#104 Lovey-Dovey
I woke up this morning with my chest heaving and tears spilling out of my eyes. I was having a dream about the death of my beloved childhood dog, Hudson. It was an awful way to wake up, and I knew the second that reality came crashing back to me that I had to write about this. For I have learned that when your subconscious mind makes you cry, you had better try and address it, or it will never go away. I address my personal issues by writing about them:
In June of 1991, the love of my life was born. This love was my dog, Hudson. I don’t know how many of you are animal lovers, but Hudson forever instilled in me a deep and infallible appreciation for the loving relationship that can develop between a human and a different animal (Humans are, after all, animals).
I am an insomniac, and have been one since I was about twelve years old. My parents used to go to sleep very early, usually by nine o’clock. So growing up, the only company I had during the cold, awfully lonely evenings was my older brother. Unfortunately, growing up, my brother and I had very little in common, and we did not get along very well. As a matter of fact, my brother used to take Hudson into his room at night, and close and lock the door, confining me to the depressing prison that is an insomniac’s high school bedroom.
When my older brother left the west coast for the east coast, for college, in the fall of 1997, I was left “all alone” in my house. On the outside, I pretended to be “happy” to see my nemesis leave my turf “for at least four years.” But on the inside, I became secretly depressed and lonely, and the insomnia only got worse.
But dogs are not as dumb as some humans would have you believe. Hudson sensed my pain, and he knew what to do.
Up until this moment, even though I’d come up with Hudson’s name and tried my best to train him and to love him, he’d been more like a toy to me. He was an object that was sometimes fun to play with, but at other times, an object that seemed to be more of a nuisance; something that had to be fed or looked after in some way.
Hudson proved me wrong. Hudson was not a toy. He was a sentient being who was full of nothing but love, empathy, and tenderness; and he proved this to me over the course of the next two years.
After my brother left for school, Hudson began to hang out with me all night, every night, keeping me company while my body refused to subdue my mind into what you humans call “sleep.” He would scuff around the room, even though my door was wide open, and prefer to stay with me and wag his tail, laughing at Letterman’s bad jokes with me. And I rubbed off on him as well, as I turned him into the most die hard Oakland A’s fan that any dog has ever been and ever will be. It was a well balanced relationship.
And even though he would often kick me during his dog naps, just as I was finally beating that evening’s insomnia, I realized that even Hudson’s sleeping kicks were “love kicks.” He was teaching me a lesson that I still treasure; that love matters most.
One year after I graduated from college, in 2004, Hudson came down with some form of cancer. He had slowly stopped eating and drinking water, and my parents were in hysterics (in their own way) about his declining state.
Never in my life have I experienced such a fierce and loyal determination to play god. I don’t remember the details, but I flew back to Iowa to see my parents and to save my puppy’s life. I was convinced that I owed my puppy this, at the very least. After all, he had done something nearly impossible for me, just five years prior: he had saved a teenager from a serious bout with adolescent lonely depression. He was my hero.
Even my father, who is about as comfortable with showing love as an insecure obese person is with sharing their body among a room full of super-models; even my father was having trouble coping with what all of my family knew was inevitable; that Hudson was going to die. Hudson was truly special. Even my friends who hated dogs seemed to perceive that Hudson, bad smells and full-on-physical-greeting tactics aside, was more human than dog.
I’ve lost a few people that I truly loved in my life, and each and every loss hurt, and each loss hurt differently. But the loss of my dog hurt so bad that I still wake up crying sometimes when I think about my last week with my dog. Today was one of those days.
When I went “home” (Iowa is where my parents live, less my “home”) to care for my allegedly dying dog, I was actually able to get my beloved dog to eat and drink, and to regain some of his mobility and “youth.” I remember that even my parents were impressed by this turn in our beloved dog’s health.
I was the best nurse you’ve never seen. I stayed by my faithful puppy’s side as often as I could, just as he had stayed by my side for the last two years of high school.
I nuzzled his muzzle with my face and whispered thanks and kind words of love to him. And I tried my hardest not to cry in front of him, and to keep him thinking positively. At no point then, nor now, do I think that anything I did was crazy or unrealistic.
As a matter of fact, Hudson’s positive reaction to my tender love and care was life changing. It proved to me some conclusions I’d already made governing personal health. Having already had some eerie medical history of my own, I was convinced that your attitude matters most when it comes to staying healthy.
Unfortunately, the same afternoon that I left Iowa to return to my life in New York, feeling confident in my puppy’s return to glory, Hudson quit performing what was evidently a mere charade, and he relapsed into his former status of “on last leg.”
Basically, Hudson had humored me. This dog had seen how his own demise was affecting me, and so he had taken it upon himself to remain the strong one in our relationship. I “shit you not,” as I write this, the memory of Hudson’s brave and bold behavior in the waning hours of his own life are so vivid in my mind that I am beginning to cry.
Like it or not, my experience has taught me that a “stupid” dog can be more emotionally mature than a human. After all, a “mere dog” was able to realize that for the sake of my lasting memory of him, and for the sake of my mental health, he needed to feign an air of health and confidence. Yes, you read that correctly, my dog was capable of ‘feign.’
