HER TIME

HER TIME

A short story by Pamela Brown

I came home from work yesterday to the unusual sound of the buzzing of chain saws and the old tree was half down. They are finishing it today. My husband said it was time. This past summer brought us several severe storms. Trees were torn from their roots and damaged a lot of the homes surrounding our community. The neighbors on our street decided it was time for theirs. So, it must be time for mine. The old Silver maples were planted by the lake over 100 years ago. I can hear the guys working on her now, sawing her limbs off and carrying her away piece by piece.

Several years ago, I had to put my dog Maxine down. She was the Lab of my life. I remember, my husband said, it was her time. But how could I accept that she would be gone? How could I go on? She had been my rock through hard times. She was my protector. She was the dog I bought for my boys after my divorce. She wasn’t theirs though. She was mine. She loved me with those big brown eyes, that bore into my very soul. Her empathy was obvious. She knew when I was sad or happy. She was always there nuzzling her nose into me.  Her passing was more difficult than any loss I have ever experienced. I was physically sick for days. The gripping anxiety tightened around my throat and made it hard to swallow and I never thought that the tears I shed would ever stop. She was 15 years old. On that day she couldn’t walk. I had to carry her outside and lay her on the grass, in the sunshine.  It was her time. 

After Maxine, I had Charlie. She was a Goldendoodle. She was larger than life! And I don’t use that phrase as easily as those who have lost a loved one, does. She was big. She was bratty. She was my baby. Unlike Max, she really didn’t care how I felt. At least it always felt that way. Her needs were first and usually that meant a treat or a constant hand on her back stroking her fur. If I failed to meet those needs for just a short time, she would remind me with a very adamant strike of a paw.  She would sit in the front passenger seat of my car with her head held higher than mine. The looks I got from passing cars still makes me smile. Once while driving I took my hand away to make a turn and she reached out to slap me with that paw. I swatted her back like we were having a fight. Silly that she felt so human. She was accident prone. She broke her toe, digit the Vet said, in the water reservoir behind our condominium. She ran into a tree chasing after our golf cart and nearly knocked herself out. She caught her toe in the grooves of our deck and tore off her nail. When she was about 9 we had to have knee surgery. That was about $5,000.00. Nothing was too much for our Charlie. Then the next year, another knee. We fixed that one too. It wasn’t her time. And then, a year later it was. When she started limping on the third leg, I took her in to get it checked thinking, here we go again, only to find out it was cancer spreading throughout her shoulders and spine. Nothing to be done. Just keep her comfortable and wait for the inevitable. That cold January Sunday, of the Super Bowl, I took her to her favorite pet store, where she liked to look at the Guinee pigs and she splayed to the ground on the slippery floor. Thank goodness my husband was with me that day. He never usually visited the pet store with me. I left the basket there filled with her favorite treats and helped my husband carry her to the car. As we whisked her to the 24-hour emergency vet, I lay with her in the back of the van huddled around her soft fluffy fur with my wet faced burrowed in her neck, telling her she was going to be ok. But she wasn’t. It was her time. 

Many years before Charlie, but while Maxine was still alive, I lost my mother. She had moved miles away from our Michigan home to Phoenix several years before. At only 67 years old she had suffered a stroke. It caused paralysis on one side, and she was unable to speak and communicate clearly. I could lose her. She was always supposed to be there for me. She always had been, even though she was far away. I talked with her on the phone often. She never felt far away until that day. That day when I couldn’t be with her. As a struggling divorced mother of two young boys, I just didn’t have the money to jump on a plane. It was agony, knowing she was slipping away. One stroke after another finally took her. Molly was an amazing woman who raised five daughters. She worked so hard all her life and never even got to retire. How could 67 years be her time? I just couldn’t accept that.

My father was 9 years older than my mother. He lived into his 80’s. He had heart problems at an early age of about 50. When he passed, he and my mother had been divorced for years. Later in his life he developed some dementia. We never even told him Molly had passed. We would visit him at the nursing home, and he would ask about her. We always said she was doing fine, not wanting to upset him. The five of us girls would visit him at the nursing home every week on Sundays. One of my younger sisters visited more often, because she was living nearby. I think he was lonely there. None of us girls had the capacity to care for him in our homes. He was a big man and kept having frequent falls. I once visited him, and he didn’t know me. It crushed my soul, he called me a baby killer and was yelling at me, he didn’t recognize me, and it was shattering. I raced out of the room into the hallway crying and trying to understand how living was worth it, when your life was like his. I think I experienced grief before he ever died. Was it his time? Sometimes I wished it was, before it was.

I never met my mother-in-law. She was gone before I met my husband, Jim. I loved his father, James Senior, though.  He was kind and funny. He lived to be 92 years old. Right up to his death he was alert and strong. He was having some stomach issues and the doctors believed they needed to do a colon resection. They felt that his heart was strong enough to go through the surgery and perhaps it was. But his heart wasn’t in it. The recovery was just too much for him and he lost his desire to go on. I sat at his bedside, taking turns with his sisters to help keep his spirits up. I loved him like my own father. I was comfortable with him as I feel he was with me. There was an unspoken closeness that passed between us, that I can’t really explain. Once he was sent home, he decided for himself that it was time. They had sent him home with some strong medication for pain. He made the decision for himself to end his suffering. They tried to keep him alive, but he managed to accomplish what he had set out to do.

As I am writing this, I hear the buzz of saws taking my old Silver Maple away. I reminisce about the hot summer days when her shade enveloped me as I lay on the couch, on the deck reading a book. I think about her beauty with her leaves rustling in the breeze. I think about the mess she made every spring, with her red buds and helicopters everywhere and in Fall, all those leaves to clean up and a tear rolls down my cheek. She was here long before me. I have only been able to enjoy her grandiosity for the 12 years since I moved in. I think about how melancholy I feel at this moment and wonder how the thought of her not being her for me is affecting me. She is only a tree. Yet, it is what she represents. She represents all those I have loved and lost. Those that were there for me, but no longer are. Of my own mortality that I will not always be here for those that survive me. It was her time.