Mental Compartmentalization and Grief

I know not everyone holds dogs or pets in as high esteem as we do, and plenty of people probably think it is crazy that we are this upset about losing a dog. But we are. Lola was such an integral part of our life that things seem very hollow and drab without her there to frequently make us smile, or even to just get us out of our chairs and doing things.

PartPurple and I process grief very differently, I think. She hasn’t experienced a lot of death. Her parents are both still alive, as are all her siblings. She’s lost grandparents and that can be hard, but they’re not typically someone you see EVERY day. I, on the other hand, lost both parents, a step-father and a step-brother. My dad when I was about 12, the step-brother when I was 14 and he was 17. Back in those days we didn’t have grief counselors or anything; we just dealt with it. When my dad died I remembered him speaking to one of his friends back when his mother died. “We all have to go some time.” he’d said, very stoically. I tried the same when he died, and had kids at school mocking me for “not caring that my father died.” Which led to some playground fights.

Anyway, along the way I learned my own technique for handling grief and it is pretty insular. I don’t want to talk to people, I try to find something to lose myself in, and just not think about things too much.

Since Lola was nearly always at my side, this isn’t working as well as it has in the past. But here is what is working, sort of. In my head, Lola (for some time now, in a way) has been two things. Lola, this beautiful joyous soul that is nearly always at my side, and Lola, the dog that I have to take care of and who mandates my schedule.

There is no bright side whatsoever when it comes to Lola-the-Soul being gone, but there are some upsides to not having a dog to take care of. I slept in this morning for the first time in almost 15 years. I have a lot more free time now that I’m not going for long walks with her. We’re going to save money on her medical bills, food and such (once we pay off the vet bills which will take years but let’s set that aside for now). Maybe I’ll get into multiplayer gaming, now that I don’t have to pause every 20 minutes to take care of something she needs.

So those are the things I’m focusing on, and it is helping. I still get blind-sided with sadness frequently but I’m trying to focus on the freedom that comes with not having any pets. Lola didn’t travel well at all, so we didn’t travel at all. And I don’t mean flying to Paris.. I mean something as simple as going for a drive out into the country as a day trip. So we can start doing things like that, eventually.

I think this is working because I’ve been ‘practicing’ it for some time. As she got older and older, and I knew she had to go soon, I would think about things like how awful our dog park smells in the heat of summer (trash cans full of stinky poop bags baking in the heat) and how once I didn’t have a dog I wouldn’t ever have to go there again. Things like that: the lack of a dog, with dog being an abstract concept, had some up-sides. So now I’m embracing those.

Though at the same time I worry how this will impact my health. I need to find some other form of casual exercise or I’ll just sit at my PC or on the couch until I can no longer walk. Both my mother and grandmother did this once they stopped working and both went downhill fast once they stopped moving. So I need to be sure I do something. Maybe I’ll start hiking or something. Capture birds on my Merlin app or something.

Anyway, just kind of thinking out loud here. Today’s plan: Lola has a hole out on the woods that she loved to dig in, and since it was in the woods I let her dig in it. At the same time a random maple seed at some point landed in a flower pot out behind our building. The plant in the pot died long ago but the tree is a few feet tall now. I’m going to go plant it in Lola’s hole as a tribute to her

Close up of Lola intently staring at something off camera

Farewell, Lola-Girl, You Will Always Be in our Hearts

Last night we lost Lola. She would’ve been 15 had she made it to next month. That’s really old for a dog, and I kept telling myself I was prepared. I wasn’t prepared.

She got pretty sick last week and spent about 48 hours at an emergency vet hospital. If you want the whole horrible story, PartPurple set up a GoFundMe page that goes into ALL the details. Maybe I’ll copy what she wrote down at some point to save it but I don’t have it in me right now.

Puppy Lola in a cage
Oct 2010, When we first laid eyes on her at the rescue

Anyway she came home last Friday, and Friday and Saturday were tough. Sunday she was a bit better, better still on Monday, and Tuesday she had a great day, being her old smiling happy self. She saw a lot of her friends and got attention from so many people in the complex that know her.  I remember thinking “Thanks goodness she is back to normal.”

Wednesday started normally, then she started really hyperventilating. Then she fell and couldn’t get up. We scooped her up and rushed her back to the hospital where they found she had an extremely high fever, to the point where they starting bathing her in cool water to try to bring it down. We took her to veg.com which I have nothing but praise for. They do most of their work out in the open so the whole time they were working on her, PartPurple and I were giving her pets and talking to her and even helping to give her oxygen.

