I Hate Mournings

After my dog (Wilma) passed away, I decided to write about how death has been a major theme in my life.

I Hate Mournings

Aching yet numb. Hurt yet relieved. Knowing that life DOES go on. Why me? No! Why her?

Mournings are difficult for me to deal with. I’ve been through so many of them that I often ask myself why I can’t use the numb feeling they attach to throw my feelings and thoughts out and get my a*s back into this thing called life. I ask myself what is life? Do we truly work to live? Or perhaps, do we live to work? And this thing called romance? Why? Why are people brought together just to be torn apart. Was Wilma my greatest love in life or was being born and coming from my mother’s womb the greatest romance of all? I often ask myself how [GOD] could have taken someone from me that I loved so much. But it the end, I ask myself, “Is he doing this to hurt me? Or is he doing this to show me how to love?”

Wilma was my child, my friend, my singing companion, my Prozac, my coffee, my inspiration, my private thought that provoked the occasional case of the giggles, and my “honey bee” until that mourning when “is” became “was” and life became death, and fur and wet kisses became ash and memories. That was yet another mourning when I had to learn to wake up and get out of bed yet to face life all over again.

Wilma wasn’t my first bad mourning. I claim that my greatest character trait is that I am a “lover” and not a “fighter” because I like to be happy and wish peace toward every one and I have to deal with this thing called life on my own. But isn’t life a fight? In the case of my father, life was the fight. For the first nineteen years of my life, he worked tirelessly so that I could have a comfortable home with comfortable things, and comfortable schooling yet he was never there for the comfort that I needed. When he died I had realized that I would not miss him because all of the great times we shared. I missed him for all of the great times that we could have shared and all the great times that we would have continued to share if [Cancer] wasn’t in the way. When he died, that was a mourning that I was awaken and forced out of bed just so I could continue MY fight. Work, or life, or love? What is it? Why is it? I don’t know. Neither did my dad.

I lost all of my grandparents and then a baby brother. It wasn’t in some freak gas explosion, or robbery gone wrong, or bad case of food poisoning. Again, it was cancer. They didn’t all die at the same time either. They slowly disappeared within a few years apart from one another. It was tragic and usually happened around Christmas time.

Death has had a large impact on me. I imagine that it has taught me skills that others would not acquire without the macabre and morbidity that surrounds the eternal sleep. For example, I tend to pull through and not be a quitter. When times get tough I am the survivor. I know what it takes to live. I joke and tell my friends that if there was a zombie apocalypse, I would be the one to fight my way through. I don’t want to say that all of the death in my life has desensitized me in any way because it hasn’t. When Wilma died I spiraled into a state of shock.

Earlier this week I had to pull myself together because I was not going to start my mourning with me showing the entire Starbucks how much I missed her. I was in a hurry to catch the train and in the manic midst of pouring cream and sugar into my coffee and onto the floor and all over my jeans, I saw it. Trying my hardest to pull back the tears that were about to flood the coffee shop, panicking, sniffling, not being able to breathe, and THEN. The panic attack was caused when I looked down at my shirt and saw that Wilma’s gorgeous, golden fur. Wilma had been gone one full week yet a part of her that no longer exists was all over me. The crying and thought of my best friend’s fur all over me made me woozy and so I ran out of the coffee shop and into the alley so that I could just emotionally collapse.

“How are you handling everything? How are you coping? How can I help?” These are questions that someone in the rise of mourning gets bombarded with my every one. My answer, “laughter”. Now let’s get real for a second. I have my “hat days” or my days where fashion means pajamas, or my “Britney circa two thousand eight days”. However, I usually receive a stare as if I need to be put in a padded cell but really I laugh and joke about horrible things. This is one of those other skills that I have learned from being around so much death and loss. When my family’s mansion burned down, I joked and made remarks like, “Gee golly! What a hot mess!” It seemed insensitive but that is how I cope. When coping with Wilma, I found it rather amusing when my mom brought home her ashes. There she was in her little earn, in all irony, above the stove top. Next to her earn about the stove stop, was my mom’s cigarettes and ash tray. This horrible image made me burst out in laughter. Wilma made me laugh. She was my best friend. If your best friend can’t make you laugh then I highly recommend finding a new one. I know that as always Wilma would have heard me laugh at the whole situation and then she would have smiled and showed her exciting face. You know, the one that furry friends make when someone says, ‘Treat” or “Outside’.

I wasn’t laughing the day that Wilma was carried to a better place. Wilma had suffered from Diabetes and Pancrenits. A dog has a very hard time dealing with one disease much less two life threatening diseases and Wilma was a pretty tuff corgi. She fought these diseases for a full year. She received shots of insulin twice a day and received and IV drip every day. That day, however, she was her bravest. Watching your best friend fall ill and suffer is torturous. I thought maybe there was still hope but deep down I knew this was her time to not have to fight any longer. And then I had a dream. I dreamed that my dad was waiting there with my other friends and family that I have seen leave this world. There I was letting Wilma off of her leash so that she could run to my dad’s arms and finally reunite with her lost friends and family as well. As I woke up crying, I ran to pick Wilma’s sick little body up off the floor so that my mom and sister could help me take her to the vet. The vet looked and poked and walked away for five minutes. When he came back that’s when we had to make an agreement as a family. 

As Wilma laid on the steel bench with the iv in her arm looking at all of us and then looking at me, all I could do was show her that everything was going to be OK. I hugged her and petted her and rubbed her ears for one last time as she slowly went to sleep. As Wilma slipped away, a part of me died. A part of me that I had never been fully conscious of. The sight of her small little body lying on the table, lifeless, was a collapse of my heart. That was the last time I would see Wilma, my best friend.

When I walked in the house, it was like nothing had changed. At the same time there was this constant reminder that Wilma was gone. I walked into the kitchen and saw her little puppy pad still soiled. I ran to my little leather chair that Wilma and I would cuddle in and turned on the TV in a numb ghostly way. Alanis Morisette was on and she began to sing her song “Guardian”. I used to sing this song to Wilma all of the time so naturally I burst out crying and as soon as it was over I cuddled with my other furry friend, Daphne, who knew that Wilma was gone as well. “Wilma is gone and Now it’s just you and me” I explained to Daphne. 

Mournings are rough as many people say. We need to wake up and get out of bed just to face what life is going to throw at us regardless of what has happened in the years prior. Wilma was the first little creature to show me that I could love someone so much. I had always put her before myself and I wished that I had been the one who went to sleep that day. Though the ugly and painful parts of death are the ones that haunt me, I will remember all of the good times that I had shared with all of my loved ones. I believe that death is a form of metamorphosis. Just like a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, I believe that we eventually become something else. I also believe that death brings people together. It makes the living stronger and it’s a large lesson in the educational process we call life. It hurts that I have lost a lot of loved ones in my life but someone someday will feel the same way about me that I felt about Wilma, or Leroy, or my dad, or Babi, or Papa, or Meme, or Grandpa Rene, or William. I will have a family with people surrounding me. I will have a loving spouse and children, as well as grandchildren. The ones that I have lost continue to live on within my heart as memories and I know that someday, when I die, my family will face their own mournigs and I will live on as a memory as well. I just need to make some adjustments to my eHarmony profile for that to all work out.

Author's Note

This was a school assignment.