The Pause of the Threshold

Death will interrupt this essay

Last Sunday, my partner and I drove to the ocean to celebrate her birthday. We weren’t staying overnight, we were driving an hour and half to eat lunch at one of our favorite places, linger a little, and then drive home. It felt a little crazy, the three hours of driving, in part because there was a 200-foot trench running from our cow shed to my writing studio and we needed to fill it in by nightfall since the forecast predicted rain.

Lately, urgency drives everything. A task is either urgent because there’s passion behind it or because there’s a genuine need or deadline, like dinner or taxes. Nothing in the middle of the to-do list ever gets done.

The 200-foot trench existed because there’s no power or water in my writing studio—an ongoing situation bearing no real urgency until my partner learned that our neighbor had rented a trench digger and she could borrow it for free. (And who can say ‘no’ to a free trench-digger? Most of us! But not my partner!) So my partner had spent Friday digging trenches, and Saturday running pipe and wire (I briefly “helped”), and now we planned to spend Sunday afternoon raking dirt back into the trench.

As we drove on a winding, forested road towards the ocean, I was surprised at how easily I dropped into passenger mode and how much I enjoyed it. It felt like meandering and meandering felt like medicine—an antidote to urgency.

Our teenaged son had declined to join us, but as we ate, he texted me an update that our senior dog, Wally, seemed like he was feeling okay. He had been limping a bit when I got up in the morning, which is normal for him, and had been reluctant about breakfast, which is not.

I ate an insanely good wedge salad with fried chicken and a glass of rosé, and then I watched my partner pet some kunekune pigs that were lazing around by the restaurant, and then we walked along the beach to visit the carcass of a dead whale that had washed up several weeks before. I had advocated for skipping this activity (I’d rather see a live whale, I said, to which my partner replied, Duh.) but there was power in engaging with the remnants of loss, the battered body of a majestic creature. Humans walked the beach and turkey vultures loomed in the distance. I took photos.

On the way home, I drove and my partner napped, and then when she emerged we talked about household decisions, preparing to reenter our shared world of to-dos. When we pulled up to the house, I promised I’d help her with the trenches—I just needed to pee and check on the kids and let the dogs out. Only, when I went to let the dogs out, I could see that my senior dog was now fully lifting one of his hind legs and holding his paw at an odd angle. He peed and then plopped down on the grass. I examined him. His other hind leg, the one he was putting wieght on, was clearly swollen. This made no sense.

“I think Wally broke his leg somehow,” I told my partner when I met her at the trench. I had already called 2 emergency clinics. One of them had a six-hour wait. The other one, 30 miles away, told me to bring him in. I picked up a rake. “I just gave him a pain pill,” I said. “So I’ll load him up in 40 minutes, once the meds kick in.”

My logic was sound, I think, but also I wanted to rake some dirt.

On the way to the clinic, I stopped at a drive-thru and got myself a giant sandwich for dinner. It was already 7 pm and I was hungry again. I parked the car in the parking lot and ate half. I wondered what the fuck was I doing. Why was I moving so slow?

But I think I know what I was doing. I think I knew that I was in for something, that the fifteen minutes I took to feed myself, to prepare myself, were minutes I would need. I was believing myself.

At the clinic, I spent five hours and $1,668. I left with no answers, although in the moment I was too bleary to see it that way. I’d been texting with my anxious son, reassuring him that everything was okay. The vet explained that the x-rays showed no obvious fracture. He offered pain pills, sedatives, and antibiotics. He offered an overnight hospitalization and I declined, not quite following his insinuation that something more was wrong. He spoke of a possible infection. Okay, I said to the vet. Okay, I said to myself. Death was hovering in the corner of a room I hadn’t yet entered. If I had been alert I would have seen it.

It was 1:40 am when I finally left the clinic. My heart leapt with joy when Wally came through the double doors, led by a vet tech with a leash. For the moment, he could walk. I brought him home.

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I was outside with Wally the following morning, Memorial Day, when the vet called unexpectedly.

After three hours of sleep, I’d used a folded towel to support Wally’s back end and help him outside, but once we got there, he had plopped on the ground. He had no interest in rising to pee. I hadn’t tried to feed him yet. Last night it had rained as predicted and the ground was soaked, but the sun was out and the air was humid. I didn’t want to leave my dog alone on the wet ground, and so I grabbed the dog brush and started brushing. He’d been shedding for weeks , but grooming him had been lost in the middle of my to-do list. Now, suddenly, brushing him was a compulsion, a passion. I started filling a plastic bag with his fur, taking pleasure in the volume of undercoat that came loose and admiring the smooth tawny coat that remained. This is what I was doing when the phone rang.

When I answered, the vet told me that the radiologist suspected cancer. We could decide how aggressive we wanted to be, he said, but the first step was to schedule an ultrasound and a few other preliminary tests that would cost about $6,000.

I had stepped away from my dog, and now I was shielding my eyes from the sun. “I don’t…” I said, “I just don’t see him recovering from this.”

“I understand,” the vet said. “We can start thinking about hospice measures.”

For a moment, I imagined a span of weeks, a slow goodbye with many days of tending-to.

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I called my son and asked him to come outside and join me. We cried together. I kept brushing Wally and collecting his hair in my plastic bag. “Why are you doing that?” my son asked me.

“I don’t know!” I said, and I laughed while I cried.

For the next 36 hours, I found myself in a space I recognize from having two babies: the pause of the threshold, when someone is entering or exiting this realm, when time slows and the only world is the world of the inner sanctum. There was no to-do list, there was only tending-to: tending to the dying, but also to the living:

We fed Wally meatballs, pills tucked into the center.

I hauled water to the chickens. I filled their feeders.

I went to the store and bought comfort foods: bagels and cream cheese and cookies and sourdough bread.

I called all of the vets who made end-of-life house calls. All of them were booked until the end of the week. My dog was no longer walking or eliminating. I called our vet, one mile down the road.

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At 5:30 pm on Tuesday, the three of us—Wally, my teenage son, and me—arrived at our appointment. My partner and my younger son had opted out with clarity. My teenage son took inventory of his feelings and said he wanted to be there to hold Wally’s paw. He might look away, he said, but he wouldn’t leave the room.

My son was surprised, he told me later, at how quickly the injection worked. He expected to have some minutes between injection and death, some time where Wally would be half-gone but still breathing, but instead it was jarringly sudden, the shift from here to not-here, the body transforming from vessel to monument.

In December of last year, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Wally had offered us a preview of this moment by struggling to walk. He was thirteen years old and had long been arthritic, but he was showing his age more and more. Back then, six months ago, I had worried that this was the end, but we had started him on a regimen of monthly shots and daily pain pills and I had told myself: I bet this buys us three more months.

It didn’t matter that we’d surpassed my prediction, six months instead of three. Death feels sudden, even when it’s not, even when it announces its arrival from many miles away and pings you with relentless reminders.

As the week has progressed, I’ve slowly stepped back into the realm of to-dos and scheduled time. I initially wanted to write “real time” but that’s wrong. Real time is what we experience at the threshold, when deadlines evaporate and grief whispers its urgency.

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a prompt

All of this is heavy, and so, if you want a prompt, I’m tempted to ask you to write about the pigs who made a fleeting appearance in the first section. I’m not sure what the prompt is, maybe: write about pigs, just for fun.

But of course you could also write about the pause of the threshold: When have you experienced it? What beginnings or endings have slowed time for you? (Sarah wrote about this too earlier this week, which was an inspiration for this post.) What are your tending-to tasks in the pause?