Cherished (5 page)

So, I gave myself over to it. The loss of the puppy and everything else. I stayed in bed. I wore soft clothes. I failed to return phone calls. I stared at photos I'd taken of her. I prayed the family would call and return her to me. I kept vigilant watch over the neighborhood to see if a sibling of Hope would appear. Then finally, one day, Mercy came over to me and stood stubbornly by my leg.

“Look,” she seemed to say. “Look at me.” I did. Her round
forehead and perked ears. Her tilted head. “Please,” said those eyes. “Let's go outside.” I sat for a while, then put my hand on her head. She sat, closed her eyes, feeling it there.

It wasn't a softening I felt. It wasn't exactly forgiveness. It was something else — a rising above myself. A sort of metaphysical sigh. I took her red leash out and off we went, into the desert sun.

I got an email just the other day saying that Frida is well. She moved to Washington State after the college in New Mexico closed. I imagine her out there, delirious beneath green trees, as we continue to weather the dust of a new desert city. I imagine her curled at the feet of the child in the family, the way the child gently tugs her ears, the way that translates to Frida as love. It is not the same as death, losing Frida. It bears no relation to the way I will feel the day I lose Mercy (whom I have forgiven, now, completely). It has nothing in common with losing a mother, a grandmother, a grandfather, a friend — all losses I have suffered and some how survived. But I still have days when I long for her tiny white body in my arms, her strange, smashy face that made everything seem less serious. There are still days when I miss her, or at least the idea of her. The idea that, in the darkest moment, you can find Hope there, pawing through the street garbage. That you can pick her up and hold her. That she can, with a wag of a tail, do away with heartache and show you the way.

I
always suspected Mr. T. had one of those large economy size thoroughbred hearts: maybe not Secretariat size (twenty-two pounds) or Mill Reef size (seventeen pounds), but larger and stronger than average (seven pounds). The horse was a fitness machine.

In five years of riding and eventing, I had never tired him out. He was always ready for more, even if I was nearly falling off him from the exertion.

Every year at his well-horse checkup, the vet would comment on his dropped beats — he could drop two or even three (five seconds between two heartbeats seems like a very long time when the horse is standing before you, apparently alive and well) — and attribute it to the residual effect of a great deal of exercise early in life. (He was a racehorse for eight years and had fifty-two starts.) Thus it was that I
wasn't too worried when this year, Mr. T.'s twenty-first, the vet detected what he called arrhythmia. As I was taking another horse up to the vet clinic at UC Davis anyway, I packed Mr. T. along.

The results weren't good. On the one hand, the senior cardiologist shook my hand and thanked me for bringing him a big, lean thoroughbred with a heart that was so efficient and powerful that through the stethoscope it was nearly deafening. On the other hand, that arrhythmia had a name. It was “atrial fibrillation”; and it wasn't just a quirk, it was a potentially dangerous condition. The horse could drop dead at any moment.

I was impressed in spite of myself (and in spite of my conviction that Mr. T. was going to live forever) and agreed to have him “converted” — that is, to allow the cardiologist to administer a powerful and toxic drug, quinidine, that might or might not convert his chaotic heart rhythm to a normal, or “sinus” rhythm. It was an in-patient procedure. I left him there and brought my other horse home.

Mr. T. was a very bad patient. He wouldn't eat, wouldn't relax, would hardly drink. His separation anxiety was so great that the cardiologist actually feared for his survival. He did, however, “convert” — his heart rhythm returned to normal, without any dropped beats — and stayed converted.

The bad news was that the dose it had taken to convert him was very close to toxic. There would be no trying this again. And the quinidine took maybe twice as long to clear his system as usual, putting him at risk in other ways.

I tried not to pay attention to the cardiologist's other remark — that the longer the heart had been arrhythmic, the less likely a permanent conversion. Those dropped beats we had always heard — I wasn't going to admit the possibility
that his heart had been arrhythmic as long as I had known him.

Mr. T. had stopped being a jumper — age, an eye injury, and timidity on my part. But not long after I wrote an article about him, “Why I Can't Find a New Horse” in
Practical Horseman
, he started jumping again, and he was great at it, as he had once been — energetic, fast, and full of thrust. And there was no changing his go-for-it style. I'd tried that, and it had just made him confused and anxious. You couldn't parse a fence or a combination or a course and try to get him to jump in a relaxed, easy style. You had to sit up, hold on, and let him do it. It was hugely exciting.

Anyway, two weeks after the conversion, Mike, my local vet, took another EKG. Tick Tock Tick Tock (that was the horse's real name), everything was perfect. I began conditioning Mr. T. for an event at the end of June.

I was well organized in my training, for once. I had him entered in a schooling show, in a couple of jumper classes, and I was galloping him at a local training track once a week. At the beginning of June, I took him over to the track, a half-mile oval. As soon as we entered the gate, he picked up a huge, even, ground-covering trot on very light contact. He trotted happily, his ears pricked, for two miles. Then I walked him half a mile and asked for the canter. For a mile, it was collected, even, easy, a perfect joy. Then I walked him again.

At the last, I gave in to impulse. After he had caught his breath, I turned him, bridged my reins, and assumed galloping position. I said out loud, “Pick your own pace,” and he did. He
took hold and shot forward, switching leads and going faster about every eighth of a mile, exactly like a racehorse. But then, he was always a racehorse. The other stuff was just for fun.

For me, the “breeze” was both frightening and exhilarating — as fast as I had ever gone on a horse, but incredibly stable. Yes, I was not in control, but he was, and I never doubted that he knew exactly where each foot was at every stride. More important, all this exercise was effortless. He was hardly blowing after we had gone half a mile and I managed to bring him down. It took him the usual ten minutes to cool out.

