Someone else’s tragedy
Posted on December 18, 2007
Filed Under death, dogs, homeownership, marriage, pets | 5 Comments
An ambulance, an emergency response vehicle and a state police car in the driveway- sure signs that there’s trouble at the neighbor’s. A gurney is lifted. The EMTs give it a heave-ho and it is gone from sight. I can’t be certain who belonged to the body on the stretcher. Was it a man, a woman, a college-age girl? Did I see a head there, mouth open struggling for breath or perhaps moaning in agony or was that a covered corpse, silent in death?
All the grim excitement was obscured by the hemlock trees, the dense hedge between our yard and the Harrison’s. So thorough and opaque a barrier that I have, in two years, exchanged ten words, maybe twenty with the people next door.
I dash to the second floor to get a better look. A woman, maybe Mrs. Harrison, but I’ve only met her once so couldn’t say for sure, slightly gray, wearing a wool pea coat and holding her purse across her chest, walks carefully up the icy walk and disappears into the house. The ambulance moves off slowly, no sirens, lights extinguished. And it looks convincingly like the final moments of someone else’s tragedy.
Later a light goes on in the room above the garage. A single lamp, perhaps to read a book by while she eats her dinner in her lap and tries to forget the heart attack that has taken her husband just four days before their daughter is due home from Middlebury for Winter Break; just eight days before Christmas, on an afternoon that is sunny but bitingly cold. After dinner, she will try for rest in the bed that was theirs. And in her fitful sleep her feet will seek the warmth where he had lain and find it cold.
She will invite the golden retriever to join her in the bed. The dog will be confused, having been relegated to the oval carpet by the foot of the stairs for nine whole years. She will stroke the dog’s fur and find it soothing.
She had named the dog her ‘pet-peeve’. She had laughed and told friends about his shedding and his propensity to lift his leg on the living room couch. She had never considered herself much of a dog person, a pet person, really. She once would have been entirely content to be canine-free. But she can see the future, a dog in her bed, a dog for whom she must remember to wake and administer pills for arthritis and eczema. The orange-yellow pill bottles lined up in the medicine cabinet, each one labeled Peeve Harrison, two tablets daily, to be given with food.
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