Life and Death in 24 Hours

This will be a big one. The three chapters are: 1) We're pregnant, 2) We're giving away our dog, 3) My mom is dying. I know these three sentiments don't belong in the same post. It's like going from joy to sadness to oh fuck. But all three events collapsed into Sunday evening and Monday morning, so this is literally a recap of how my week's going so far. It's like the eventful week everyone who starts a blog dreams about having, only not, because most of it is terribly depressing.

Chapter 1: Baby

Veronica is eight weeks along. We had her first OB appointment, and got a look at the lima bean (previous stages: blueberry, pistachio, sesame seed, poppyseed), which has a rapid heartbeat and a tail. It's awesome. Because everything's interactive nowadays, we got a photo booth roll to take home of the vaguely circular lump amidst television static. I feel like I'm looking at my unborn child through the scramble of you-didn't-pay-for-HBO. 

Because V and I like to change our minds a lot, I will use this space to unabashedly lay claim to our best naming ideas. You can watch them progress from whimsical to madness to pedestrian to whatever as the months progress. As decided verily upon a Chipotle burrito this evening, a female lump shall be called Talula Jean, and a male lump shall be called Lachlan James. That's Lulu and Lucky. DON'T SAY THOSE SOUND LIKE CAT NAMES.

We're pleased as punch, obviously. Every book and person in the world would recommend that we wait another month to announce things but dammit, this is the couple that decided to move a wedding from next year to next week. Plus, I need an excuse for my rapidly growing baby bump.

The pregnancy has been smooth sailing so far, except for all the nausea and pain that V is going through. Actually, I've taken on my appointed role as "sympathy pain carrier" with aplomb, feeling queasy and sleepy right along with her. I guess the symptoms of "nervous drinking and fear of poverty" are the same as "creating life in a uterus." 

Back to the OB. We're going with a Dr. Gooch. The other choice was a Dr. Hooey. These are the obstetricians in our neighborhood, and if you guessed it only took me 30 seconds to make a "gooey hooch" joke, you can remain my best friend for life.

Chapter 2: Cricket

As I've already discussed on this blog, since it's the one thing I wasn't keeping secret from the world, we have gone through the painful decision to re-home our loving but erratically aggressive poodle. While we had several justifications for this, the main one is because she's not the right dog to have in a home with a baby or a toddler -- one reach into that food bowl, and there's a potential for serious mauling. 

I wanted to avoid taking her to the shelter, because it wouldn't take them long to discover her severe food aggression and declare her unadoptable, possibly fast-tracking her to a premature death at a healthy 4 or 5 years of age. V helped me post an ad on Craigslist that was frank about her issues. Due to the photo of her dancing, we got sixtyzillion responses. Tonight, we decided who her new owner will be.

Now, I was looking for an elderly couple or woman, figuring that Cricket needs a steady companion to bond with, a quiet routine during the day, and someone who will give her lots of affection and attention when she's in a needy mood. The one thing that nagged at me was that Cricket, as anyone who has met her knows, is a rough-and-tumble bull dyke of a bitch who also needs some adventure and scruffles in her life. She's born to be a rebel, baby.

So we farmed her out to a cross-country trucker named Paul. She'll be riding in style in a gorgeous red rig with a full sleeper bed in back, perched on the co-pilot's chair, watching the wheat of America pass by, maybe with a wee bandana around her neck. At every truck stop and rest stop in this great nation, she'll dismount gracefully from the cab, sniff the breeze, piss on a rare wildflower, then dash up to every trucker in the joint to either hug the leg or bark viciously, like a caped superhero marking the bad from the bad-ass.

I honestly couldn't have dreamed up a better fate for my rambunctious puppy. When people speak of dog heaven, I think this is it. At least, for our peculiar pound pooch. We give her away Wednesday night. Godspeed, poodle. 

Chapter 3: Mom

This one's the most complicated, so I'll get into it sideways. The reason we're not giving Cricket away until Wednesday is that I'm taking her in for surgery to remove a benign tumor from her neck tomorrow morning. It's costing us a fortune, but it's the right thing to give a healthy dog to a new owner, even if it does finally max out the wedding credit card. As V was finalizing the paperwork and I was absorbing the reality of it all, I got a call from my dad.

Mom has been in the hospital for two straight weeks for a blood clot that runs the length of her leg. It was surgically cleaned out, and they put in some heavy-duty stints to keep the pathways clean, but while they were checking it out, they discovered a large cancerous mass enmeshed in her abdomen. This is her fifth bout of cancer. She's already had a mastectomy and a hysterectomy.

As I discussed a month ago, Mom hasn't been mentally up to the fight this time. It all began with a back surgery this summer that just literally seemed to seep her will to live. She rallied to attend our wedding, and even managed to kick a nasty addiction to painkillers and Ambien for the sake of her family's pleading, but now we understand that she's been nursing a hidden and evil cancer that probably contributed more than anything to her rapid weight loss, depression, and lack of energy.

I don't know how many experimental drugs and treatments this woman has been through in the past ten years. In addition to the back issues, blood clots, and various forms of cancer, she's on treatment for diabetes and heart disease. With all these ailments necessitating various medications, she's running out of options for treatment or surgery -- the cures would all kill her. Tonight, the family decision, with her blessing, was to transfer her to hospice for her remaining days. She's 64.

I'll be flying home this weekend to help with the transfer and hopefully have a few more lucid conversations with her before she's allowed to slip into a coma of sleep and medication. I'm planning to use whatever time I have to really connect on three things, in this order: 1) laughter, 2) memories of her life before I was born, 3) professions of love. I'll be getting more into the heart of this over the next month or two as she slips away, but I owe a lot to this woman. She wasn't the person who carried me in her womb for nine months (I was adopted), but she carried me in her heart for 32 years, and she gave me the capacity to laugh, remember, and love.

Life has been too rapid this week to allow me to absorb any lessons, but I'm sensing an emerging theme from all this life, death, and giving away: there is no such thing as control. The more I yearn for control over the events of my life, the more they spin into infinite directions. By the end of this year, I will be the father to a child, and no longer the son to a mother. The enormousness of these two thoughts ... I cannot cope, so I'm concentrating instead on the most frivolous wish, the wish that by the end of this year, a small and happy dog on a highway somewhere sees a vast blue sky over a craggy mountain range and wishes I was there, too, to share it.