, breathing hot air to wake me up. Today though, he’s across the room, staring at me still, but not smiling. His face is saying “let’s get the hell on with this.” I don’t blame him. I wonder for a moment if I’m keeping him alive for him or for me, and decide that it’s finally time.

I realize on my way to the vet that I’m going only 10 mph. There are a line of cars behind me, honking and trying to pass. If they knew, they would understand my lack of haste, I hope. One truck passes by sporting a golden lab, face out the window, tongue and ears flapping in the wind. God sure has a sense of humor. I remind myself that Juice has also had those days, plenty of them. We’ve all had them, our glory days, our head sticking out the window, in bliss and euphoria. At what point are they all gone? At which point are our best days behind us, and how will we know? That dog in that truck will have his day too, his final ride. At least he was enjoying it today.

It all happened quickly. His condition deteriorated so rapidly that it was impossible to prepare for. I suppose I had more preparation for this one than others, but how does one truly prepare for loss in the first place? I’ve read and journaled more material than I’d ever like to admit on grief and recovery after loss, but wasn’t sure how to prepare for the final moments before death; what I should do or how I’d feel.

I prepared the best way I knew how, by visualizing, walking myself through the steps. We get there, we go to the back room, we inject him, and that’s that. That’s what I imagined, I’d never done it before and didn’t know how these things worked.

I pulled up into the dirt driveway of the vets office. The whole area surrounding the office is a warm place, a special place, and Juice was special to more than just me there. I sit in the car with him for a few moments, deliberating in my head whether I’m making the right decision or not. I look at him, and lean in to give him a kiss. He leans forwards and tries to kiss back, but instead coughs a bloody mess from his mouth, painting my pants and the vehicle center console a dark crimson. I won’t forget that moment for a long, long time, I imagine. I knew at that point that yes, this was the right thing to do, and what a tragically bitter reinforcement it was.

I watch him hobble out of my trailblazer for the last time, and we walk into the office, feeling very ominous. Immediately the staff does everything they can to make us comfortable. They’ve been through this several times before, but one gets the feeling that it’s something that doesn’t get any easier with time.

The doctor and I talk for a few moments. He doesn’t need to look at Juice for long before reassuring me that we were doing the right thing. Better painless and peaceful we agreed, although if I had to guess I think he would have rathered his chances duking it out with Death himself.

We walk outside, slowly. A slow trot was all he could muster. We spotted the only area of sunshine to be found, a small circle on top of a small grassy hill. A fine place to die, I thought, better than inside of a hospital with white walls and fluorescent lights, on a metal bed. I hadn’t thought much about the value of scenery and environment in this situation, but the outdoors brought a pleasant, albeit brief reprieve from the gravity of the moment.

Doc explained a bit more about what was going to happen once we all sat down with him. He would find a vein in his leg like we had several times before in the week. Instead of drawing blood or injecting antibiotics though, we would be mainlining him the good stuff. Barbiturates in lethal doses was what is deemed painless and peaceful in the veterinarian world, and it looked very much to be both of those things.

I laid side by side with him, with my head facing him for his last few breaths. His eyes had been lazy and half shut the whole day. We began to inject him, and for a brief moment he opened his eyes wide and alive, looking at me as if he were just a puppy again. A rush of euphoria maybe, a flood of good memories, I would like to imagine. The final breath was long, and there was no doubt that it was his last. His head slumped on top of my hand, where I felt the weight of that handsome face that I had grown to love over the last decade. I let him lay there for quite a while, reminding me of when he would fall asleep resting on me.

We cried and hugged and cried a bit more, as Doc continued to talk both Juice and I through the process, until long after the last breath. He added a bit of comic relief by assuring us that Pope Francis has officially blessed all dogs to go to Heaven.

Most importantly though, there were some very pretty ladies waiting on him up there, he explained. And we all know how much Juice loved his pretty ladies.

What Will Your Verse Be?