Lola the dog looking serious
July 2013, she’s growing up and getting sophisticated

Eventually they put her in in oxygen tank (like a big aquarium where they can oxygenate the air and temperature control things…rather than try to put an oxygen mask on a dog) and an in-depth ultrasound was scheduled for this morning. We left her in the care of the doctors and nurses, and came home; by then it was 5:30 PM or so. At about 10:30 the vet called and told us, basically, that she wasn’t going to make it. So we rushed back over and said our goodbyes. She was pretty out of it and I’m not sure if she knew we were there. Then she went peacefully with a bit of chemical assistance.

And now we have no dog. No morale officer. She was in many ways my best friend, and in some ways I have never loved an entity as much as I loved her. She was my companion pretty much 24/7 since I started working from home 12 years ago. She was the kind of dog that when you moved, she’d come move to just to be near you. She was always with us. In the nearly 15 years of her life I think we boarded her twice to go somewhere. She was almost never alone.

Lola the dog covered in dirt
March 2016, clearly the sophisticated phase has ended

Of course we loved her, but so many people in our rental complex loved her too. We’d go for a walk and folks would holler “Hey, Lola!” and she had this particular bark that meant “Hey, I see you, how are you?” that she would offer to folks she knew. She was a complete character and made folks smile where ever she went.

She was our heart dog. We will miss her forever.

Lola the dog looking thooughtful
Jan 2020, thinking about puppy stuff
Lola the dog propped up on an ottoman
August 2022, trying to convince me to take her for a walk
Lola enjoying a day in the grass and sun
May 2024, about a year ago and age is catching up to her
Lola resting in the grass, smiling
April 2025 This was just before she got sick. She seemed happy as a clam

Farewell S, and Thanks For All the Memories

I learned this weekend that an old friend of mine had died and it keeps creeping up and saddening me. It’s strange because this is a high school friend and I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in probably 40 years or so. And it would be highly unlikely that I’d every speak to him again even if we both lived to 100.

But still, knowing he is gone is a bummer.

I guess the worst part is how he died. If he’d had cancer or a heart attack or something it would be tragic but, y’know, just one of those bad things that happen. But the facts are much sadder. Basically he drank himself to death.

He’d been dating the woman he married last time I saw him; heck they may have been married. After that he got a good job, got a nice house, had a couple of daughters who grew up and gave him grandkids… and then he started drinking heavily. After he was arrested a few times for DUI, he lost his good job because he couldn’t get to it. Then he got a local job but lost that one, too. He lost the house, the wife and kids split, and he wound up back in his boyhood home. His parents had died a year apart from each other so he was living alone in the country with no driver’s license.

He’d been in rehab for a month, but when he came out he was right back to drinking. Three days later he got drunk, fell and hit his head and laid there, alone in his childhood house, for a few days before someone found him. He was still alive but his brain was swollen and he later died in the hospital. I got all this background from the friend who took the time to seek me out and tell me S was gone.

I still remember him as this good looking, easy-going young dude. We were really tight through high school. There were 4 of us and we had ‘our’ table in the cafeteria and later on when we could all drive, we’d cruise around at night, drink beer, smoke, chase girls, go beach riding, skateboarding and throw the Frisbee around. Just normal stuff. We weren’t angels but we weren’t bad kids either. Just regular guys. He got me out of a few bad binds over the years, and vice versa. The four of us were always watching out for each other.

We were all into model rockets in a big way too; he had an incredible attention to detail and his rockets were always gorgeous while the rest of us were just slapping ’em together to shoot them off as soon as possible. That has always stuck with me…how much time he’d spend on something that generally had a limited life span, model rocketry being what it is.

Since those days, I’ve done nothing significant in my life and I often feel remorse about that. I’m not the hero of anyone’s story, just a generic background character. And I felt kind of bad about that. But now I see how much worse things can get. I don’t know what happened to S between then and now; I don’t know what kind of demon he had eating away at him. And I wonder if we’d still been in contact if I could have helped.

All too late now. I read his obituary and the picture they had was of an old man (he was 63 or 64 when he passed). I guess that means I’m an old man, too. I just kind of find it hard to believe.


Notes on the AI used in this post.  Image created at DeepImg with the prompt “A well maintained and realistic graveyard. Close up to show just a few graves. Daytime, clouds in the sky. A few trees. No people or wildlife. It should look like a real place. No buildings, just a few graves.”

 

Social Anxiety & MP Gaming

So I’ve been playing a good bit of Guild Wars lately. My new character has about 24 hours under their belt and is level 60-ish. For most of that time I’ve been doing what I normally do: treating a MP game as if it were single player, albeit with more interesting NPC AI. (In other words, I treat other players as NPCs basically.)

I have pretty severe social anxiety which gets worse and worse the older I get. I’ve worked from home for 12 or 13 years now and since I work full time and my partner doesn’t, she is who runs the errands and goes shopping and stuff. I can go weeks without leaving the apartment complex and days without talking to anyone other than her and people at work. And the thing is, I’m pretty happy like this. Most people tend to bother me (or at least that’s what I tell myself) so I’m pretty happy being left alone, as a general rule.

