We’re all varying degrees of broken
The other night I helped my elderly dog get under the table to scrounge for crumbs,
Holding his harness so his back legs wouldn’t give out
It just seemed like if you can’t scrounge for crumbs when it’s your favorite thing to do,
What’s life made of?
But I’m not ready to make the executive decision that his life isn’t good enough to live
Though each day he seems to lose more and more.
At 3am I hoist my pregnant belly out of bed when I hear his whimpers
To find him stuck behind a potted plant
Unable to lift himself up on the hardwood floor
“I hear you, buddy,” I whisper in the dark, awkwardly stumbling with his harness
Trying to avoid knocking my own girth into the ZZ plant branches
Holding his harness so his back legs wouldn’t give out
It just seemed like if you can’t scrounge for crumbs when it’s your favorite thing to do,
What’s life made of?
But I’m not ready to make the executive decision that his life isn’t good enough to live
Though each day he seems to lose more and more.
At 3am I hoist my pregnant belly out of bed when I hear his whimpers
To find him stuck behind a potted plant
Unable to lift himself up on the hardwood floor
“I hear you, buddy,” I whisper in the dark, awkwardly stumbling with his harness
Trying to avoid knocking my own girth into the ZZ plant branches
I have 8 or so more weeks to go and it’s a miracle I’ve gotten this far,
With a success rate of 1 out of 9. 11%. 11! It’s such a low number.
If nothing goes wrong now then I’ll be 2 out of 10. 20%.
What a fucking circus.
I panic every other hour thinking the baby hasn’t moved enough
That some rare complication will come up in the eleventh hour
Because why wouldn’t it? It already has
This isn’t supposed to happen to people over and over like it has to me
And this time it’s not just me losing a baby
It’s my son losing his brother
It’s too much this time (it was too much every time).
My old therapist when Simon was born tried to get me to “live in the moment”
since I can’t control what came before or what comes after
So here I am in this moment, easing my Springer Spaniel down onto his blanket
Then easing myself down with him to lie a moment rubbing his ears
Remembering all the times it’s been me and him
Lying in the hammock at the cabin in New York in the summer shade
Back when he could run and climb stairs and do things like jump into a hammock
All the nights he kept me company when it was just us in the house
those years Michael lived half the week in Cincinnati
Crying in the backseat of the car after his surgery 7 years ago, his head in my lap
when I couldn’t get him out by myself without making him yelp in pain
And then lying on the floor with him a few weeks later, crying again, when I’d lost my first babies
And both of us were broken and immobile
It’s been a long set of years, buddy, and we’re all varying degrees of broken
I’ll carry him around if he needs it, until it seems like it’s not what he needs anymore