“…Poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

– Robin Williams, Dead Poets Society

Love, Hailey once told me, while in an especially cerebral mood, is all the little memories you share with someone that no one else has. Love doesn’t always have to be romantic, she said, or with just one person, or even a person in general, and by her standards, love was around everywhere. Some of my favorite memories of her was when she was in these moods, when she was feeling talkative about abstract ideas and beliefs, being spiritual.

I suggested that maybe love was exclusive to only good memories, to which she asked who in my life that I loved did I only have good memories with? No one. Bad times add depth and give context to love, she explained, in many more words than that. When folks get to the age where Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia set in, she said, they forget who they love, because they lose their memories with that person.

I had long suspected in my own mind and my beliefs that this was the very meaning of life, all the weddings and funerals and art and math and science and religion and music, it was all part of the human experience, interactions between humans and other living things. We all have different views on why we’re here, but my presumption is that it’s to feel every range of emotion contained within the unexplainable complexity that is the evolved human brain. That’s another topic altogether, but essentially what I called God, she called love.

It was one of the more profound things she ever told me, that memories and love are one and the same, and a mentality I ended up adopting. She was right, after all. There are other factors at play of course, what I like to think of as memories you’ve had because of someone maybe rather than with; remembering the way it made you feel when they did something in particular, or memories of phone or text conversations you had while not technically together. Essentially though, I realized that everything I loved in my life; her, my dog, my parents, my sisters, my friends, every living thing that I had love for, I indeed loved because of my memories with them.

There was an article I read recently, about the science behind memories, and the tangible items that inevitably sometimes become attached to them. Some objects around us are ordinary and insignificant. Bag of dog food, bar of soap, those things are replaceable. There’s another scope of items all together though that are absolutely unique in their own right, and these are the ones that have the ability to take you to a very particular plot on the plane of time and space, the ability to reproduce a memory unlike anything else can. Just like a memory is a special place in space and time that can’t be replicated, so too are these objects.

I’ve got them everywhere. She had a habit of leaving pieces of her behind everywhere she went, which I wouldn’t have had any other way. Pictures she hung up, trinkets she left behind, things she wrote me, her plants that she loved, all things I could never get rid of. These things hold her essence like nothing else can, and I can feel them the moment I open my door, her inviting me back in with love, in the form of memories, in the very way she explained. We’ve all got them, our Hailey keepsakes. Memory retrieval tools, if you will. Vehicles to relish in our memories, should we choose to, and still feel her love. Those things are still around not to dwell on the past, but to instill hope for the future, to remind us how beautiful life can be, especially when in love.

I will admit that it is hard sometimes, not to harp on the past. It’s human nature I think, in any case of loss, to go back and assess what exactly happened and how it could have been prevented. Whether sports, or business, or love, and especially life, it’s ingrained in us to backtrack and pinpoint where it all went wrong. I do so much less now, although I’ve been lost in memories all week. The difficulty and demons for me, always lied in the parallel universe, the alternate series of events that would have transpired had just this or that one thing happened differently. “Why me?” is a question for the self-pitied, and I got over that one quickly. “What if?” though, was the maddening one. There are millions of them, junctures that could have altered fate, and I am not sure how anyone ever silences them for good. Muffled now, surely, but never completely silenced. I think sometimes maybe I’m just an unforgiving person at heart, and that reaches into the realm of self forgiveness as well.

I grieved publicly, more than many would have liked. Hailey and I were going through things at the time where we were largely taking care of each other, and when she left I felt like I had failed, and my sense of purpose inevitably shifted to becoming a memorial of life for her. Maybe if I’m known for nothing else, it will be for my ability to pick one thing and stick with it.

I made affirmations that I would be strong, that everything was going to be fine soon. I could not have been more wrong. Grief entangled me, swallowed me whole, suffocated me. I survived, yes, but I got my ass kicked. To say I took it hard would be an understatement. I don’t care what cliche encouraging words anyone may have about strength, I walked away from that fight feeling I had lost it pretty emphatically. I wrestled with massive, colossal, extreme internal conflicts, and was left feeling very shaken up from the whole thing.

