It's a long story how Theo, my little cocker spaniel, lost his right eye the day after Thanksgiving. By the time we realized something was wrong, he had already managed to scratch both eyes, most likely by rooting beneath some newly planted trees in his yard.
When we noticed he was squinting, we took him to the vet and brought him home with eye drops. And then he bumped into a chair. He yelped, appeared to be in great pain, and so we flew back to the vet. The eye could not be saved, and so we made the heartbreaking decision to have it removed.
Dogs are troupers. Everyone will tell you this when yours suffers a trauma, and it's true. While my husband and I wept and laid awake nights and hovered anxiously over the newly enucleated Theo, Theo himself barreled about the house pretty much as he had before, looking for contraband to chew and crumbs to snarf up and the other dog to annoy before falling into nocturnal slumbers that rivaled the sleep of the dead.
While I structured my life around Theo's new reality of twice-daily pain pills and antibiotics and three kinds of every-four-hour eye drops, Theo deviated not a bit from his old reality, awakening us at 6 a.m. for breakfast, announcing his 4 p.m. non-negotiable desire for a walk and demanding dinner at 4:45.
Have I mentioned he looked like he'd been in a knife fight with a much larger spaniel? Or that, because I am horrified by the visuals of injury, it took every bit of stomach I had to examine the surgical wound daily for signs of infection without screaming and fleeing the house? (So horrified am I by the visuals of injury, I once removed a piece of broken glass from a dog's bloody paw and then cleaned it while looking at neither the glass nor the paw.)
The fact that Theo was and continues to be downright indifferent to the sudden turn of ocular events astounds me. Why was there no aha moment, no canine freak-out about the fact that there were metal sutures in his face where there once was an eye? Why no hint of annoyance about the plastic cone he wore around his neck, day and night, for three long weeks, that snagged on every door jamb and every leg of furniture and the soft sides of his bed, jerking his neck and stopping him in his tracks? Most of all, why is he undisturbed by how, whenever he turns his head to the right, the world disappears? I have a mild ache in my left hand that bothers me a hundred times more than Theo's painful blinding and its difficult aftermath seemed to have bothered him.
My husband has a favorite saying that he trots out whenever things get dog-intensive around our house which, because we've had several packs of dogs over a 30-year period, is often.
"Dog-dog-dog," he says. It's shorthand for "life is sad/scary/worrisome/ overwhelming/exhausting/hard in a way that it would not be if we did not have dogs."
Not that he doesn't want or love them. Yesterday morning as I was making coffee, I looked up just in time to see him sit down in the center of the sofa and create, out of our fluffiest blankets, a bed on each side of him for each dog.
That he wants and loves them is a given. But along with "life is sad/scary/ worrisome/overwhelming/exhausting/hard in a way it would not be if we did not have dogs," it's also true that life is rich and affecting in a way it would not be without them.
With the loss of Theo's eye - and a growing number of other, non-eye-related physical problems - we see the gradual slide of our young dog into a senior dog, of an invincible pup into a vulnerable one. If our feelings for him didn't also slide, from the excitement we felt when we adopted him into the depths of love we feel three years later, it might not matter so much.
But our feelings did slide. And it does matter. I don't want to lose Theo. But if I focus on losing him, I lose sight of what's true now: that he's happy and energetic and full of silliness and love. It was Theo's discovery, but my aha moment: It matters where you put your gaze. You can look one way and lose the world and look the other and find it again.
Dana Shavin's memoir, "The Body Tourist," is available locally at Star Line Books and Barnes & Noble and from Amazon. Her website is Danashavin.com. Email her at dana@danashavin.com.