published in Achieving Your Dreams, Change, Spirituality, Synchronicity by Maryanne | July 27, 2010 | 11 Comments
Right on Time
By Maryanne Pope
“Timing,” as the old saying goes, “is everything.” However, what I’m discovering is that trying to get the timing right is often beyond our control – and what sometimes seems like really lousy timing is, in retrospect, right on the mark.
When my dog, Sable, went blind 10 days before I moved from Calgary to Victoria, at first I thought it was horrible timing because not only was it extremely inconvenient to pack up one’s home while caring for an aging deaf and blind dog, it also meant that I would be taking her out of her familiar surroundings.
First would be the four day car trip with three different motels. Then we’d be living in a basement suite at a friend’s place in Victoria for six weeks, at which time they would be moving to a new home – without a rental suite. So then, after those six weeks, Sable, Soda (my other dog) and I would have to move again.
This meant that, upon arrival in Victoria, I would have six weeks to either find new digs to rent that would accept two German Shepherds and be suitable for a blind dog – as in a fenced yard and no stairs – or buy my own place.
When my friends in Victoria first told me of their change in plans to sell their home with the rental suite, I must confess my stress level went up a notch…and I found that out when Sable still had her sight. So when she went blind, I REALLY started to worry about where the heck the three of us would live, come the end of June.
But I did have six weeks to look. Not.
The day after I arrived in Victoria, Sable started crying and pacing. I rushed her to emergency. Her eye pressure had spiked again; the drops were no longer working. Four days later, out came that second eye.
Now, caring for a large elderly blind dog is one thing. Caring for a large elderly blind dog after major surgery is quite another. In the week following her surgery, I knew I wouldn’t be able leave her alone at home for very long nor could I take her in the car with me. This would make looking for a new place to live rather difficult, which pretty much left the four days between me finding out her eye pressure had gone through the roof – and her surgery.
Sure enough, it was during this grace period that I was driving down a street in Sidney when I saw a sign for an open house. I had my friends’ kids in the car and one of them went in with me. The realtor showed us around and when she took us through the kitchen and into the sunroom addition, my mouth fell open. It was perfect for my office! Two days later, I put in an offer.
From a timing perspective, it is only in hindsight that all this makes sense.
The temporary basement suite turned out to be an ideal place for Sable to heal because a) there were no stairs and it was a small, manageable space; b) I had three little girls helping me care for her and; c) she had my full attention because the big move from Calgary was done and we had our new place lined up.
When I started thinking about this move in the bigger picture, I realized just how incredibly good the timing was. My home in Calgary was a four level split…that’s at least twenty stairs. Now that Sable can’t see, she doesn’t do stairs anymore! If I were still in Calgary, she’d either be alone every night or I would be sleeping in the living room.
Plus, if I didn’t have an imposed six-week timeline to find a place to live, I wouldn’t have been looking very hard – and therefore probably wouldn’t have found my new home.
Speaking of which, it was on June 29th – nine years and nine months to the day that my husband, John, died – that I moved into my new pad. And get this: the movers had just finished bringing all the furniture and boxes into the house. Then they walked out the front door and I walked out the back. I stood there a moment, in the middle of the yard, looking around and smiling. Then I looked up and said a ‘thank you’ to whoever might be listening – and then went back inside the sunroom where all my office boxes were now stacked. And there, sitting on top of one of the file boxes was John’s old Timex.
No way.
The only rational explanation I can come up with is that when one of the movers was carrying a Bankers box, it was tilted and John’s watch fell out of the hole where the handle is. If so, it’s strange that no one said anything to me about finding it. And I certainly hadn’t started any unpacking yet.
I picked up the watch and smiled…and in my heart, I heard John say, “Right on time, Pope.”
Maryanne Pope is an author, screenwriter and playwright. She is the author of A Widow’s Awakening and the executive producer of the Whatever Floats Your Boat…Perspectives on Motherhood documentary. She is the founder & CEO of Pink Gazelle Productions Inc and the Board Chair of the John Petropoulos Memorial Fund.
published in Animals, Spirituality by Maryanne | July 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Saving Sable…Part Deux
That’s Sable on the left in the photo above and on the right is her partner in crime, Soda.
Ten days before I left Calgary to move to BC, I was packing up my office on a Saturday afternoon in early May when I noticed Sable – who was deaf and down to one eye at that point, having had the other one removed the year before due to glaucoma – bump into a box. That’s odd, I thought to myself.
But she proceeded to lie down, have a short snooze and then went back upstairs. A few hours later, I was in the dining room when I looked up and saw her walk right into a large box by the back door. Then she just stood there, staring at the wall. I ran over, gently lifted up her nose and looked at her eye. It was cloudy and grey.
No!
I raced her to emergency. They confirmed she couldn’t see much at all – nor was there anything they could do about that. But they put her on more eye drops to try and keep the pressure from going any higher and we were to return on Monday for a re-check. By the time we walked out of the clinic, her vision had deteriorated enough that she fell off the curb. My heart sank.
In the backyard at home, she proceeded to take a two foot swan dive off a brick ledge, right onto the concrete patio. Thankfully, a cushioned lounge chair broke her fall. And where was I, you ask? Watching, mortified, from the kitchen window. For this, I have no explanation other than I guess the reality of the situation hadn’t yet registered in my brain that being blind means not being able to see anything.
Never a shortage of life experiences for a writer, I kept telling myself as the familiar tentacles of sorrow, anxiety and fear tightened around my heart. Would this mean the end of Sable? And if not, how was I possibly going to pack up the rest of my home – never mind the logistics of closing down my Calgary life – in time for the movers, who arrive in one week, while caring for a completely dependent blind dog?