Life, to me is a perceived series of events, and the way you perceive and interpret it depends entirely on who you are. It’s impossible really, for me not to juxtapose between August 30th and August 31st. It was the axis on which my reality spun, and not the first time that Hailey had spun it, just never so furiously. You would have been hard pressed to find a single event that could have possibly changed my life more. It transformed me instantly, so much so that it’s difficult to not feel like that was was a past life. Not just immediate change, but also a slow, piece by piece unraveling. I felt as though chapters of my life were getting slammed shut in my face one by one. I watched helplessly as everything that defined me most was ever fleeting, leaving me wondering if it was all circumstantial, or a function of my own destruction? My romantic life, my career, personal relationships, my health, day to day activities, nothing was left untouched.

In my mind, that really was a past life, and I wasn’t left just grieving the loss of Hailey, but also of my former self. Anyone who tells you the old Josh is back would be lying, and I myself would be lying if I told you I saw him ever coming back as he was before. The old Josh belonged to Hailey, and that’s largely the way I’d always felt since I met her. I assure you, there is nothing more strange and confusing in this world than being in love with someone who is deceased. It’s not an exaggeration when I say these memories sometimes feel as if they’re a lifetime away, and it’s easier for me to think about my life now as a second one, to just acknowledge that the other was lost on I-75 with her. Restart rather than rebuild, it fits better in my mind that way.

Metaphors for new life and rebirths aside, death and loss and mortality are very heavy and present themes in this chapter of my life, and they seep their way into everything. Maybe that’s what defines me right now, maybe it will define me forever. Maybe one day I’ll return to form, and have my journals and stories and tattoos as scars to remind me of when I walked through the fire, of when I felt so strongly about such things. Every word that I write now, every punch or kick I throw, every note I play or sing, it’s all in efforts to come to terms with who I am, and try to shape the person I will be in the future. The new me is certainly not any less ambitious, and at no shortage of grandiose plans.

At the end of the day, we are vessels, I think, for whatever emotions it is we’re carrying. Hailey, at her best, was a vessel for pure bliss, the definition of an infectious smile, one that would make you want to go conquer the whole world. At Hailey’s funeral I tried my best to elaborate on that, on her being the source of inspiration for much of my teenage and adult life. It still rings true, so much so that anything significant I do, any mark I make here in the world, whether locally or nationally or globally, will inevitably have her hand behind it, and it takes an extremely powerful person to be able to do that after they’re gone.

To finish with the Robin Williams quote with which I began:

“…That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”

If you were to die today, whose life would you have impacted? What seeds did you plant?

What will you be a vessel for?

What will your verse be?

Whatever you conceive Him to be

Waking up on the day of a funeral is what you make of it. It depends on the context really, your relationship with the departed determines what the day holds for you. I’ve only had to do it a handful of times in my life, but I’ve found that funerals are far more for the living than they are the deceased, and there’s not anything wrong with that.

I had managed to distract myself with my own affairs over the past week, knowing that Sunday was looming like a dark ominous cloud that was going to head my way sooner or later. After the last particularly personal funeral I’d attended, I tried to wake up this morning with a resolve that I wouldn’t be shaken; a daunting task considering the agenda for the day.

My mouth still offered the taste of last night’s medicine when I woke up. I had gone home early to prepare myself for the day, and was thanking myself for it in the morning. I had my clothes hanging up, breakfast ready, everything I could do to make the following day easier was done the night before. Wake up, get dressed, stay focused. Gameface.

I pulled into the funeral home at 9:03, not quite sure what the mood or environment would be when I got there. I had never met any of Jeff’s children save his youngest daughter Ashley, whom I wasn’t really close with. As far as I knew his children had grown apart, many of them living in different states.

My grandmother was the first person I saw as I opened the doors. My lively, vivacious grandma had been slowed down in recent months by a hip replacement, but was getting around much better than I expected. She was talking to my mom, who was around the corner dawning a tasteful black dress with white trim. No sobbing family members yet, which was a good sign.

