Little Tippy

Back in November, Tippy the Party Poodle caught some sort of respiratory bug. He coughed, first delicately and later helplessly, and declined precipitously in the last two weeks, refusing food, becoming skeletal and lethargic, and groaning a little with each breath he took.

We took him in to the animal clinic a couple of times for antibiotics, but the vet was unable to prescribe anything useful. Finally, after realizing that Tippy would not improve on his own, we went back in late on a Friday night. We were the last customers. The tech put an IV in Tippy's forepaw, and as I held him, the vet injected a full syringe of bright blue barbiturate. The effect was almost instant; although his heart beat on for a minute or two and he was still warm, his little body felt like it deflated in my arms.

We buried Tippy the following morning, in the back yard under the east-leaning dogwood tree. It was surely a kindness to take him to the vet for his lethal overdose, and yet I felt miserable seeing his curly, stuffed-toy body so rigid in death. Such a contrast between the live, obnoxious, silly Tippy, tearing in circles around the yard, and the stiff little body we brought home in a clear plastic box!

This contrast troubled me all day, as my feelings of specific sympathy for Tippy’s suffering mixed with a generalized sorrow that anything and everything must die. I thought about Janne and Rob’s son Jonah, in his late 20s, so bravely confronting a recurrence of melanoma. In the afternoon I got an email from my friend Marcia saying that her husband has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, a particularly aggressive kind. Death and its harbingers were too present.

That evening, as I lay in corpse pose after yoga exercises at the Y, I had a powerful vision of Tippy. Not surprisingly, at the end of class, when we all lay down and the teacher turned the lights and the music down, and began her now-familiar low litany of relaxation and immersion in the breath, the moment, my tears began to flow. And as they did, a rather wonderful vision—I have to call it that, as it was more persistent than a simple image— came to me.

In my mind’s eye, I saw Tippy’s little curly body again, but it was not half-covered in clods of dirt, as when I last saw it. He—his body—was floating upward into a pale blue sky, ringlets of white fur feathering out as he drifted upward, simply de-mattering into the atmosphere. The curls became swirls and trails of cloud, and within a few minutes the body was no longer blood and bone and suffering flesh. Tippy was cloud and vapor and breath, and I opened my eyes feeling relieved and so much lighter.

Cloud photo from http://cobweb.ecn.purdue.edu/~ebertd/cloud