Nothing to Report

At a dinner table in North Dakota many years ago, the conversation centered around a list of relatives and friends suffering from various medical conditions, hospitalizations, and the recent deaths of people someone at the table may have once met. I remember the youthful feeling of wanting to excuse myself, wanting to run to the hills. All of the life felt sucked out of the room, replaced with the mastication of human suffering.

My eyes ran along the shelves of a china hutch, laden with ceramic cows and chickens, to wood-paneled walls hung with plates depicting hunting scenes, before coming back to a woman whose pale face uttered details between sips of stew. “You remember [insert name of someone you don’t remember],” she would say. There would be a tally around the table of yeahs and nays. Then she would lower the spoon ceremonially and say, “She died.”

Please, I asked Steve afterward, if I ever become a person who reports on the health misfortunes of others, check me. Tell me if I have drifted so far from myself and my feeling for life that I can no longer see clearly and begin to traffic in the woes of human existence.

I figured I would need his help if I ever began to inventory suffering because it would be a sign that I had lost sight of what made me feel alive and could no longer see through to the mirror.

I was in my twenties then, and I had not experienced much in the way of death of loved ones or the medical woes of aging. It all seemed an American Gothic scene without the pitchfork.

I just wanted to get outside, be outside. Feel alive.

Lately, I am going through a transition. What I feel most is not a lack of joy and beauty, but a deep sense that I know what I am missing.

The other night, I made notes about Rigby’s health – what he had for breakfast, his medication and supplements, his level of enthusiasm for exercise by number of balls chased and caught, the firmness of his bowel movements. His daily notes look much the same day after day. He eats, takes pills, goes on a walk, goes to the proverbial bathroom. He is on day 109 of chemotherapy treatment.

I have never kept journals, and I’m not very good at it:

• Day 43: Thursday 10/16. Day after Vincristine. Breakfast: Hamburger and green beans. Prednisone, Cerenia, Probiotic. Psyllium. Slightly less active. Not less hungry. Lomustine. Denmarin.

• Day 91: Wednesday 12/3. Day of Anchorage appointment. Breakfast: Prime rib and carrots. Cerenia, Trazodone, Gabapentin, Prednisone, Ciprofoxacin, Psyllium, Probiotic. Saw owl carry snowshoe hare across Main Street in Kenai. Denmarin.

• Day 100: Friday 12/12. Breakfast: Chicken and carrots. Psyllium, probiotic. Good walk/foot-long poo. Denmarin.

Rigby’s journal may work better as a spreadsheet. I picked the above excerpts at random, but I scanned them to find any that might give a deeper meaning to what I am doing. Sometimes, I jot down something Steve says. One day, he said, “Nothing to report.” He may say this often, but I only wrote it down once.

It seems like something Steve would say – one of his North Dakotaisms. Perhaps the meaning is along the lines of the sentiment “I hope your trip was uneventful.” More likely, it has to do with Steve’s opinion that the only items worthy of report must qualify as “pertinent or amusing.”

This was an opinion I shared in my twenties when I thought I would like to die on a mountain without a dollar in the bank. I still like that idea quite a bit, but then practical thoughts creep in like a kind of nagging parent. What about the dogs? They would probably like you to come home and feed them.

While my journal exercise may amount to a bank ledger in terms of creativity and confessing its contents goes against my sense of vanity, goes against the anti-suffering reportage anthem of my twenties, it contains what I find most pertinent in life at the moment. Steve and I are rallying around Rigby and the other older dogs, whose conditions might sound like the chronic medical diagnosis of a second cousin you have never met, between requests to pass the bread.

I don’t blame you if you want to run to the wilderness instead of read about my dog’s bowel movements. I don’t blame my young self either.

Beyond the medical words, there is the life they fail to account for. If you’ve ever loved a dog – or any creature – you know the comfort of their weight and fur. You know their face by heart, can imagine the way they look at you and the feeling of your heart opening.

The way Boss somehow synchronizes his breathing with yours as you are drifting off to sleep and you sometimes let out your last sigh of the day together – you look forward to that.

You might love how only Colt’s eyebrows are turning gray in his black face.

When I look in the mirror, I still see the mountains in my eyes. I miss the bright days above tree line. I miss wondering about the snow conditions and whether the dogs will be able to run on top or break through because I know for many of them, their hearts want more than their bodies can give.

I miss all the things people complain about in the field – the weather, the dog hijinks, the fading daylight, the blisters. Oh, to hear the healthy complaints again! To be cold and hungry outdoors instead of well-fed at the table of woes where you hand out more of your food to the dogs than you eat.

What matters is that we shared views from the top of a mountain. We shared nights in a tent and long road trips. We shared a life that involved great love and passion and maybe very little thought about what it would feel like to see it gradually slip away from us as our collective abilities declined with the years.

It doesn’t feel fair to write only about the good times, as if there were no struggle and no suffering. My days afield are becoming shorter and shorter. Fewer and farther between.

None of us who once found a kind of paradise ever lost it. It stays with us and flashes in our eyes at any age. We recognize it in others with a sense of the larger story that includes the beginning, the middle, and the end.

If you are at the beginning, get the dog. Climb the mountain. Go all the way and back and then go again for as long as you can. As far as you can go without leaving any integral part of yourself or your loved ones behind.

And if you are me, nearing the end of a wonderful story, don’t worry too much about being no fun at the dinner table. Just say what you have to say. Feel what you feel.

My attention looks like this:

• Day 109: Saturday 12/20. Breakfast: Hamburger and green beans. Prednisone, Psyllium, probiotic.

I reach down, and Rigby nudges my hand – his nose cold, wet, and searching for a treat.

It may seem like nothing to report.