I Can't Stop Lovin' You!

Tonight the dream may come, but then again it may not.  And, to tell the truth, I am not sure which I would prefer. It is a simple dream, a dream that fills my heart with joy and then bursts it as that last tiny sliver of joy forces its way in to pop it like a needle pops a balloon, the fragments drifting, floating, through my brain until the dream comes again.

The dream didn’t start on March 11, 2005, but its birth, its conception, happened on that day for that was the day that Dalglish, my companion, my soul-mate, left this world. 

Dalglish, a beagle/spitz mix, was approximately 8 weeks old when my wife, Val, and I were led to him. And for fourteen years he made us laugh, he made us complete, he made us a family. Dalglish was a joker, a dog that when he was about 3 months old jumped from an eight-foot deck onto a six-foot fence and then down to the street to chase a squirrel, and then on catching up to it grinned at us and let it scamper away.  Dalglish was a peace-maker who hated when Val and I argued and would manipulate everything around him, including nudging our hands towards each other until we were holding hands, laughing, and talking again. Dalglish was a dog who would warn us of anyone coming to the door, barking incessantly until we checked it out . . . unless it was the pizza delivery man, any pizza delivery man, in which case he would sit silently at the door, smiling stupidly—a good trick because he was anything but stupid!  Here was a dog that loved everything about life.

But he had been failing for a while. The signs were there. We thought we had lost him in 2003 when he sustained a serious back injury, an injury that the vet informed us beagles were susceptible to, and he lost the use of his back legs.  There was one chance, just one, and if that didn’t work we may have to put him to sleep.  But this was Dalglish!  The high dose steroids worked slowly and his iron will pulled him back to health and back to his jovial self.  So even though he had now been failing this just another thing that we were certain Dalglish would bounce back from.

Which brings us back to March 11, 2005.  For a few days Dalglish had been lethargic, not wanting to move, not wanting to eat, not wanting to do anything. On the morning of March 11, he appeared to be having trouble with his back legs again, and this is why I found myself racing down I-95, not watching and not caring about the speed limit, and admittedly spending more time using the rear view mirror to look at Dalglish lying quietly in the back seat than looking at where I was going.  This was a race, a race to the vet’s clinic, a race that a small insistent voice inside my head kept telling me I was losing.

The car had hardly come to a complete stop in the vet clinic’s car park when I was out and snatching Dalglish from the back seat, heading for the clinic’s door. As I struggled to hold him in one arm and pull the door open with the other, I felt him slump.  It was as though what little strength he had left chose that time to desert him.  He was still breathing but this was not Dalglish, the clown, Dalglish the athlete, Dalglish the dog who would go through a brick wall to get at something that he wanted, in my arms. This was now my baby, my reason for living, that was dying in my arms.
I will never forget the vet assistants rushing out to grab Dalglish from my arms, to sprint with him back into the heart of the clinic.  Every breath of his was an effort.  As a nurse I have witnessed the rapid shallow breathing of the dying, the Cheyne-Stokes pattern of slow deep breaths gradually accelerating to rapid shallow breaths and then the sudden stop when everyone else in the room will subconsciously hold their own breath until the slow deep breaths resume and the pattern repeats itself.  But as a person every inch of my soul was screaming at me that I was not seeing what my eyes were taking in.  I saw the shaking of heads, I saw the tears in eyes, and I heard from somewhere in the distance a voice telling me that if Val wanted to say goodbye she had to get here . . .now!
There was a quick phone call to Val—I’m still not sure what I said—and I sat in the room with Dalglish, my hand on his head, while we waited a million years for Val to get there, but she didn’t make it in time.  The breathing pattern reached that rapid shallow crescendo, and then the pause . . .and I knew that the pattern was never to be repeated, that the pause in the breathing was to be eternal. It was over.

The dream started a few days later. As I say, it is a simple dream.  I am sitting in the car in the car park of a railway station.  The rain streams down the windshield.  And all I can hear is the song, I Can’t Stop Loving You, not the Phil Collins version but the earlier version by Leo Sayer. “So you’re leaving in the morning on the earlytrain.”  I slowly get out of the car and head for the platform and there is Dalglish, a small suitcase by his side, and a train on the rails obviously preparing to leave.  It cannot be anything other than a dream because of the small incongruities that such things often have: the train station is in my hometown of Dumfries, Scotland, a country that Dalglish was never in; the car I was driving was also the car I owned in Scotland, not the U.S.; the dog sitting on the platform is not the older Dalglish, rather it is Dalglish at about 5 or 6 years old.  The scene could be lovers breaking up, but it could just as easily be a beloved son heading off to college or to a new job.  In my head I am screaming for him to stay but the words don’t come out because I know this is something in which he has no choice . . . he has to leave.  He is smiling and his head is tilted to the left as if to say everything will be fine. But I know it won’t be.

The dream doesn’t come every night, sometimes it doesn’t even come every week, but I know that it will keep coming.  And I don’t know if I want it to stop because just seeing him again brings a smile to my face and lifts my heart, but it also reminds me that we will never physically be together again.  I will never again feel him snuggling in behind my knees as I lie in bed. I will never again trip over as I try to rise from a chair because he is parked at my feet.  But somehow, as I see him smile, I know that he was right . . . everything will be okay, and my life is so much better because he stayed for a while.