Whew boy, kitty hospice care rather draining work. Thought I was holding up pretty well but then the kids lost it, followed by me. Here they are, happier days: not long ago, actually.
David Foster Wallace had some memorable speech acts on the topic of John Updike: nothing but "a penis with a thesaurus," for example, and I think he was also responsible for the rhetorical question, "Has the s.o.b. ever had an unpublished thought?" I'm sure he must have, but, to the point DFW was making, Updike wrote the only poem in The Norton Anthology of American Literature about the death of a pet:
She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog! Good dog!"
We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.
Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried
To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded with love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.
Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.
The only one I know on this topic but what more is there to say about it? I knew the time had come when I found Diddles prostrate in his litter box. Getting in had used up all his strength.
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