I actually enjoy playing games with others as long as I don’t have to talk. That’s part of why I stuck with Fallout 76 so long. LOTS of public events but hardly anyone uses voice chat and there is no text chat. So virtually all communication is done via emotes.

So anyway Guild Wars 2, being a PC game, of course has text chat though maybe because I’m in the beginner areas, I don’t really see it used much. Once in a while someone shouts out some coded message about a train that I assume is telling everyone to come join a group to steamroll world bosses and such, but I don’t understand the lingo and anyway I’ve been too focused on the story for now to pay much attention.

Thursday night I found myself waiting for a mob to spawn with another character and we started to chat a bit while we waited. This was a MUCH higher level character and when they learned I was newly returned to Guild Wars 2 they started showing me their mounts and stuff, then asked me if I’d done any of the puzzles. While I’ve heard of the puzzles I didn’t know much about them and said as much. This person then took me under their wing and for the next hour, at least, they showed me a couple of puzzles, gave me a ton of tips on how movement and jumping works in GW2, rezzed me when I fell and teleported me along when I started getting frustrated. It was a lovely time and at some point they followed me and said they’d say “Hi” the next time they saw me. I followed them back, making us “Friends.”

I was so happy when I logged off. I’d actually had a conversation with someone I didn’t know, and had really enjoyed it.

Friday was the first day in a week I didn’t log into Guild Wars 2. Just didn’t feel like it, I told myself. But I knew the truth. I was really anxious that my new ‘friend’ would be online and would say “Hi” and possibly even want to show me more puzzles. Or just to talk, who knows? The possibility just caused my anxiety to go through the roof. As much as I’d enjoyed the hour I spent with them, I was anxious to get on with the story. But I also didn’t want to say “No thanks” to someone offering to teach me things. It seemed rude. So my solution was “Just don’t log in.”

Ridiculous, right? First of all I’m sure this person has much better things to do than drop everything and teach me how to jump around in the game. Second, I’m sure anyone would understand if I said “Thank you so much, but I’d really like to focus on the story tonight.” I feel like I should be more worried about “Will this person actually ever say hello” rather than “Oh, too much human contact… do not want.”

And this isn’t a one-time thing for me. Often when I get excited about an online game I decide “I need to find a guild to join.” Once I do, I stop playing because I don’t want to have to say “Hello” or “Goodbye” or in general talk to anyone. Heck I do the same thing on consoles, often toggling my account to show as offline so no one asks me to do anything. Even though on the rare instances where I DO join someone else in a game, I generally have a great time.

Anyway, back to the current situation and Guild Wars 2…

Eventually, quite late, I did finally log in and this person wasn’t even online, so how I would’ve handled it remains a mystery. But I’m really disappointed with myself for taking such a positive interaction and managing to turn it into a source of stress and worry. Not really sure how to “fix” this but my gut says “Just get out there and force yourself to talk to people more.” would be a good place to start. When I was younger I was VERY social and was out at clubs and bars all the time. Knew folk every where I went. Spent a few years as a bartender, spending hours chatting with the regulars while serving drinks. Then I was a magazine writer who was constantly going places and interviewing people, or spending all day on the phone chatting. And I LOVED that job.

So I know this isn’t, y’know, genetic. This is learned behavior. Or un-learned behavior, as the case may be. Maybe by kind of putting this out on the Internet it’ll give me an incentive to put my money where my mouth is and actually force myself to interact with people.

Lola is Eleven

A while back Bhagpuss mentioned that he and Mrs Bhagpuss are thinking about getting a dog. I think they should! I think everyone needs a dog. I love dogs.

In particular I love our dog, Lola. I used to blog about her but at some point I stopped, but then I stop most things. Going back and reading about all our plans for rules and structure just makes me chuckle because so few of those persisted.

I am not, generally, a happy person. I spend a lot of my time irritated at something. I have a nasty temper. In a lot of ways Lola saved me. @partpurple quickly dubbed her The Morale Officer of the household. Whenever I’m frustrated or angry, Lola is there to cheer me up. When I do get angry she reacts strongly and gets quite withdrawn. This has helped me to finally get control of my temper; seeing so clearly how it makes people (and dogs) around me feel helped me to come to grips with it. These days it is very rare that I lose my temper and when I do it is quite mild compared to the old me. I owe that to Lola and it has spared me SO much heartache.

Us: Lola, why is your face so dirty?
Lola: Baroo?

Lola makes us laugh or smile dozens of times every day. I love her in a way I’ve never loved anyone or anything. I don’t have kids but I guess what I feel is like 2 steps removed from what a parent feels for their child. She is our puppy-daughter. I’d do anything to keep her safe.

