Ornoth

I renounced my citizenship in the State of Maine twenty-eight years ago, when I moved away after college. Locals will tell you I’m not a real Mainer anyways; I was still “from away”, having lived there only 24 of my first 25 years.

When I left, I was eager to leave the land of poverty, ignorance, and racism behind me and start a new, adult life in Boston. I did my best to sever all ties with the land of my youth; but there was always one obligation that kept pulling me back: my parents.

For more than two dozen years, I continued making regular trips north to visit. Going back to Maine was always uncomfortable for me, like perpetually picking at the scab covering the many reasons why I’d left; it never fully healed.

That obligation to keep returning came to an end in January, when my mother passed away. My only remaining duty was last week’s interment ceremony, and the brief family gathering in her memory.

So now I can turn my back and leave Augusta for what might well be the very last time, and say perhaps my final farewell to the State of Maine.

I suppose it’s a major life passage. I left three decades ago, but this is truly the final severance of my ties to Maine. It’s the cause for a little bit of melancholy, but a much larger sense of closure, relief, and joy.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t really hate Maine… I carry treasured memories of some of the people and places and experiences of my childhood. But that chapter ended thirty years ago, and there’s no point in lingering in the vicinity of long-past adventures.

It’s futile to cling to people and places that have already undergone three or four decades of change; what’s truly important are the memories I have of them, not the present reality. And unlike the present reality, I can carry those treasured memories with me, no matter where I go.

It’s also ironic that my trip home from Maine involved driving to Boston and flying out of Logan airport. You see, my mother’s death also removed my biggest reason for coming back to pass through Boston.

So this trip was a farewell to Boston, as well. Unlike Maine, Boston is a place I dearly love, where I feel at home, and have lots of recent history that I chose to create. So I’m hoping there will be reasons to visit that bring me back in the future; I just won’t have the convenient opportunity provided by flying in on the way up to Maine.

But even in Boston, a lot of what I loved here is history, and many of the people have moved on. I guess it’s one of those lessons that only comes when one has lived long enough: that clinging to people and places from the past is futile, and the part that matters most—your memories of them—can be taken with you, wherever you choose to live.

Even if you were never to return again.

Puggle is dying.

I brought the little guy in to the vet because for the past few weeks he seemed to be having gradually more and more difficulty breathing. No apparent pain or even much discomfort, which is good. But despite that, the vet’s diagnosis is dire: congestive heart failure.

There aren’t many options to consider. Untreated, he will die within weeks. We could drain the fluid from his chest and put him on a diuretic, which would give him short-term relief, but which isn’t a viable long-term treatment. We could undertake a lengthy, uncomfortable, and expensive sequence of aggressive treatment, with a lot of risk and little guarantee of results. Or we could euthanize him.

What seemed to me to be the most compassionate thing to do was to give him the short-term treatment, see how he responds to it, spend some quality time together, get used to the idea, and let him go when his symptoms return. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to nurse him through to the beginning of January, so that the holidays aren’t an eternal reminder of his passing.

Puggle is my first and only pet, which makes this really hard, and he’s been my constant companion for the past fourteen years. I’ve always known that this day would come, and dreaded it, because the little infestation is a very, very important part of my life. So today has without question been one of the most painful days of my life.

As anyone who knows me will attest, I’m pretty good at resorting to cold logic to subdue my emotions. I have been telling myself that everyone dies sooner or later, and he’s just a cat, after all. But the heart doesn’t agree with that, and my heart and mind seem to be taking turns speaking from the pulpit in a very heated debate taking place inside my skull.

In a way, this is a good ending, though. The diagnosis leaves little room for me to second-guess my decisions. It’s not one of those situations where he’ll need daily shots or an extensive treatment regimen for a long duration. And the Puggle doesn’t appear to be in any pain or much discomfort. So in that sense, it makes saying goodbye a lot easier.

But at the same time, he’s not in respiratory arrest, so I do get some time to say goodbye. The vet said I can feed him “anything he’ll eat”, so I’ll be picking him up some cheese curls, ice cream, bacon, and grass for his enjoyment. And because my company takes the week between Christmas and New Years off, I’ll have that whole week to spend with him, if his health permits.

That might be bad news for you, though, because I expect I’ll be posting a lot about this over the next month. The point isn’t to solicit sympathy, but just to record the things I’m going through. And to hopefully remind you that we all—cats, dogs, and humans—have a very brief time on this earth, and we should express our affection and appreciation of one another while we can, because all too soon, it will be too late.