He Was the Best Boy-o

We lost our pup last week. He was almost 13, in a breed that usually lives 12-14 years, and I am so grateful he spent all his years with us. Still I wish we'd had yet more time. It's unfair that dogs live their lives so much faster than us and that the puppy I cradled in my lap became older than me, in a sense. It's one of the hardest things about giving your heart to them.

We don't know anything about his birth. He was found wandering in some local woods when he was six months old and came to us through an animal rescue agency. He was Australian shepherd, and "shrug"--as in "we don't know what else he was." 

I used to say his breed was O'Neill because he was one of a kind. He had the sweetest, most expressive butterscotch eyebrows, and when he trotted ahead of me on the leash, his ears bounced like the wings of a bird struggling to take flight, and I half-expected his them to lift off his head and take off into the sky like some sort of Terry Gilliam animation. 

When he was young, he was an amazing Frisbee dog, with a startling vertical leap. If he'd been human, people would have paid to watch him high jump, or slam dunk. It was like gravity had no hold over him. 

Even as he got older, he was still such a stellar athlete--when I took up running (when I was 46 and he was 10 or 70, depending on how you count), he went with me, making me feel safe about running isolated trails "alone" because no one would dare approach me without permission and keeping me going even though I hate running, because I didn't want to deprive him of the joy. A perfect running coach--his joy was infectious and almost made me understand why others love running. 

He took his job as protector of the family extremely seriously, even though we didn't always make it easy on him. We just wouldn't all stay in one place--which made it much harder to herd us. 

 
Right before the pandemic hit, O'Neill did the dog-equivalent of tearing his ACL when he leapt at a squirrel, and we opted not to put him through surgery, but just to try and limit his movement so he didn't re-injure himself.  Accepting physical limitations was hard on him--he's stubborn like me. 

We mostly succeeded in keeping him from hurting himself, since three of his Bryants were home with him for most of 2020 and the start of 2021. We could see that his doggy dreams had come true--all he'd ever wanted for us not to leave for work and school, but stay with him all day, where he could watch over and protect us. The best thing to come out of the pandemic has to be that my loving boy-o got to spend his last year with his family around him all the time.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, when he had another round of digestive distress (something that had been coming and going in a cycle for some months), and was clearly feeling miserable, we had an ultrasound done and found out that he had multiple tumors throughout his system, including his pancreas.

It didn't make sense to put our elderly boy-o through chemotherapy and make the end of his time with us a misery, so we took him home, knowing we were basically moving into hospice. Over those last couple of weeks, he had a lot of good days. Extra attention, including visits from big sis off to college, and his Auntie and Uncle, all the blankets and treats. My husband even found a way to play "tugger" with him and slow speed chase whenever he felt good enough to want to play. 

Feeding him chicken and rice rather than dog food was something we did because he seemed to do better with it digestively, but he regarded each meal of "people food" as a massive treat. I hope he felt spoiled with love and small pleasures. 

On his last day, we took him for a longer walk in the woods--something he has always loved, but hadn't been able to enjoy since his leg injury--it left him shaky and sore and ruining the rest of his day didn't seem worth it for a few minutes of joy. 

But, on his last day, it didn't matter if he got tired and his legs were shaky afterwards. He was going to get a good long rest. His smile that day was a joy to behold. And he about wagged his own tail off.

We bought him his very own cheeseburger as his final treat. The vet said we could give him anything he might love, since it would not affect the ease of his passing, and we knew he'd been coveting all the hamburgers he's watched us eat all these years. His family surrounding him, and petting him, and telling him what a good boy he was, he was allowed to go to sleep and just not wake up. Time for him to rest.

I think it was the right thing to do, even if it was the hardest thing. I'll miss him forever, but I'm lucky to have had him in my life. Goodbye, Bud-bud, O-Neill-zebub, Sweetie Pup, Trouble-dog-Bryant. You really were the best boy-o.  

Wording Wednesday: Mornings with Helene

The new season of Wording Wednesday has begun. Fellow author Andy Brokaw collects a set of prompts and puts them out there for the world to use for inspiration. This season, the theme is weather and we begin with the impressionist artwork Sunlight Effect Under the Poplars by Claude Monet. Check out the links and play along if you'd like, or just enjoy reading.

