This is pretty raw, and a lot longer than I expected but I think I needed to let it out. If you’re currently grieving a pet, this might be too much to read.
My dog passed away this past Saturday morning.
I’ve been in shock ever since and absolutely devastated. My appetite is gone and I’m nauseous and I’m realizing that even though my mom had a similar bond to Ivy, her way of grieving is very different, and I just feel alone.
While Ivy lived a wonderful life of 10 years, longer than many dogs get, she seemed to be doing fine until literally midday on that Friday and we had no idea it was something that would ultimately take her life. We’re struggling with all the “what-ifs” and “if only” thoughts but even though we don’t know for sure, we suspect the cancer we had removed a year ago had come back and even though we get her checked out routinely, we just didn’t catch it in time. The emergency vets said that it was as though her body was attacking itself. It’s just hard because we have her father from the breeder who literally turned 13 the day after she died, the day we buried her. We also still keep in touch with the breeder and she’s told us that HIS father is still alive. So, it was just so unexpected. And Zac, her dad, doesn’t even seem to be registering the fact that she’s gone. We showed her to him when we brought her home, but he barely noticed and just laid down next to her for a second before getting up and wandering off. He doesn’t have the best eyesight and maybe what they did to her body made her smell different, but I thought there would have been some recognition. But he just sort of moved on like nothing happened. Maybe he just understands better than we humans do that death is a part of life, even for his own daughter, but when she was alive he did look after her in his way. I just hope he doesn’t wake up one day looking around for her but we did all we could do.
I didn’t expect to get into the actual event but to be honest, it helped to type it out. The thing is, while I’m absolutely devastated right now, it’s not like I was on top of the world before she passed. Three years before we got her as a puppy in 2014, I was diagnosed with endometriosis. The year I graduated college, 2014, I got a job as a nanny for an emotionally abusive family (which I thankfully left after 3 months but was still a bit traumatized). I had a second surgery for endometriosis in 2015 and was prescribed depo provera which made my depression and anxiety way worse than it already was. I got a job as a photographer taking photos for church directories which was insane (12-17 hour days, no breaks worked in, at least 2-4 hour drives, many kind people but enough rude people to make it miserable), I developed panic attacks and took a medical leave of absence (ultimately left), was judged by so-called friends, went through a time where I couldn’t work because I didn’t know enough about what would trigger these panic attacks, isolated myself from my friend group (hardly any of whom were reaching out anymore anyway), and realized in early 2017 that most of those “friends” who did reach out weren’t really my friends, and between April 2016 - Sept 2017, my “job” (because I didn’t have a real, paying one) was to work on myself in individual and group therapy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I’m very grateful for both, but when your job becomes analyzing what’s wrong with you, or why you do what you do so you can stop/change/adjust constantly, it gets to be a bit much. Then I got a retail job in Sept 2017 where I dealt with a narcissist coworker. I also started getting migraines at that job in 2018. Sometime in 2018, my brother met his now wife who has never liked us because we don’t fit in to her “fantasy” (not confirmed, but my theory). When we first met, she told my brother I was “too nice” and “not candid enough”. We have done and continue to do everything we can to be welcoming and she’s nothing but disrespectful to all of us. She even sent something to members of her own family recently that they have been very hurt by. Anyway, in July of 2019, I briefly got a job canvassing neighborhoods for a construction company until I had an 8-hour long panic attack. Needless to say, I did not stay there. Feeling ashamed and hopeless, I made a plan to take my own life. My dad interrupted me as I was writing the suicide note, and obviously I’m still here. I got another job the following week, one that I’m still at, but it didn’t come without its hiccups. A man who yelled at me and who I still have to set boundaries with nearly five years later. Another man who acted inappropriately but ultimately he was set straight. As you can imagine, my brother’s girlfriend/fiancée/wife made our lives difficult and did everything she could (and succeeded a long time ago) to separate him from his family who he seemed to be so close to before (I used to think of him as my best friend). In the summer of 2020, I started having hypnopompic hallucinations where I’d wake up physically but I would still see things as though I was in a dream state which freaked me out. In December of 2020, I made a total of 6 batches of cookies, rolled out, embossed, all the works for literally hundreds of cookies, and that triggered an underlying back issue from carrying too much weight in my backpack slung over only one shoulder in college. This resulted in me going to the chiropractor, getting massages, and as the back issue was finally working itself out, it felt as though it dispersed all that pain and more to the rest of my body. I won’t go into it because that would be a post somehow longer than this, but about a year later after having had a third surgery for endometriosis in 2021, seeing a gastroenterologist, worrying if I was having seizures, and finally seeing a neurologist, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in 2022. I found out my uncle had been diagnosed with cancer earlier that year too, a sarcoma. He passed away in May.
Around a month later, my mom, a non-smoker, was diagnosed with a rare type of non-small cell lung cancer. It’s called ROS1 and it’s very aggressive. Not only that, but it does not go into remission; my mom will have this cancer for the rest of her life. Already, she’s gone through two treatments, and the when we suspected the trial she was on wasn’t working anymore because of a mass they found in her right lung, she had a biopsy done in December right before New Years, and in the middle of it, she had heart failure. Thankfully, they revived her and she’s ok. At first they thought it was a heart attack but her arteries were clear. They said it was a case of broken heart syndrome. Her heart has recovered fully since then, but she was taken off the trial, and after briefly trying another targeted treatment, she’s now on chemotherapy.
After experiencing a traumatic event with my brother and sister-in-law back in December of 2023, my family hosted a baby shower for them at our house earlier this month. I’ve been conflicted about how I feel about the coming of this child. I have been overwhelmed about my mom and the side effects she’s been having from the chemo along with the other drug that they’re giving her for the first 4 rounds. My dad caught pneumonia a few days before Ivy passed. I was already overwhelmed.
I was almost always already overwhelmed. But through all of the above, except those first 3 years of endo, I had Ivy. I could go to her. I could play with her. I could pet her. I could cuddle her. Or I could just watch tv or be on my phone but she always had a way of knowing when I’m sad or upset and needed her there. And I think she just genuinely wanted to be with me whether it was on the couch, on the floor, or even upstairs.
That’s part of why this is so hard. It’s ALL of these current things, plus Ivy. Ivy made it bearable. I know I’m not always going to feel this way, but I think I need to get it out somewhere. While I know that I will move on and live my life through the good and the bad… part of me doesn’t want to. I don’t want to face life without Ivy. I don’t want to have people come into my life and not be able to introduce them to my “buddy”. I know how that sounds. And again, I know I won’t always feel that way, but the thing is, I don’t have any friends I can talk to. I have people who care about me and that I care about, but I’m not close enough to share this and one person I used to think might be that type of friend kind of has proven that she’s not interested in a real friendship. She just checks on me by text every few months and says she’s praying for me. While that’s sweet, whenever I try to engage, she ignores it and then literally just writes another text checking up on me a few months later. She responds to updates, but not when I try to reciprocate.
So, with my friends falling away, with my brother turning away from me, Ivy really was my best friend. Possibly my only real friend.
