I came home from the Albany Bulb with a heavy heart today. Tears streamed down Sarah and Animal's faces, their dog Rowdy lay, quietly peacefully newly dead in the campsite where she lived, on a bloodstained blanket where her painful tumours had ruptured over the last day of her 16 year life. I walked back to the car with my friend Karen and the vet who had gently and tenderly eased Rowdy into a world of endless rabbit chasing under blue skies with steak in her food dish and flowing streams to swim in. Three months ago I had taken Rowdy to the vet and the mammary tumors had been diagnosed as inoperable and probably just the visible tip of a raging cancer. Animal took the news well, stuffing down his emotions as a guy who has a broken history can do and broke the news to Sarah that it was just a matter of short time. Today was that time and it was an easy passing, the dog had not wanted to eat yesterday as if making as clear a sign as she could to her doting owners, that she was ready.
I had brought a photograph of Rowdy to them, along with the vet, so that as soon as the light left her eyes, they could look right back into it again. I had arranged for this moment to be as simple and as manageable as it can be for people who live on the edge of society, living in poverty and a makeshift home, struggling to make it through the month on a small amount, wondering what might have been if drugs or alcohol, or crime had not been part of their emerging lives.
Animal is 50 now, I think, and his once powerful physique is not quite as impressive as it once was. He looks like everyone's favorite uncle, yet he used to scare me sometimes with his rage and fury if he felt that he was not being dealt with honestly. These days I see him trying to get his breath back as he hauls a 5 gallon container of water on the small carrier he has attached to the back of his bike. He won't accept my help. Sarah was once undoubtedly a beautiful woman, tall, elegant and smart as a freakin' whip. The day I brought Rowdy to the vet, Animal worried that Sarah was having menstrual cramps and hadn't eaten for two days. I walked back to my car, drove to Safeway and stocked up as best I could for people who have no refrigeration - a roasted chicken, Ramen, cans of tuna, bread, water, cookies and some fruit. It is the only time in the time I have known them, over 9 years, that they ever commented on their own needs.
I have known them since I got involved at the Albany landfill, in 1999, when I tried to help the large homeless encampment with their animals as they were being evicted onto the streets, railroads and freeway underpasses of the East Bay. Recently, these two returned to their former home after attempts at living indoors and Animal's occasional returns to jail for minor violations of probation. I have always liked these two people. And I have always marveled at their intense and persistent devotion to each other and to the dogs that shared their life.
This is a part of my life that relatively few know about. That one of the most profound lessons I ever learned came from people who do everything that I don't do - get drunk, do serious drugs, commit crime, live on the streets, pick up cigarette butts and re-use them, live without walls, heat or light at the end of a switch, accept a level of discomfort that I can't even imagine, live in fear for their safety, live always waiting for an eviction or a visit from the police - the encampment at the Albany landfill educated me in one short fast burst of time about a level of humanity, of neighbourly concern, of the extraordinary relationship between homeless people and their animals. Like anyone else, I have sought and received acclaim in my life, I have been honored and praised and my photography and writing eulogised and admired. But it is the moments like today when Sarah hugged me - though I hate being hugged by anyone - crying into her hands and dripping tears onto the photo of Rowdy, that it all seems to make more sense to me.
and it's THAT you I fell in love with Jill.
Posted by: susie | April 02, 2009 at 10:09 AM