They were standing over a table of pictures and keepsakes that belonged to Jeff. His Noles hat, a collage of random letter-shaped objects made by his daughter Ashley that spelled out “Music”, a framed copy of his favorite poem “Desiderata”, these were the things that had been decided to define him by those left behind, and rightfully so. Included in the pictures were dozens of photos that his sons had brought that neither my mom nor I had seen before. Pictures of him in the late 70’s, adorning bell bottoms and loudly colored suits, playing guitars and standing in front of amps. He looked like a rockstar.

After admiring pictures of Jeff being way cooler than I ever knew he was, I took a moment to introduce myself to his family. They were polite folks, many from Tennessee with a nice thick southern accent. We said some hellos, then piled into our cars. We were to drive ourselves to the gravesite, where they would be burying Jeff’s ashes in the same lot my mother was to be buried in. That lot stood next to my grandmother’s lot, who had bought the space for my  mom over a decade ago when she was still struggling with cancer. You know, just in case. At least we were all being honest with each other’s mortality here.

We got to the gravesite, where my mom said a few short words, and broke the seal on what would be many tears shed throughout the day. A couple others followed suit, and my uncle played a song that they had prepared on his iPad. It reminded me for a moment of Jeff trying to explain to me what awful quality sound Apple produced because it was a MP3 player as opposed to WAV files, which he preferred for his music. We couldn’t all be technological savants though, and I don’t think Jeff would have minded technology permeating into his celebration of life.

My mom took her seat back down next to me, and I couldn’t stop from clutching her tightly once she continued to cry. I began to realize how foolish it was to wake up this morning thinking I would not be shaken watching my mom transition from wife to widow. The two of us sat there for quite a while longer than the others, in preparation for what would be our final goodbye to what remained of Jeff in the urn in front of us. I managed to hold it together, for the time being anyway.

She had asked me to drive to and from the cemetery, which I was happy to, just her and I. We got back in the truck and headed back to the funeral home. When we got there my mom wanted to show me the slideshow that they had made the day before, set to the backdrop of The Beatles’ “Let It Be”, which Ashley had chosen, as it was her song of choice for her dad to sing to her as she went to sleep as a child. It had taken them nearly 12 hours of sorting through pictures and choosing exactly what photos correctly portrayed Jeff in the broadest and most accurate scope. I thought to myself how immense of a challenge this must have been to condense the love of your life into a few short minutes of a picture slideshow, and was thankful I had not had to do it.

Pictures of Jeff in early years, more pictures of Jeff looking like a rockstar, pictures of Jeff and his kids, pictures of he and my mom. The pictures looked to have been arranged in chronological order, which is appropriate I think when trying to correctly convey the depth of one’s journey. We had made it towards the end of the slide show when the day finally caught up to me.

The projector flashed a picture of last year in Vegas. There the four of us sat, my mom and I, with Hailey and Jeff on our sides, looking every bit as blissful as we were, ignorant to what the following year would hold for us four. The symbolism and inescapable imagery of the photo opened the floodgates for me as I realized that the four of us had been reduced to two, and once again it was just my mom and I, as it had been for much of our lives.

I got up to take a moment for myself, and took a minute to find the same photo on my phone. In the picture her hands were holding me tightly as they usually were, and I took a few moments to lose myself in memories. I snapped out of it to return to my mom. The day was about Mom and Jeff I told myself, not Hailey, no matter how freshly and effectively the day was slicing open old wounds.

We sat there for a few moments and watched the slide replay as people began to enter the funeral home. This time it was my mom’s turn for her gameface, as she greeted everyone who came in. She acted with compelling grace, accepting condolences and thanking people for coming. I wished she had delegated more responsibility to me as I realized the most heartbroken person in the room was also having to act as a host. Couples walked in two by two, embracing one another as people often do at funerals, unaware at how painful that sight can be to someone who just lost a lover. At least she knew that I knew how she felt, whether we talked about it or not.

It wasn’t going to be a big funeral, and no one expected it to be. Some loved ones showed up that I was surprised and comforted by, some friends that I assumed would come didn’t show. I hoped my mom wasn’t keeping track as I was. In the background was a CD playing on repeat of a Navajo Indian tribe that Jeff had found while he and my mom were living on the reservation in Arizona.