Three days later, we went to the show. He warmed up and jumped around perfectly, won a couple of ribbons, seemed happy.

Thus it was that I couldn't believe it, four days after that, when Mike told me that his atrial fibrillation was back, and possibly worse. His heart rhythm was chaotic. We took another EKG, sent it off to Davis, discussed it more than necessary with lots of vets. The cardiologist's recommendation was discouraging — walking around, maybe a little trotting from time to time. But, I said. But. But when I galloped him on the track, the work was effortless for him.

The answer to the riddle was in his large, strong heart. He had enough overcapacity to give himself some leeway, to oxygenate himself thoroughly almost all of the time. The danger, to me as well as to him, was that his overcapacity was unpredictable. He could literally be doing fine one moment and drop dead the next. And, the cardiologist suggested, in accordance with the no free-lunch principle, greater-than-average heart size often went with arrhythmia. His recommendation stayed the same — walking, a little jogging from time to time.

I stopped riding the horse. I'm not sure why, except that I was confused and ambivalent. One day I decided to ignore the cardiologist's advice, the next day I decided to heed it. Mr. T. and I were used to working, and working pretty hard. If we weren't allowed to work hard together, then what? I didn't know. I let him hang out in the pasture with his brood mare friend.

Not too long ago, I decided to pretty much ignore the cardiologist. I wouldn't be stupid and run Mr. T. cross-country or “breeze” him again, but I would do dressage and jump and treat him like a normal horse.

That very day, I went out to give him a carrot, and he was standing in the shade, pawing the ground. I put him in a stall with lots of water and no food — he'd been colicky before. By bedtime, he had manured three or four times.

In the morning he seemed right as rain, so I began introducing a bit of hay. He continued to seem fine. After noon, I let him out. An hour later he was pawing and looking at his flanks. I called Mike, who was engaged but promised to come ASAP.

Half an hour later, the horse was eating manure. My heart sank. Even though Mike and another vet I asked said this meant nothing with regard to colic, I knew differently. I had never seen him do such a thing, and I thought it was an act of equine desperation.

The rest of the day was a losing battle. No matter how much painkiller of whatever kind we gave him, the pain could not be alleviated. And his atrial fibrillation meant that he could
not tolerate surgery. The impaction, which may or may not have been a torsion, was out of reach and would not dissolve. At 10:00 pm, I said to Mike, “Are you telling me now's the time?”

He said, “Yes.”

I led Mr. T. out of the lighted stall where we had been trying to treat him. He moved, but his head was down and he was hardly conscious of me. We went out into the grassy pasture where he had wandered at large every day of the spring. I knelt down in front of my horse's lowered head, and I told him what a wonderful horse he was, perfect from top to toe every minute. Then Mike gave him the two big shots of barbiturates that would cause him to arrest.

Arrest what?

His heart.

It didn't take more than a second or two. Mike held the lead rope. The collapse of a horse is always earth-shaking. His haunches drop backward, his head flies up, his knees buckle, he falls to the side. We flocked around him, petting and talking to him, but he was gone already.

After everyone left, my boyfriend and I covered him with blankets and went in the house.

I slept fitfully, unable to grasp the suddenness and enormity of the death of my dear friend and constant companion. Each time I woke up, I dreaded going out there at daybreak — what would he look like? How would the mare be acting? What would I do next with a thirteen-hundred-pound body?

When it was finally time to get up, my boyfriend got up with me, and we went out. The mare was in her stall, quiet. I fed her. Then we approached the mound. Fermentation from the impacted food had already begun — under the blanket, my horse's belly was beginning visibly to swell.

I folded back the cover, expecting something horrible, but Mr. T.'s eyes were closed — a kindness my boyfriend had done me the night before. I can't express how important this was. It was not that I had ever seen his eyes closed before. I had not — he was too alert to sleep in my presence. Rather, it was that, looking familiarly asleep, he looked uniquely at peace.

We sat down next to his head and stroked and petted him and talked. I admired, once again, his well-shaped ears, his beautiful head and throatlatch, his open nostrils, his silky coat, his textbook front legs that raced fifty-two times, in addition to every other sort of equine athletic activity, and were as clean at twenty years old as the day he was born. I admired his big, round, hard feet.

But we didn't just talk to him and about him. We relaxed next to him, stroking and petting, and talking about other things, too. We felt the coolness of his flesh, and it was pleasant, not gruesome. We stayed with him long enough to recognize that he was not there, that this body was like a car he had driven and now had gotten out of. The mare watched us, but she, too, was calm.

Later, when I spoke to the manager of my other mares and foals, she told me that when a foal dies, you always leave it with the mare for a while — long enough for her to realize fully that it is not going to get up again, and to come to terms with that. I thought then that this is true of people, too. We have to experience the absence of life in order to accept it.

My friends know that I adored Mr. T. to a boring and sometimes embarrassing degree. I would
kvell
at the drop of a riding helmet about his every quirk and personal quality. He was a good, sturdy, handsome horse, and a stakes winner, but not a horse of unusual accomplishment or exceptional beauty. He was never unkind and never unwilling — those were his special qualities. Nevertheless, I watched him and doted over him and appreciated him day after day for almost six years.

The result is a surprising one. I miss him less, rather than more. Having loved him in detail (for example, the feel of his right hind leg stepping under me, then his left hind, then his right hind again… for example, the sight of his ears pricking as he caught sight of me over his stall door… for example, the sight of him strolling across his paddock...for example, the feel in my hands of him taking hold and coming under as we approached a fence … for example, the sound of his nicker), I have thousands of clear images of him right with me. I think I miss him less than I thought I would because I don't feel him to be absent.