Hudson did something that week that most humans cannot do; he sucked up all the cancerous pain that was literally eating him alive in order to stop me from crying and losing my stability. And that just about defines altruism for me, in so far as I’m concerned with definitions.
Attitude alone will not prevent illness, but a bad attitude tends to hinder recovery and can often speed up a process of declining health, whereas a good attitude can combat a lot of illnesses.
How can I present such a bold and unscientific theory as though it were a fact?
Well, I tend to form my opinions based on an amalgamation of my own experiences and observations as well as those of other humans, and every single nurse that tended to me after my car accident was fervent in vocalizing the power of positive thought.
But this column is not about “MikeyOpp Psuedo Science.” (I’ve actually written that column, and never released it…it’s too much, even for me). No, this column is about love.
This column is about the fact that I was watching a movie last night in which one of the characters said: “Love is a wish you hide in your heart that no one else knows” (Terry, a character in Bandits directed by Barry Levinson, 2001), and about how this quote did not deliver a new epiphany; it did something equally powerful, it re-triggered the memories of an old epiphany, one which I still need to work out, in my own life.
The older I get, the more children amaze me, because while children may fear boogey monsters and “the dark,” they do not fear lightness and love; as a matter of fact, they embrace love and reject hate in ways that should make most adults feel shame.
I guess dogs are like big children, or little children are like big dogs-whatever way you want to set up the analogy, up until a certain point of social interference, all young animals seem to have nothing but a desire to give and receive love–and again, I stress the fact that humans are animals! It seems to me that it is only as animals grow up that they learn about predators and prey, and this intricate threat tends to make love shrink on the hierarchy of survival.
But what is necessary in nature is no longer necessary for the human species, for we have organized societies that are supposed to diminish the threat of predators. We have set up a tremendous global enterprise of agriculture in order to circumvent the necessity of dealing with predators and prey alike!
So what is preventing our species from turning away from hate and fear, and towards love and security?
I recently wrote my parents a letter in which I told them that I had suddenly realized that I never appropriately thanked them for the greatest gift they ever gave me; the gift of unconditional love.
My parents have faults, just like every other earthling out there, but one thing they got right, for certain, was the act of giving truly altruistic love to both my brother and to me (and to Hudson).
The results of my parents’ love are complicated and diverse, but the overwhelming byproduct of their love is that I am not afraid to show love, to give love, to receive love, and to openly talk about love.
Because if we continue to harbor our love ‘as a wish in our hearts,’ hiding it from the world, then how are we ever to move forward towards a universal goal of world peace and harmony? You think any rational human on earth, at the end of the day, doesn’t wish for anything short of unconditional love and security? Osama Bin Laden, as evil as he may or may not be, I’m sure even he desires nothing more from life than to feel loved.
And I don’t particularly care if that statement offends any of my readers, because when you carefully ponder the concept of humans and our collective and individual desires for love–and the sense of security that only love can bring about, then I think it’s quite easy to see how even Bin Laden deserves a chance for love. For I posit that if he were given enough love, even he would surely put down his sword, so to speak.
I currently live in East Oakland, California. This is a section of the Bay Area that is notorious for its appalling violent crime statistics (It tends to land in the top three category, annually, in “worst homicide rate per capita of any city in the United States” (see Wikipedia: Oakland).). But when you investigate the nature of the homicides here in my city, you’ll find that most are committed by very, very young people.
The vast majority of crime in Oakland is committed by young people who seem to have been instilled with a sense of cultural and/or racial shame. Young people who see more local money being spent on law enforcement than education. Young people who have not yet been given the proper amount of time, distance, and perspective to see the counter-productive results of their naïve and morally questionable codes of ethics. Young people who, simply put, tend to be growing up with a depressing lack of unconditional love in their life.
When I first moved here, I was full on ready to buy into the cycle of self-protectionism based upon my fears and stereotyping; after all, violent crimes are, um, scary. Fortunately for me, one of my best friends from Portland helped me to move down here, and when we arrived, she told me, a la Harry Truman that “the buck stops here.” She further added that it’s foolish to be afraid of my own neighbors, no matter what the statistics say! Her advice was to smile at everyone in my neighborhood and to let my love shine; to become a friendly addition to my neighborhood, and not just another jaded, uptight “alert citizen.”
And she’s right. What began two months ago as a work in progress has turned into a very real and empowering personal state of using love to conquer the shaky foundations of fear and hate that purportedly surround my new community! All the time I am shocked by what a difference it makes to give another human being the gift of your smile.
And I will stop at nothing to continue in my quest of providing anyone I encounter in my life with a sense of unconditional love and support. Hudson may have passed on, and I may be “all alone” in the sense that I am very much a bachelor in my late twenties studying the solitary art of writing, but I don’t feel alone, because I have the love that so many give me, and the love that I in turn produce, to give to my world; and it’s a beautiful thing.
So my love is no longer a secret wish. It’s now a patch I wear on the sleeve of every shirt I don, each and every day. And no matter how bad the new census’ report on crime statistics becomes, and no matter how many people in world continue to play games based on blame and fear mongering, I will not stop in my quest to mass produce the only product that I believe can and will save everyone on earth from world wide calamity. It’s called love, and it is indeed, a wonderful thing.
My Hudson and me.