I'm a fan of prompt writing. It helps me keep the fun and play in my writing life. Sometimes it leads to something I can expand upon and publish and sometimes it doesn't, but I love the freedom to play in a story I have no expectations for. Let's see where this one takes me, shall we?
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These mornings with Helene were heaven on earth. Away from everyone else, if only for an hour or two, Giselle and Helene could pretend they were still just girls, free to wander open fields expecting nothing but beauty and receiving it openly. The light on the tall grasses and flowers bloomed in Giselle's chest like hope, buoying her despite her troubled mind. Helene's skin glowed, as it had when she was young and would let down her hair so the wind could ripple through it. She used to say it felt like flying.

Their lives had gone in very different directions since childhood. Always the beauty among their group of friends, Helene had married a wealthy man despite her lowly station. He had swept her away, taking her to Paris, Rome, and Ithaca, all the places they had read and dreamed about over their schoolbooks. Her letters praised the scenery and said little of the man himself, which was commentary enough for Giselle to understand.

Life had not been a fairy tale for Giselle. Her father died suddenly when she was twelve, leaving her family in desperate straights. She'd gone into service, which allowed her to earn a little money and help keep her mother and younger siblings in food and shelter. That had been the end of her schooling and any dreams she'd fostered of a better life. On bad days, she resented it bitterly. On good ones, she was thankful that she'd at least had an option to help. 

After her fifth child in as many years, Helene's health failed her. She'd never been strong, not in body, though her spirit remained robust. The doctors hoped that fresh air and exercise would enable her to recover, but anyone could see she was fading. Helene, ever a loyal friend, had taken the opportunity to bring Giselle with her as her companion, to get away from the drudgery of the city and into the light of nature again. They both knew it wouldn't last.

It wasn't right, getting her friend back just so that she could help her die. But for an hour or two, whenever the light shone, they could be girls again, pretending the future stretched bright before them. It would have to be enough.

The Burden of Creativity: a #HoldOntoTheLight post

Sylvia Plath was the beginning of awareness for me about the tangled relationship between creativity and mental health wellness. Her suicide happened in 1963, before my own birth. I learned of it in the 1980s, when we read one of her poems in a high school English class. I'm pretty sure it was "Daddy," a poem which confused the heck out of me even while it broke my heart.

I'd been a pretty sheltered kid. I mean, sure, one of my best friends was bulimic and another was sometimes afraid to go home, and there were weird relationship dynamics all around, but I still believed that everyone around me was basically all right. My rose colored glasses were firmly in place. The idea of someone mourning that her father died before she could kill him herself was quite a shocker. The biographical fact that the poet later killed herself even more-so.

Sylvia's suicide was glossed over in the biography in my textbook. It probably said something euphemistic about death by her own hand, rather than giving the shocking details I later learned, wringing them out of English teachers, since this was before you could just google things like that.

I couldn't understand.

I couldn't grasp why she couldn't persevere, couldn't believe in the possibility that things would get better.

Some of my friends could, though.

We talked about it with a morbid kind of fascination. We read The Bell Jar and Flowers in the Attic. We talked about Romeo and Juliet for months after our English class was done with it. My friends told me about the times they had almost taken the walk off the crumbling bridge above the railroad tracks at the edge of our hometown or showed me the scars from aborted attempts to end their suffering. They talked about feeling like others would be better off without them or that it might be easier just to stop fighting.

I listened with wide eyes, weeping sometimes and begging them not to give up. I wanted to think that it was just overly dramatic talk, a way to stand out, like an outlandish hairdo or coming to school with visible hickies on your neck. (I probably knew even then that it was something else entirely, but I denied it as long as I could.)

It was like that for me--I was interested in the dark side, but it didn't drag me in. I could still walk in the sunlight. I wanted it to be that way for them, too. I didn't want to believe that people I knew and loved could have come so close to taking themselves out of the picture entirely. That was too awful to contemplate.

In college, I was an English major. I read The Awakening, Antigone, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, all books where strong and vibrant women came to tragic ends. I learned about Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Parker, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent Van Gogh, Jean Michel Basquiat, Alan Turing--so many authors, artists, and geniuses who took their own lives.

