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Tales from the Other Side of Language 111 The kennel is urgent. “Please! Sahaya really needs to be with you! She is doing poorly with us this time. She’s not even eating the scrambled eggs and cheese we made special for her! We must bring her to you!” I’m weak, apprehensive, and look forward to seeing her anyway. I expect her to bound into the house, all wiggly-happy and relieved to see me. She barely looks at me. Her body is limp and so transparent I think I can see through her. Her gaze is elsewhere, not here. I have a sinking feeling that she’s thinking whether to stay in this life or go. I wait a day for her to perk up, but she doesn’t. I’m impaired enough that I won’t drive. Friends take us to and from the vet. She is gravely ill with a rare blood disease. No reason. The vet gives a slim chance for her to live. I bank heavily on the chance, with high doses of steroids and soft baby food to entice her to eat. Too weak to go up the stairs to sleep, she stays downstairs. I feel too frail to sleep downstairs to cuddle near her. She gains some stamina and labors to get up the four stairs to the first landing toward my room and lies there looking pleased with herself. Two days later she manages her way up the next nine steps to the second landing, lies there panting with the effort. I come out of my room one bright morning to find her all the way upstairs, lying in the hallway, wagging her tail as I come around the corner. With effort, she raises her head, looks at me, adoringly. I am shameless, fall down beside her, hug her, in tears, full of admiration. “I think that you knew for a long time that I was not well, even before I knew myself. You had no way to tell me... You were heartbroken with worry when I was away so long.” As I speak, the words ring true. I think back on the many times she was accurate in responding to trouble in my patients, sensing the meditation students, walking around the room and choosing the person to be with. It is no stretch for me to think that she has been trying to help me all this time. I’m moved by this dog and her devotion. In a sudden inspiration I tell
112 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance: her, “We will get training together so that you will have ways to tell me what you know. I will find someone to help us teach you to be a service dog for me… I adore you, and it’s time to get you all the way well!” We’re downstairs together for the day and she sleeps there for the night. I come down the next morning, waiting for her little noises of getting up and moving to greet me with her eager face. The house feels empty; I don’t hear her. “Sahaya!” I call. There is barren silence. I run out to the garden, expecting to find her there, but there is only stillness. My eyes scan the yard until I see her white back serenely stretched out on the ground near the porch. I call out, “Sahaya!” but she doesn’t move. She lies facing an old door I found in the rafters of the garage. I attached it to the fence, and called it The Door to Other Worlds. She is cold when I lay my head on her body. She has gone through The Door and left me. Ruth’s husband comes, helps me carry her heavy body into the house, lays her on a soft yellow blanket on my painting table. I’m in a daze. First I clean her carefully. I act without plan or consciousness, find cloth and crow feathers around my studio, make streamers from the cloth. I tie the red cloth strips and black feathers gently on each of her paws, murmuring the little achings of my heart for her to hear. I find a rope of cowry shells, put them around her neck and add a red string of little bells. I want her beautiful when we take her for cremation. Grief floods everything, and my daughter comes to take care of me. As we come home with the little white box of ashes in my lap, she softly sings a niggun, a wordless, melancholy, sweet tune, in the darkened car. I caress the little white box as though petting a big dog in my lap. Sahaya lived her name. In Sanskrit her name means beautiful, golden companion. In our time together we radically changed one another. She filled my haven with her articulate silence, yet she was not silent. She spoke to me with sounds, attitude, movement, and intention. She came to understand the languages of my mouth and my energy, and I understood her ways of language. She blossomed into a dog beyond dog. Seeing that, I take courage
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We must be willing to give up the l
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Weeds, ink dr
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PART ONE: THE PRECIPITOUS ABYSS
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Tales from the Other Side of Langua
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