passing

As I drove home earlier today, I saw a gopher, twisting on the roadway.
It was confused.
It was contorting.
Writhing.
Its eyes moved in slow motion, unable to calculate the End.
It was dying.
Slowly.
Once I recognized the situation, I looked away and hoped its end would come soon. I hoped for a giant steel belt wrapped in black to come tearing down the road and crush the suffering. But a prayer for death is a plea fraught with complications. How does one weigh suffering and life with salvation and death? Who wants to wear the executioner's mask when his or her heart bleeds with sympathy and compassion?

Thirty minutes later Sister calls with tears in her tone.
What's going on? Is everything okay? How is the pregnancy proceeding?
She tells me the baby boy is doing fine, his kicking and wrestling a constant reminder, and he's due in mid-November.
But this phone call isn't about a baby, a beginning or a new life.
This call is about an ending, and her tears are for Family Dog.
After seventeen years, Family Dog's life is quickly fading and Sister is faced with that brutal prayer: a prayer for death. The Angels of Anesthesia are calling and Sister, naturally, is hesitant to heed their song.
Family Dog was the staple that bound Sister and I through our parents' divorce, and when everything was falling apart, that little Pekingese was there to lick our wounded hearts.
And this is very difficult to write about...

It's hard to express how the confluence of recent events has affected me emotionally... My creative spark remains broken, silent... My mental stability: a volatile signal of depression, self-doubt, fear and hopelessness, with intermittent flashes of joy, love and passion... It feels like everyone is an antenna, receiving some kind of secret broadcast -- a transmission I'm unable to catch -- and I'm rendered lost and lonely, left with frequent moments of "unreality"... And the last pure and untainted symbol from my crippled childhood will soon be gone.
What happened? How did things get like this? And why is Family Dog's imminent death just another tragic poetic stanza?

mc