Minutes before the service was to start my mom asked me if I wanted to say something. I had considered it but wasn’t sure if it was my place. The fact that she asked if I wanted to told me that she wanted me to, and that was fine. I racked my brain for something I could come up with in a matter of minutes that would be meaningful and appropriate.

My first instinct was to reach into one of my endless notes of pertinent and somewhat situationally exclusive quotes that I had collected over the past year. I knew there was a reason why I kept these things. I had my favorites, and chose a particularly special one to me that had been sent to me by a friend. Worried that I would find myself stuck in front of a congregation with a cliche quote but no personal story about Jeff to offer, I began to look over his things for something to reference. As I searched around I found a stack of thick construction paper, neatly cut into strips, with a excerpt from the same “Desiderata” poem that Jeff kept multiple copies of throughout the house and was framed on the table in it’s entirety. The excerpt however, read a specific verse, that went as follows:

“Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore, be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. Whatever your labors and aspirations in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all it’s shams, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.”

I had read the poem hundreds of times before, and never once had it spoke the volumes to me it did at that moment. I was reminded of the first time I met Jeff. My mom had invited me to dinner to introduce me to a new guy that she had met and liked. I was at a time in my life where I was finding myself and my spiritual beliefs, and I was feeling rather inquisitive that night at dinner, nearly seven years ago. I began to ask Jeff a range of questions pertaining to the supernatural, as well as his thoughts on God. My mom was probably mortified, but he navigated the conversation smoothly, explaining that he couldn’t explain in the brevity of one conversation what it was he thought the secrets to the universe were; God was a vague term to him, but the most important thing was to be a good person and the rest would work itself out. He hit the proverbial ball out of the park, and that was the last conversation I ever had with him about the topic.

I had just a few short moments before I was to get up and speak at yet another funeral less than a year removed from the time I had last taken up the task, and it wasn’t any easier this time around. I told the dinner story briefly, as well as it’s importance to the excerpt from the poem as I interpreted it.

“Be at peace with God” I said, was in the same vain as the mantra used by so many of my loved ones that I never could quite stand behind: “everything happens for a reason.” The insistence that this is all pre-ordained is a notion I’ve never been comfortable with, to say the least, and instead I’d adopted a motto of “trust the journey” I explained, because at the end of the day we don’t really have a choice but to anyway. There may be a fundamental difference between the two adages, but when it’s all said and done, why does it matter what it is we tell ourselves to get through tragedy?

“Be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be” was the perfectly worded mix of spirituality and practicality, in a way that truly embodied Jeff. Being at peace with your life and your beliefs is important, but adding that we all conceive God differently, and that it’s perfectly okay to, that is a vital acknowledgement. It matters to me far less now what those around me conceive God to be, all that matters is that we get through whatever it is life (or He, if you’re into that sort of thing) throws at us.

I closed my short speech with the quote that I had chosen, by Ms. Helen Keller: “What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” I can say with conviction that the things and people that I’ve loved are what make me, with the same weight that the genome code in my DNA does.

After the service we were led outside, where my mom had prepared several dozen (biodegradable) garnet and gold balloons to release as a final farewell. One by one all the guests grabbed their own balloon, symbolic of their own goodbye to Jeff. My mom was always big on symbolism and meaningful gestures, and it had seeped it’s way beautifully into the ceremony. As we released the balloons, they picked up in the wind and headed west towards Doak Campbell. We found those in the crowd who meant the most to us and hugged them one by one, starting with my mom and I, and radiating outwards.

I was left the rest of the day reminded of what makes life so precious: the singularity of it all. This is our one shot to make our mark amongst a sea of billions trying to do the same. In the end, what will it be that lines your tables of keepsakes? What pictures will your loved ones choose to define your journey? Choose and act wisely, because once it’s over, it really is all over.

I swore to myself I would find the words today to summarize that picture of us four from earlier in the day; part of my ongoing refusal to ever leave a meaningful experience untold. As I sit down to write this on my outdated Asus that Jeff and my mom gave me for Christmas years ago, the first song to play on my Pandora? The Beatles, “Let It Be”. Life is crazy.