Heart Failure

The dog is lying on his side, his nostrils whistling as he struggles to get more air. We knew it was only a matter of time before his heart gave out. But it's too soon. He isn't even seven.

That's how old I was when I learned that hearts can fail. The knowledge terrified me, as did the sight of my grandmother lying on the floor, a massive figure ghost-like in her nightdress and hairnet, a cake tin by her side in case she had to throw up.

"She has angina," said the grownups. For a while I believed it was a friend who came to stay. "Grandma can't come to the cottage, she has Anne Jina," my mother would say. When I learned it was an ailment, chest pain that meant her heart wasn't beating right, I felt sorry for her. Sort of. We had two grandmothers; Grandma K was the not-fun one, and it was she who provided the most competition for our mother's attention. Children are hard-hearted creatures.

My grandmother didn't die that day. The ambulance came and took her away. My mother visited her in the hospital most days until she was well enough to go home. My father wasn't happy. He had to drive her there before or after work while my other grandmother, the one who spoiled us, came to stay. It was fun even if it wasn't right that we loved her more. I was young but I knew that much. But hearts are funny things; they can be both soft and hard, and when they fail it seems that no one is ever ready.

Our dog was born with a congenital heart defect. At first they thought he wouldn't make it to adulthood. Tetralogy of Fallot, said the veterinarian, which makes the heart lopsided: too much blood on one side, not enough oxygen on the other. Yet of the two pups we got around the same time, he was the one who ran the fastest, was first out the door on walks and the least tired after. We were grateful for his apparent good health despite the vet's admonitions: his heart will tire out one day and then we'll have to see.

My grandmother never ran or jumped, at least not that I saw. All she ever seemed to do was sit in a chair, her bad leg up, having tea and making the occasional, caustic comment. Usually far more loudly than she should. "She's heavy through the leg, like I was," she observed to my mother one day as I left the room. I was a teenager then and wearing short shorts. My mother came into the hall to find me, silently laughing, the eternal cigarette between her two fingers. "She's deaf, you know. She thinks nobody can hear."

Grandma's deafness was a source of endless amusement in our family. One sweltering summer night when her snoring was keeping the entire cottage from sleeping, my mother got up and told her: "Mum, you're snoring!" She woke from her slumbers with a start, sat up and cried: "What? Eh? It's snowing?"

It wasn't kind to laugh at people's infirmities but it was different with old people. Besides, our grandmother often laughed at herself, which made it okay. Her odd expressions were legendary. "Her face would stop a clock," she would pronounce of some unfortunate looking woman."He'd eat a stone," in reference to the dog. And when we children asked, as we often did, "What's for dinner?" she replied, a twinkle in her eye: "A cold plate and a worm."

Her sense of humour held her in good stead when, one Christmas Eve, the dog mistook her false teeth on the nightstand for a bone. Grandma's only comment was, "Must've have a bit of grub on 'em!" My mother was terribly upset that her mother would miss out on her Christmas dinner but the gnarled set of teeth, which she jokingly called choppers, was somehow pushed back into shape enough for her to eat turkey.

I never understood why my mother made such a fuss over her. It irritated me somehow. She may have been my grandmother, but as human beings went, she was nothing special. She let her daughters do everything for her, never took any initiative on her own. From the height of my youthful arrogance, I told my mother as much.

"My mother hasn't had an easy life," she sniffed, drawing on her cigarette. She was angry but I got the feeling it wasn't just at me. She blew a cloud of smoke away from me. "Mother was an orphan," she whispered. Or perhaps just fatherless, born out of wedlock as they said back then; whatever her story, I was not impressed.

My aunt told a better one, about how Grandma K had run away from the army where she worked as a cook when she broke a glass jar into the jam.

"She went AWOL," my cousins joked. "There's an international mandate out for her arrest!" It was funny and not, awful yet exciting. Yet how could our grandmother, with her faulty ticker and funny expressions, have done anything so daring?

The real tragedy, the one no one ever talked about, was that her husband had died a young man, leaving her alone and with no money to raise three girls. "Daddy drank," whispered my mother. "She had to manage everything on her own."

Grandma K's heart finally gave out when I was twenty-one. By then I was no stranger to death; fun-Grandma had already been gone for several years, her heart strong but no match for cancer. I was old enough to understand, to fully empathize with my mother's loss. Yet it felt like a release when the nursing home called to say that she had died. Her life at that point was no life at all. We had visited her together at Christmas, just a few days before she passed. We took flowers and presents and a cake. I remember seeing the old bodies strapped to their chairs. How horrifying, I shuddered in the car after, the loss of freedom, all those decaying bodies and failing minds grouped together in death's ante-room.

"You're being overly dramatic," my mother had said, shaking her head. "They're well looked after in that home, three meals a day and lots of activities to keep them busy. I wouldn't mind."

"Yes, you would." I rolled my eyes, thinking death would be a better option. My father said nothing. Perhaps he agreed.

We named our next family dog after Grandma K. It was meant to be in fond remembrance. As it happened, the dog, a Dalmatian called Nellie, was quite the character. She smiled, for one thing, bunching up her lips over her teeth in a way that always made me think of the choppers. And when we moved, she became so frightened in the new house that she ran right through a plate glass window, opening up a huge gash in her chest. The vets managed to save her but when they stitched her back up, the two halves of her black spots didn't match.

He's had a good life, my husband and I tell each other now. Not a long life. Short but sweet. He has been so loved. Just think of all the pets who end up abandoned in shelters. We say these things but we don't believe them. Not really.

The dog surprises us when, a few moments later, his breathing calms and he sits up. His time is not yet. I ruffle his ears and my husband picks him up for a cuddle. We smile. He will live to see another day.

Our dog is precious to us but perhaps after all he, too, is nothing special. Dogs and grandmothers, it seems to me now, are excellent teachers. No matter how long they're with us, how good their hearts, we mostly outlive them. We survive the loss. And all the things we grownups say at such times are mostly to make ourselves feel better. Less alone and a little less frightened when we face the day, that inevitable day, when hearts fail.