Holding

I've been in a holding pattern of sorts lately. That's probably why there's been no entries here. It seems I have no choice but to wait on the actions of others. I can't force things to happen that I am not in control of. It's odd, but if you called me a dynamic forceful make it happen kind of person I'd laugh, and friends who know me well would probably laugh. Yet most of the major changes in my life I've forced, I've pushed, I've pulled, I've bullied into happening. And now I find that the things that matter most to me I can't effect.

The downside to having these furry children of mine is that I won't outlive them. The dog is eleven and the tom cat is fourteen now. They've both got medical problems that have been burying me in vet bills. But worst of all I can't fix them, I can't make them young and healthy again. All I can do is what little I can and wait for them to choose their time, and hope they choose it and not me.

I've spent most of the day today anguishing over them. My poor boy is mostly deaf now and he's begun to use the carpet instead of his litter box. I'll take him back to the vet next week, but I fear his various illnesses have brought on a senility of sorts. He's always been a stubborn son of a bitch to begin with, and now he wants death his way too. Figures.

The dog is so much more gentle and apologetic about her illness. She takes her pills without a fight and if she could speak would bow and scrape the floor with apologies every time I have to get up in the middle of the night to let her out. She's a dear sweet old soul of eleven with a pancreatic insufficiency that's making it hard for her to keep food down. I've ordered some pancreatic enzymes for her and I dearly hope they'll help. If they don't I'm off to find pig pancreas at the nearest slaughterhouse. I've done many a thing for the furkids, but this will be a new high or low depending on your point of view. Still, she'd do anything a dog could for me. In that way alone she outranks and outshines my own human family.

I'm still waiting on my oldest sister to figure out that she needs to move on. Why the four of us siblings all turned out so differently I cannot explain. Nor can I explain why she refuses to move from that wreck of a house who's ceilings threaten to fall in on her with every minor tremor. She and I are total opposites. I've made every change in my life happen, and she has not changed her life one inch more than circumstances have forced. I've lived in ten different houses and apartments in the last ten years and she's lived in one house, clinging it to it as if her life would end were she to leave it.

And this is what I tried to tell the dog through torrential tears this afternoon. Your leaving will hurt more than anything has in a long long time, but that is what life is, a series of leavings. It's one of the signs that you're truly alive, this depth of loss and sorrow. And from that sorrow and often because of it, more joy eventually finds it's way to you. And that is living; an ever changing existence. To change is to live. To refuse to change is to stagnate and never live. The opposite of living is not death, it is refusing to live.