As a creative writing minor and habitué of coffeehouses and open mic readings, I heard and saw a lot of creative work about the struggle against inner darkness, against demons of doubt and despair. It began to seem that despair and creativity were two sides of a single coin, or just different interpretations of the same view. Like stubbornness and determination, which are really just the same thing, viewed differently. Creativity seemed to come so often intertwined with a darkness. The same agile minds that can create wonders can create demons--and sometimes the demons consume us.

Imagination is a blessing…and a curse. A double edged sword that sometimes cuts us back.

I was a grown woman, a teacher in a classroom of my own, the first time depression truly beat someone I loved and took them from my life. I know now that I was fortunate to have made it that long. Like everyone else around me at the time, I asked myself what we missed, what we should have seen, what we could have done. I still want to know.

And there have been too many lights extinguished in this way. Co-workers, students, friends, uncles, cousins. Stars in my personal sky that no longer share their light.

So, please. I beg you. When it feels like the darkness is winning, reach out to someone. The world needs all the light within all its denizens.

(There are a list of places to reach out for help or to donate to support in the message below)

#HoldOntoTheLight is a blog campaign encompassing blog posts by fantasy and science fiction authors around the world in an effort to raise awareness around treatment for depression, suicide prevention, domestic violence intervention, PTSD initiatives, bullying prevention and other mental health-related issues. We believe fandom should be supportive, welcoming and inclusive, in the long tradition of fandom taking care of its own. We encourage readers and fans to seek the help they or their loved ones need without shame or embarrassment.

Please consider donating to or volunteering for organizations dedicated to treatment and prevention such as: American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Hope for the Warriors (PTSD), National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Canadian Mental Health Association, MIND (UK), SANE (UK), BeyondBlue (Australia), To Write Love On Her Arms and the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.

To find out more about #HoldOntoTheLight, find a list of participating authors, or reach a media contact, go to https://holdontothelight.wordpress.com/

2015: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

Goodbye, 2015. You were a great year, and a terrible year for me and mine. In some ways, I will remember you fondly; in others, I'll be happy to see you go.

2015 was painful in that I lost people I loved. I know it's the way of the world, but it doesn't make it any less terrible when the moment comes. All in all, in the second half of 2015, I lost six people in my family. I felt the last one the most. My Uncle George was one of the giants of my childhood and cancer came for him with quick and angry claws, snatching him away before I could get north to say goodbye in person. I still feel hollow from the loss.

2015 was difficult in terms of personal health. I seemed to spend way more of the year fighting "something" than in other years. No one big illness, thank goodness. No hospital stays or broken or sprained things, but lots of weakened days, and more missed school than in recent memory.

2015 was overwhelming. Adding book promotion to an already full schedule of teaching, mom-ing, wife-ing, and writing was well, whew!  It was a change akin to adding a child to my life in terms of all the adjustment required. It will definitely be important for me to keep working on balance of all these different things in the new year. In fact, the whole year flew by in a blur.

But, 2015 was also the year that my first book made it into print. Going Through the Change: A Menopausal Superhero Novel has done pretty well for a book by some woman no one has ever heard of. It's been in and out of the top 100 superhero novels several times in its first eight months out there in the world, and sold enough copies to let me spoil my family a little during winter holidays. That felt good because I've really had to lean on them to make all this work!

It's leading to new opportunities, too. I've already been to one con (Atomacon!) as a guest author and will attend my second in January (Illogicon). I've been invited to contribute to blogs, podcasts, radio shows, and anthologies. 2016 is a horizon full of promise. Here's hoping for smooth sailing into those seas! Happy New Year!

On Uncles and Holidays

My Monday Classics book club read Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales as our December selection. If you’ve not read it, you should. It’s very brief. Won’t take you long at all. I think it’s best aloud. Dylan Thomas always plays well aloud. If you wish you can even listen to him read it:
Like most things by Dylan Thomas, it is beautiful and lyric and full of made up hyphenated phrases that seem like they shouldn’t make sense, but are perfect in their descriptions.

“All the Christmases roll down towards the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.”

It’s heart-true, even when it doesn’t quite make sense. On reading it, I felt enveloped in holiday memories. Family parties of my own childhood, full of uncles and aunts and cousins and mischief. Thomas’s uncles, like mine, were large men, in front parlors, with new cigars or sitting in front of fires with loosened buttons.

