"Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky." -Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Sometimes life is just hard. Sometimes you have to just resist the urge to look up at the skies and tell God to take His best shot, strike you with lightning or just destroy you (a la Jena Malone in "Saved!" or any number of other memorable movie moments). I've felt close to that point the past few days.
I rushed home to Atlanta late last night because my dog from elementary school through high school and who my dad claimed was his when I left for college was very, very sick and losing gross motor control. The vets did a biopsy and there's a tumor occupying most of her snout, but they aren't sure if it's a very aggressive tumor that's pressing on her brain or has invaded it. If it has invaded her brain, she's terminal. If not, it's treatable. For now, she is leaking blood everywhere and struggling to breathe. She's lost a lot of weight, can barely sleep because she has to struggle to breathe, and the vets swear it's more discomfort than pain. I'm coaxing her to eat and drink and constantly wondering how we're going to make it until we get biopsy results on Tuesday. This is when we learn her fate, assuming she doesn't get drastically worse and demonstrate on her own that her brain is infected rather than simply affected.
It's truly heartbreaking and horrific. Worse than when my mom had her lung biopsy and they couldn't quite sew her up all the way (that's how it works with lungs -- too many alveoli and little tubes and vessels that don't get sewn up) and she would just start gushing blood from about the bottom of her rib cage. This is worse because Wilma, my/my family's dog, looks so pitiful and helpless and she herself is getting covered in blood, but doesn't want us to wash her. Sometimes she comes over and looks up at me and I know she wants something, but I can't figure it out. We go through the typical things and ultimately I think she wants someone to make it hurt less, but I can't.
I honestly think that watching another living being suffer like this might be the hardest thing to do. And as if this wasn't awful enough, it's my father's first Father's Day without his own father so I'm sure that my grandfather was thinking about his father this weekend and seeing this awful suffering can't help, but bring all of it to mind. And my dad is so close to Wilma. When my dad has been laying around with his radiation treatment, Wilma has napped with him and been there for him and just simply understood and sympathized and try to help in a way that no human ever can. She selflessly loved him and now she has to suffer like this and it breaks my heart. There's no way that she's just uncomfortable, you can't look at this dog and not see that now.
I just can't believe that this is happening right now. I just don't know how much more my family, my dad in particular, can take. And reading up on Job and struggling to make meaning out of this or just find some small comfort... well, it's just not happening. I don't know if I'll ever grow to accept this particular story that's always bothered me anyways, but I certainly can't at this point in time...
Hopefully you all are looking at a much better approaching weekend...
(And a slight update: Had to do something creative or mind-numbing because of a freakin' RIDICULOUSLY terrible email from the thesis adviser and I just can't think about it because I'm so angry and I just can't believe how shitty she is sometimes... like now. So here's a slideshow of William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job. Images from Wikipedia.)
