A Monumental Life Come Full Circle: A Metaphysical Look at Canine Dementia
My dog Qaisuke's cognitive function has fallen to pieces in recent months. As with all synchronicity, it followed this huge surge in vitality. Everything ebbs and rises in a set pattern that was determined at the beginning of time. She is now a walking textbook case of canine Alzheimers. Every single symptom. She waits at doors on the hinge side, gets stuck in corners, having forgotten how to back up. She plows over her water bowl, knocking it over.
All her life, she was militantly house trained and took obvious pride in her own high standards. She had to be vehemently convinced that the pee trays we use in Korea for apartment dogs were not totally barbaric. Of course, now even she forgets her house training. She is shakier and more easily startled. She is increasingly agoraphobic. She can't travel far anymore on neither train nor bus nor subway without becoming increasingly agitated until she falls apart completely. All the activities that were once as easy as breathing are now irretrievably traumatic. On top of all this, she is deaf and increasingly vision impaired. Her cognitive function has been declining steadily over the past year. At first it wasn't that noticeable. Now the slope is becoming slippery.
As Qaisuke's memory slips away, my own memory is a hive of activity. I consider all the things I was, am, will always be, so proud of her for.... Her elegance and and restraint and quintessential habits and aboveboard, otherworldly classiness in all situations, her ability to be two polar frequencies at once. She has always somehow managed to be the essence of polite and proper while simultaneously not giving a fuck. To watch these things slip away is akin to watching a jet plane stall in midair... but in this case the jet plane can morph into a submarine. You think you've lost the coin when you can no longer see its shiny side, but perhaps the coin is not actually lost. Perhaps you've simply flipped it over and discovered that while the other side is not shiny, it's still real enough to touch and hold in your hand and explore the nuances of with your fingertips. The coin is not gone. It still holds the same value no matter what side is facing upwards.
Grief is what it is. Some days I follow her around, bawling my eyes out as she ambles aimlessly about at the foot of the local mountain. I'll carry her up when she's done ambling. I'm not resisting the grief, but I am feeling it fully. I know this transition is happening specifically because those are all the ego parts of me that I have to let go of. Qaisuke has truly been everything and done everything in this lifetime. That's all anyone can hope for across a single embodiment. She has covered a thousand times more ground than the average dog. She was always a Chosen One.
In Qaisuke's earlier days, she was a therapy dog who worked with hospital patients, children and the elderly. She's been along with me at almost every job I've had across a decade. She was a shop dog, an office dog, a studio dog, a seminar dog. I ran a healing practice for over three years where she was an integral part of the treatments. She's been on road trips, criss-crossing America god knows how many times. She's hiked miles of pristine wilderness. If the hoards of people asking for her photograph were any indication, she was one of the first dogs to be seen in New York City wearing her very own pair of (despised) pink zip-up sneakers. She's been on planes, trains, buses, ferries, all manner of boats. She's ridden across the state of Colorado in my bike trailer. She's been shopping enough times to have it firmly established that she hates shopping and will sit under the clothes racks or on the couch for bored husbands and boyfriends until I'm done. All of this is the tip of the iceberg. These are just the journeys she's been on with me.
She was a free dog for certain years of our life together, where and when I could manage it and she's had her own long list of solo journeys. In her opinion, these were the best of times. She had the wild, primal run of the unfenced, wide open Colorado mountains before her. She had a dog door that opened into infinite oblivion and she took her freedom, day and night.
Along with her kindred spirit Caleb, Qaisuke knew where they could and could not go safely. Both otherwise domestic dogs had applied for and been accepted as members of the ecosystem. She had the reverence and the respect of the bears, mountain lions and other beasts that could physically take her down in a heart beat. The wild animals have their own code of ethics that is as advanced and enforced as that of humans.
"The freedom of a stray with the pampering of a pet." That was Qaisuke's motto. For she was not and has never been the average earthly dog. She was a shaman and a shapeshifter. She has the protection of the goddess about her. She has been granted safe passage, as I have been.
Qaisuke got along with all dogs, all cats, all animals, men, women, children, everyone. She didn't just get along with them, she was the wise elder, the unflappable ballast in the midst of the raging storms, the true alpha that didn't have to lift a finger to prove her position. She could speak volumes with her stillness and her silence. She could make a point in no uncertain terms with just a look. And yet she never asked for anything that I couldn't give. She was the epitome of flexibility and accommodated all my whims.
And now I look back at what I see as her extensive qualifications as the "ideal dog" and I reflect on how full of ego and biased I have been because I had a cause to further. I saw myself as this ambassador between the general public and the dog collective, where I wanted to set an example for everyone around me of the true potential of the human-dog connection. And we succeeded in tremendous ways. But at the cost of holding on so, so tightly to the standards for what it took to accomplish that. And there were so many times I went far overboard. So, we've been on one side. And I appreciate this time now to be on that other side and and see that discipline fall completely away and embrace the beauty and unpredictability of primal infancy.
Qaisuke was a mother of at least one, if not two litters early on in life. She was on the streets. She had to be the adult and the provider in a way that dogs who have not been mothers never have to be. And she had no parents, human or canine, very early on in her puppyhood, and she relied on her siblings for comfort. Looking back on my physical memories and my intuitive memories of her, I understand that she never got to be the baby and the puppy that most individuals get to be, allowed their fears of the dark and to react from their basest instincts.
And so, in the final chapter of her life, I accept and and embrace that Qaisuke is finally able to be the one remaining thing she hasn't been before in her current incarnation: We all await Completion. We await our embodiment of the whole spectrum. We await the time where we are so free of fucks to give that resistance to any experience or any state of being crosses our consciousness no more. We anticipate the freedom of having been,had and done everything to the point where it all balances. All experiences counter each other and set off this chain of endless healing like a nuclear reaction. Our ascent becomes our descent and the two interchange until they become one direction. We understand that everything was actually nothing and in that nothingness is ecstasy.
I see the divinity, the synchronicity and the arrival full circle here, as Qaisuke's cognitive memory and her grounding in the physical slips away as she prepares to leave this world. She has returned to claim the infancy and the puppyhood that were cut short for her as she was ushered into motherhood. She had her puppies, and she had me, her human, to mother through my tumultuous 20's on into my mid 30's . She saw me through my Saturn return, my shattered relationships, my professional implosions, my bouts of depression, my recoveries, my epiphanies, my new beginning abroad. She held my hand in the realms of spirit. She showed me how to return to my Beloved.
I have had one dog who was in the role of my child, and one dog who was never, ever a child. Qaisuke was a mother to me, a mother to Koa. She was a supreme Mother Energy for every life she touched and it seems perfectly natural to the point of being supernatural that in the throes of her cognitive undoing, in the grand finale of her current embodiment, she finally gets to be the child and the baby.