It’s been a rough year for uncles in my family. I’ve already lost one. My husband has recently lost one, as well. Another has just been diagnosed with stage four cancer. I guess we’re to that time of life, where the giants of our youth are no longer young themselves. No matter when it comes, loss of those you love is … difficult. It’s cast a bit of a pall over my holidays. It made Thomas’s mix of sentimentality with an under-layer of sadness all the more apropos.

I’m heading home for a holiday party this year, something I haven’t done in several years. I think it will do my heart good, to sit surrounded by my uncles. I won’t be sitting among the Chinese lanterns and nibbling dates. More likely, I’ll be festooned with beer and pretzels, but my uncles will be there. And I’ll be home.

Letter to Grandma Liz

Dear Grandma Liz,

Nice trick, dying on your eighty-eighth birthday.  A nice symmetry to that.  And the two eights, like infinity symbols. Very cool. I’ll have to remember that when my time comes.

I kind of wish you could have taken the very end more slowly, and let my mother arrive at the hospital. She was at my house, where she’d been helping take care of my kids, your great-granddaughters, in the week before Kindergarten started up full time for the youngest. She was at the airport, two hours from your side, when she got the news. That was hard.

When it’s time, it’s time, I guess.  I wouldn’t have wanted you to suffer, but Mom would have liked to have held your hand and heard your voice one last time.

She’s staying really busy right now, sorting your belongings and papers, making sure the money and legal details are in place. She’s really pretty amazing.  You’d be proud of her, I think. She’s stubborn like you.  And like you, she’s fiercely proud and doesn’t want to let us help her.  (We’re making her let us help, though).

I miss you, Grandma. I’m glad I got to see you so recently, even if you were kind of angry at the world that day. I can definitely understand being angry. I think I’d be angry, too. Getting old sucks.

There’s all the things you didn’t do yet and it was becoming clear that you were running out of time. Your body wouldn’t do all the things you wanted it to do. And there’s all the things you knew we were going to do that you wouldn’t like. That feeling of not being in control of the things you wanted to be in control of. As you thought back on your life in those last weeks, I hope you thought about the happy things, too, and not just the slights you felt you had received.

I was at your house today, helping sort things and clean up, making it into the space it will next be.  You wouldn’t like the changes we made. We got rid of your gray rug.  We took the pictures off the walls (we’re planning to scan the old ones for all to share and let your children take the ones that apply to them).  We took down about half of the draperies and let the sunshine into your front living room.  I think it looks pretty good!

I hope you understand that none of that was a lack of respect for you.  I think you’ll be happy to know that your old house is going to be home to two young couples in our family as well as to your youngest son.  I’m happy that it’ll still be lived in by people I love. Letting your old house become something different makes it less sad, makes it possible to be there without wanting to cry.

We all really do want to cry. Some of us are holding it in. Some of us don’t hide it as well.  

Looking around at all your pictures today made me both happy and sad. How much you loved us all really showed. After all, you wanted images of all of us around you all the time. So much so that you couldn’t really see the walls at your house for all the smiling faces framed on them. You found something to be proud of each one of us for, and the evidence was everywhere.

Mostly, I liked finding the pictures of you. You as a teenager, taller than the other girls in your class picture, your head ducked down. I had a feeling you got caught about to laugh.

You as a young not-yet-married woman with flowers in your hair, and lipstick on. I imagine the lipstick was red, even though the picture was black and white and I couldn’t really tell.  

You with two babies on your lap, one of them my mother. Already they were pulling in two different directions, my mother and her oldest brother, and you were trying to hold them both at the same time.

You with the big sombrero on. You were so beautiful, and glamorous.  

The ones where you started to look like the Grandma I remember from childhood, your dark-framed glasses and dyed red hair, more orange than your natural red had been, before you decided to let it go white. I liked the one from someone’s wedding where your hair was a big Jackie-O type helmet all around your head.  You were grinning. You must have approved of the match.

And that one of you and me and Mom sitting at Grandma Lena’s grave and eating fried chicken.  That was such a good day.  One of the first ones when I felt like a grownup, included with the other grownups, all three of us missing your mother together.

It was a pretty amazing life, Grandma. I know you sometimes lamented the timing of your birth. That you wished you could’ve had a career like me or my sister and had more independence.  You should know though, that your belief is us is why we can.  We wouldn’t be the women we are if you weren’t the woman you were.

We were lucky to have you.

Enjoy heaven, Grandma. Try not to raise too much hell up there.

Love,
-Samantha