There Is No Escaping Yourself
So it’s the day after your shoulder surgery, and one of your dogs is sick so you take it to the vet. You learn the dog is critically ill but makes it through the night. The next day your son is due to graduate that evening, having passed through the public school system without any sort of academic achievement.
The dog rallies in the morning and everyone is hopeful including the vet who promises to call if she takes a turn for the worse. I receive that call at 1pm and within minutes I’m lying on a floor next to the dog who once was the little puppy I had rescued from a one eyed farmer with too many un-altered dogs and not enough sense, sobbing and apologizing to the dog for being tricked into believing she wasn’t that sick. She had only been out of sorts for a day or two and I had figured it was just a stomach bug passing through the house. During those days I had found the early videos of her running around the house and yard as a fuzzy little puppy, and I remembered that puppy as I watched the pink fluid enter her veins ending her life.
What a failure I am, claiming to love animals and failing them when they need me the most. I tell the wife and son. The former is cold and distant, the latter in his own happy world with his friends all lit up with graduating high school and it barely registers. I spend the rest of the afternoon sounding professional when the phone is on, crying when it’s not.
That evening the Wife and I ride to the graduation in silence. We sit on metal seats embedded into the concrete bleachers, and within minutes my shoulder is singing with pain. The ceremony begins and my son’s principal takes the podium and jokes about all the things he will remember about this graduating class. He mentions my son by name, saying he’ll never forget him being late everyday to school and the audience laughs. I turn to the Wife and she is horrified.
Have I died on the operating table and gone to Hell? I wonder for a moment. The physical pain of the shoulder, the mental pain of an intellectual parent failing to raise an academically gifted child, and the emotional pain of failing to act in time to save one of my animals all swirl together as I look down and watch the ants crawling between my feet.
“There is no escaping yourself,” the wife says, breaking the silence on the ride home. Time slows down and I can almost hear G-d laughing at me. No, there is no escape. No escaping the moment, the pain the sick stench of failure.
No escaping yourself.
Leave a comment