And not a small dog, I might add…although having a liftable purse-sized pooch suddenly seemed like a heck of a better idea than two German Shepherds. On the other hand, trying to see a positive side to this, at least it was better that Sable, the skinny super-model, went blind instead of Soda, the solid farm-girl built like a brick…well, you know.
That night, I slept on the living room couch – feeling anything but positive – with Sable’s leash tied to my wrist. I woke up Sunday morning and, after a good sob, starting making calls to my family to get their perspective.
“It’s about quality of life,” said one brother. “Yours and hers.”
“You’ll know when the time comes,” said one sister-in-law, referring to the unspeakable.
Highly suspecting that time was near, various family members came by throughout the day to say goodbye to Sable, just in case. As for me, I cried and cried and cried as Sable pretty much just lay on the floor. When she did get up to eat, drink or go outside to the bathroom, it was excruciating to watch her bump into walls, boxes and furniture.
Later that evening, I called two friends. One of them said he knew of someone with two blind dogs and they had a great life. The other friend outright laughed when I told him I was thinking Sable would have to be put down. “We don’t euthanize people when they go blind!”
He was right. And I started to feel that old friend, hope, fluttering to life. At the clinic the next day, the vet gave me a book on how to care for blind dogs. He also checked Sable’s eye pressure and it was stable! If the drops could continue to keep the pressure low, she wouldn’t have to have that second eye removed.
Fast forward two months. My quality life has dramatically improved for a variety of reasons, many of which are directly related to what Sable is teaching me. The number one lesson I’m learning through caring for her is how to slow down. And by doing so, I’m getting a refresher course on patience, compassion, kindness and the importance of appreciating the beauty around me.
I am amazed at how brave she is – and how much trusts me as her seeing eyed dog, even though I’ve let her walk into more telephone phones than I care to admit. I’m getting better though because I’m learning how important it is to focus on the task at hand. If I’m thinking of what I need to do when we get back home, then I’m not paying full attention to her immediate needs…and that’s when mistakes happen.
This isn’t Sable’s first health crisis – the emergency clinic knows us well. My friend, Bob Fielder, has a beautiful magazine devoted to animals called CreaturesAll and he published a story of mine a few years back, called “Saving Sable.” That heartwrenching experience taught me the lesson of self-worth.
As for Sable’s quality of life? Well, I just glanced out the sunroom window and she’s lying on her sheepskin rug in our new backyard, happily chewing on a rawhide.
I made the right decision.
Maryanne Pope is the author of the creative non-fiction book, A Widow’s Awakening. She is the founder and CEO of Pink Gazelle Productions Inc and the Board Chair of the John Petropoulos Memorial Fund. Maryanne also writes short stories, screenplays and play scripts. She lives on Vancouver Island with Sable and Soda.
published in Achieving Your Dreams, Change by Maryanne | July 21, 2010 | 1 Comment
“And then the day came…
when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom” – Anais Nin
This is one of my favourite quotes and I had it in my Calgary living room for years.
I didn’t always live in Calgary. My husband John and I had lived in Abbotsford, BC, for four years while he was going to University. We’d moved back to Calgary in 1996 when he got hired by the Calgary Police Service. I remember the day John the got the call telling him he’d been hired. He literally fell on the floor and rolled around on his back, kicking his legs in the air and hooting and hollering. His dream had come true.
As for me, as happy as I was for him, I had significant reservations about moving back to our hometown…partly because John and I were both very happy in BC – so why mess with that – and partly because of the sheer magnitude of the support system we both had in Calgary. How could I continue to grow as a person surrounded by so much familiarity?
This attitude became a self-fulfilling prophecy and, in many ways, I spent the next four years curling up tighter and tighter in my safe little bud of dreaming dreams but not significantly working towards achieving them.
Then, when John died on the job in 2000, that same system of support that I perceived to be holding me back was immediately transformed into the very life support system that sustained me through my darkest days, months and years.
Shortly after John’s death, my good friend, Nancy, gave me a card with this quote on it:
“Bloom where you are planted” – Mary Engelbert
And bloom I did for the next nine years. But then the day came last fall when I realized I had outgrown my pot – but not because it wasn’t big enough. In fact, at 2800 square feet, my Calgary pot/home was too big for me!
One of my favourite writers, Sarah Ban Breathnach, author of Simple Abundance; A Daybook of Comfort and Joy wrote, “Did you know that plants need to be repotted at least every two years? Even if the roots don’t need more room to grow, the old soil should be replaced because all the nutrients have been consumed. We, too, need to consider repotting for growth.”
What I needed was a smaller pot with new soil – and plenty of water nearby.
When John and I had left Abbotsford back in 1996, our plan had been for us to return to BC – probably Victoria – when he retired in twenty five years. For my dream was to be a writer by the sea.
John’s death got me going on the writing part. So then, nearly ten years later, why was I still living on the prairies?
“There once was a baby circus elephant who couldn’t break free from her leg chain, though she tried and tried. Eventually she gave up. Years later, she still had that little chain around her leg. Although she was strong enough to break free, she had long since accepted that she could not. Emotional chains, after all, are the hardest to break.” – From Open Your Mind, Open Your Life by Taro Gold
Ouch. I sold my Calgary home, packed up my belongings and moved to Vancouver Island last month. Two weeks later, I bought a cute little home in Sydney…five blocks from the sea.
And how do I know I’m on the right track? Well, for starters, this is the quote I found, handwritten in large letters, on the side of the garden shed in my new backyard:
“And then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom” – Anais Nin
I dare say I found my new pot
Maryanne Pope is the author of A Widow’s Awakening. Maryanne also writes play scripts, screenplays and short stories. She is the founder and CEO of Pink Gazelle Productions Inc and the Board Chair of the John Petropoulos Memorial Fund. She lives on Vancouver Island, BC, with her two dogs.