Rebel

The first significant crack in my facade surfaced in February 1993 when I put my dog to sleep after nearly 13 years. That golden retriever's death bore down upon me with the weight of 27 years in tow, eventually causing the foundation to crumble and sending me spiraling into the void. Until then, I had retained a veneer of composure, to the point where people's perceptions of me differed from the reality, but I began to succumb to the accumulation of damage from the daily paper cuts to my brain and the harsher, blunt traumas. When I had attempted to persuade people that something was awry, they responded with denial, thereby creating further expectations for how I was supposed to behave. They considered it unacceptable for me to be different from how they perceived me. Responsibility lay with me also, for I believed that the failure to meet their expectations compounded my deficiencies. We lied to ourselves and one another.
Now, I don't anthropomorphize. A dog is a dog. But I could tell that dog I was fucked up, and he'd just wag and lick and not make me feel as if I should be doing anything differently. He accepted it. After long days at a high school where I felt out of place and angst-ridden, looking forward to being out with him at night helped to sustain me.
He and I came together at the end of eighth grade, when he, out of the nine or so puppies, liberated from their enclosure, seemed to take to me more readily than the rest. My selection criteria likely epitomized an unscientific approach to puppy selection, and his weak constitution when confronted with thunderstorms haunted me for years to come and provided for many sleep-interrupted nights. My mother's ulterior motive for purchasing this puppy likely involved assuaging her guilt for abandoning my previous dog in a strange (but respectable) neighborhood and offering me a carrot to relinquish my resistance to matriculating at a particular school. This was not absent a concession on my part: I wanted a Doberman but got a golden. Anyway, I took him swimming and for walks and, naturally, attended the high school. He slept under my bed and dug grooves down the bedroom door with his nails in an effort to escape thunder or fireworks. He must have heard me coming once when I walked through the family room, and he started to get off the couch but didn't do so quickly enough; when I walked in on him, he froze in the middle of leaving the couch, two front paws on the floor, one rear leg in the air and another on the couch, as if I wouldn't notice an 80-pound canine tripod.
I lived close enough during college to still see him. He stayed with my mother and brother, and they all possessed roughly the same intellectual capabilities, which proved fortunate for the dog, because living with them really could have fucked him up otherwise.
I viewed him as a constant amid the tumult, fearing not that he would abandon me. He came to live with me when I moved out and got married, and we spooked whitetail deer as we ran through the park enveloped by dusk us in late spring. When I run at that same park now, with a different dog, I can still feel the same sense of anticipation I felt then, after emancipation from my mother, the misconception that relief from persecution, self-inflicted or perpetrated by others, would accompany a change in venue.
The false allure of milestones enabled me to persuade myself that I would evolve once certain changes occurred, that I would feel better, but perhaps that perspective served as a contrivance that allowed me to persevere. The solution always lay around the next corner, until I reached that corner, only to be confronted with another corner. I would feel better once I got out of high school. I would feel better once I had sex. I would feel better once I got out of college. I would feel better once I got a job. I would feel better once I got a different job. I would feel better on the next medicine. False promises, all. John Hiatt has a song, "The Nagging Dark," about depression. In it, he says:

How fast you gonna run? Away from this one.
Anywhere but here, you wanna disappear.
Into the next daylight, where everything's right.
It's always somewhere else, you're gonna fix yourself.
Once shame and guilt had made their mark.

Well you can't run away from the nagging dark.
You carry it everywhere in your heart.
It finishes everything that you start.
And, you can't run away from the nagging dark.

How much you gonna cost? When everything's lost.
What a price you'd pay, just to feel some way.
Cause your heart has stone, round down to the bone.
How your flesh and blood, is just ashes and mud.
Feels like your soul's been blown apart.

Anyway, we got by on our own for a while, and then came a wife and eventually a cat. That cat was a bitch, but she used to sleep curled up against the dog and would lick his head constantly. By this time, he had lost an eye to a cataract, although the eyeball hadn't been removed, so he saw out of one eye and had a milky orb in the other. His hearing had deteriorated a bit, and so did his sensitivity to thunder, further endearing him to me. His ears had filled with blood years earlier, what the vet called hematomas, though before we took him to the vet my mother the nurse had drained the blood from those ears with a syringe. They of course refilled with blood, and she grew angry when I insisted that the vet tend to the dog and it cost $120. Age, though, likely caused his later hearing difficulties. Another health scare arose when he hit nine years old and the vet removed a suspected malignant mass from his side. Neutering didn't occur until later in life, when a prostate problem left me with little choice. In the run-up to that operation, I had to collect urine samples from the dog, and so could be seen trailing him around the side yard and ultimately holding a mayonnaise jar under his penis.
The lump that developed in his throat, though, when he had nearly reached 13 caused particular concern. The doctor pointed to cancer as the probable culprit, and we were to monitor his condition in the ensuing weeks. The dog became a palliative patient, with rectal temperature taking part of the routine. I went to my mother's house during this stretch and dug his grave. My brother, who professed to have a stake in this dog, watched from the kitchen window as I chipped away at the hard dirt in the cold light of January.
Sleep eluded me most nights, and I would lie awake, contracting my muscles like a colicky baby in fruitless attempts to purge the pain. At 4 a.m. on a February Sunday morning, I left my bed and took my dog, who had grown incontinent, to the all-night animal hospital. As we wheeled the gurney on which he lay into the hospital, we hit the lip of a driveway apron and his head sprang up, like he had again become that dog who chased a red-tail fox for miles in the park, and caused my stomach to flutter with the momentary delusion that what I was about to do might not be real. But just a few minutes later, I looked in his eyes and stroked his head as the injection put him to rest. I laid him in his grave with his blanket, in the spot where he and I had played when he was a pup, as those within my mother's household slept.
My wife departed for good shortly thereafter, and suddenly I found myself without two fixtures in my life from the previous decade or so, a confluence of events that strained my resilience nearly to the breaking point and foretold of further challenges.