Before we adopted her we were big fans of the show The Dog Whisperer and we learned all about boundaries and how a dog is not a person and you shouldn’t treat them like a person. How you always have to demonstrate that you are pack leader.

Yeah, we do none of that. Maybe we’re just lucky but it doesn’t seem necessary. Lola very, very rarely needs to be corrected for doing anything wrong. If you tell her she is a “bad dog” her mood will change for hours. She’s only been told that 3 or 4 times in her life. It is the worst punishment she ever gets. Honestly I can’t remember the last time she had to be punished for any reason. Usually she punishes herself. Every once in a great while she’ll have an accident, always related to being sick. When this happens she gets so sad and miserable about it that we don’t even consider the need to correct her. She is harder on herself than we would ever be. Plus they are indeed accidents. She has never made a mess unless she was sick. And y’know, when you’re sick sometimes you just can’t hold it.

@partpurple and I both work from home. She has always done so and I’ve been doing it for 8 years. Lola is almost never alone. I think that might factor into how tight of a bond we have with her. She is always near one of us and she is happiest when we are in the same room so she doesn’t have to choose between us. The downside to this is we don’t travel because we don’t like to board her. We tried taking her with us on a trip once but she was in a panic the whole time. Lola is a homebody.

In her prime she was the life of every party and she still charms almost everyone she meets. But 11 (she turned 11 in June) is getting on in years. She has arthritis in her hips and can’t really play with other dogs like she used to (she was fearless when she was younger, happily wrestling with dogs twice her size). She is on so many meds but fortunately she is a champion about taking her pills.

Been a long day of keeping the squirrels in line. Time for rest

She sleeps a lot these days. She is no longer so quick to jump up on the couch or bed to cuddle, preferring to stay on the floor because getting up and down hurts. The stairs are becoming a challenge for her. She and I are getting old together, sitting around thinking about our glory years. She’ll probably go before me and I’m not sure what I’ll do at that point.

Sometimes I think about what life will be like when she is gone. I mean at her age, she could be gone next week or she could hang on for another 4 or 5 years. We relish every day we get to spend with her and we never take her for granted.

I don’t know if we’ll get another dog when she is gone. Walking is getting hard for me (not in a significant way, but extrapolating to 10-15 years in the future I can imagine not being able to walk a dog), money is getting tight, financial security is dicey. And I wonder if it would even be fair for whatever dog we adopted. How could it live up to the standard Lola has set? I don’t think it is possible.

On the other hand, the apartment will seem so very empty when she is gone. Not too long ago she had a tooth pulled and a cyst surgically removed from her eyelid, so she was at the vet all day. And just having her gone for a day, the house felt empty. When she is gone for good we’re going to be very sad for a long, long time.

<3 My Dog

She loves the simple things, like a field of grass to lie in

The Perfect Moment

Sometimes I wonder what is normal. Do other people have a Perfect Moment? In my 60+ years of living I have one moment that I always return to in times of despair, or panic. One moment of perfect peace.

Not that I panic or feel despair all that often. The last time was when I was getting an MRI of my head. Being strapped down and stuck in that machine freaked me out, but I took a deep breath and went to my Perfect Moment and felt better.

I’ll try to describe my moment.

* * * * *

It is late summer. The sun is low in the sky. I’m on my boogie board waiting for the perfect wave. There is no one else around. Just me, the waves and the sand. Maybe a couple of gulls. There’s a stiff wind blowing off shore. The waves are pounding; I’m surprised no one else is surfing today. But they’re loud, the crashing waves.

A good set rolls in. As the first wave passes under me, I sink into the trough behind it. The sun is so low that when I do, I fall into shadow. It gets dark and quiet. The wind whips spray off the lip of the wave, spray that catches the sun’s rays, forming a rainbow that dances overhead. It is so beautiful and peaceful that I forget about riding, and just stay where I am, falling into the trough, watching the rainbow above from the shadow below, then bobbing up as the next wave arrives so once again I’m in the light and hear the crashing of the last wave that passed. Then down again into peace.

I stay there until the sun sets, then ride a wave in and head home.

* * * * *

This happened… jeez, I’m not sure. Sometime in the mid 70s, putting me in my mid-20s at the time.

Just writing it down has me feeling calmer, and of course quite nostalgic. I hope you have a moment like this that you can travel to in your head when the here & now gets a little overwhelming.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone!

[The header image is one I took at Topsail Beach in North Carolina a few years ago. Sadly I have very few pictures from the old days, and I certainly wasn’t carrying a camera while I was surfing. Not back then, in the days of 35 mm film and when Go Pro wasn’t even someone’s great idea yet.]