Missing Casey

Every time I go home and put the key in the lock, for just a second I think that when I open the door, I'll see Casey standing there.

Casey, for those of you who don't know me-- oh, wait, that's pretty much all 5 of my readers-- Casey is my dog. I still can't write "was" even though she died two months ago, on August 14th.

I spent most of that rainy Sunday on the floor beside her, petting her and talking to her. If I walked away for a minute, she whimpered a little. Other than that, she didn't seem in pain.

It was a relapse of an illness called Canine Vestibular Syndrome. I knew there was nothing that the vet could do. Either she'd recover or she wouldn't. She'd recovered from it before. This time--- well, you can't win them all.

So I spent that day lying on the floor next to her, telling her that she was beautiful and that she'd always be my doggie, and having periodic bouts of crying.

It felt surreal. As the light began truly fading not only from the late afternoon sky but also from her eyes, the rain intensified into a fierce storm. The electricity went out. And almost exactly then, my friend Kathleen, an astrologer, returned a call I'd left her the week before. The message had been something like, "Look, so I know I haven't talked to you in two years but my life has become very strange and -- dude, I need to know what the hell's going on and more importantly WHEN WILL IT END?"

I have always found astrologers -- good astrologers-- at least as useful as therapists, and certainly more cost efficient. An astrologer can, in an hour, tell me why what I'm experiencing is happening, what the next thing will be and when the change will take place. It's a decent bang for the buck and requires less caterwauling on my part. Sure, you might not buy into astrology. But trust me: a good astrologer can trump a bad shrink any day of the week. I like, for my money, being given AN ANSWER. I was happy to hear from Kathleen that the series of very bad months I was enduring would change for the better, right about now. That's part of the astrologists job-- to predict when things will be better. A therapist will never offer you that kind of certainty. And to my way of thinking, that's a shame.

Anyway-- Kathleen, who is amazing, told me things that were uncannily accurate considering that she'd not been updated on my life for quite a while. We talked about karmic ties and destiny v. free will. And she stayed with me on the phone while I was sitting on the candle-lit floor (because the lights stayed out for hours), while my sweet girl Casey chased the swift black rabbit out of this world and into the next.

Every day this week, I've meant to drive to Vermont. And yet I don't pack the car and go. It's because when I get there, I'll be looking for Casey. Some irrational part of me believes that she isn't really gone. That somehow she teleported from Jersey City to the forest, where she's there running through the woods, or lying on the front porch of my house keeping watch. Part of me believes that when the car crunches up the gravel road and turns into the driveway, when I get out of the car to open the iron gate, my girl will stand up from her corner of the porch and welcome me with her Bea-Arthur sounding bark.

I know that won't happen. She won't be there. And the sadness of that knowing weighs me down so that I can't seem to pick up my purse and car keys and other dogs (who seem unimportant and faceless now) and travel north to the place I love most in the world.

My girl is gone.

I feel like I don't belong anywhere now. Because wherever she was, was home.

To tell you the truth, I think that's why I've put my house up for sale.

And the Secret Garden house I like-- I haven't made an offer. There's no parking, and that seems impractical. As an insomniac, I often come home very late. If I buy that house, I'll circle and circle, ending up parking blocks away and having to cross through a rather rough bit of 'hood...So I'm still weighing pros and cons. Besides, my house hasn't even been seen yet, let alone sold.

And whatever house I come home to, there will be that moment where the key's in the lock. And my girl is not at the door.

Someday, I'm sure, I'll see that the experiences of this August have made me a stronger and wiser person. Right now, though, I just feel lonely and misunderstood. August was a bad month in a series of very bad months which, mercifully, seems to have ended. (As, perhaps coincidentally, Kathleen said it would.)Casey died. But before that, I did something stupid that got out of hand. There are lingering bad feelings about that, too. Someone I cared about and meant no harm to now hates me. And people who heard that person's version of the story think I am nuts. Which I am not. (Quirky, yes. Deranged, no. And many think the quirkiness is rather charming.) The story made my friends laughed their asses off. Yeah, they were laughing AT me, but they laughed with affection. Knowing me, having a background of how it all came about, they knew the whole absurd situation was closer to a Seinfeld episode (me as Elaine) than some psycho-drama thriller.

In other circles, I'm a pariah. Which hurts. There's nothing I can do about it but shrug and go about my life as I would otherwise, but it's hard to not care about it. I am conscious of being judged unfairly, and sad that a few people I respect have a skewed impression of me. It's a constant pebble in the shoe, and there's nothing I can do to cast it out.

If Casey were here, all that would matter less. If Casey were here, I'd bury my face in her neck and it would be better.

It's said that we miss things in proportion to how much we love them.

I miss that dog with all my heart.