“Maybe the octopus isn’t going to leave.”
My answer to that is a glare.
“Maybe the octopus isn’t going to leave, and what you’re doing is emotionally detaching from Lily.”
My stomach turns. “That’s offensive. You’re being offensive.”
“I’m not meaning to be. It’s a natural reaction to grief.”
“Grief?” I say it with three question marks, as the word catches me by surprise. “What are you talking about? I’m not grieving.”
Jenny raises an eyebrow as if to say, Aren’t you?
“Grieving what? I’m fully focused on forcing the octopus to leave.”
“Why can’t you do both?” she asks.
Look who showed up to play.
Jenny continues. “Why can’t you focus on getting the octopus to leave and prepare yourself for the possibility that he may not?”
“He will leave.”
“I’ll leave that for you and the vet to say. But Lily is older, and you’ve said yourself that she was the runt of her litter and her health has at times been tenuous. Unless something catastrophic happens to you in the near future, in all likelihood she is going to predecease you, and in the greater context of your life, relatively soon. If it’s not the octopus that takes her, something else will eventually. A rhinoceros or a giraffe.”
“A rhinoceros or a gir— How would a dog have a giraffe?” New Jenny has gone completely around the bend.
“It’s natural, as our loved ones age, to start grieving their loss. Even before we lose them.”
I run her words by my imaginary therapist, the one who I count on to take Jenny’s bungled advice and turn it into something less botched. He’s strangely silent for once; I’m afraid it means he finds nothing wrong with her diagnosis.
“What is grief, anyhow? What does it even mean?” I’m being obstinate.
“People describe it in different ways. I’d say it’s a temporary derangement. Freud put it as something like a departure from the normal attitude toward life.”
I stare Jenny square in the eyes so she can see my annoyance. “One, my questions were rhetorical. I know what grief is. Two, thank you for calling me deranged.”
Jenny smiles as if to soften her insult. “Grief is a pathological condition. It’s just that so many of us go through it in life that we never think to treat it as such. We just expect people to go through it, endure it, and come out the other side.”
The sun pours through the window and lands in a puddle just beyond Jenny’s feet. She kicks off her shoes and stretches her naked toes into the sunlight. It reminds me of Lily, who makes a catlike effort to find whatever sun she can to nap in. It’s not uncommon for me to find her with just her hind legs resting in her bed, the rest of her body stretched across the sun-warmed linoleum.
I think of the Valium and Vicodin that have sometimes been my sunshine; my desire to crawl into their warming rays. “Fine. I’m grieving. Maybe you can write me a prescription.”
Unfortunately, Jenny knows my fears about addiction (we’ve covered that topic exhaustively) and doesn’t bite. “We’ll see.”
Maybe I, too, am suffering impairment from the presence of the octopus, seizures in reason. My thoughts of late have resembled those of a small child more than the thinking of a grown man: the magical rationalization of needing to be gone so the octopus can leave; my desire to be intimidating, bigger than I am, to have the hurricane in me; the need to express everything in a tantrum.
“What do you think of when you think of mourning?” Jenny asks. The question snaps me back to attention.
I answer without really thinking. “I guess ‘Funeral Blues’ by W. H. Auden. I think it was Auden. I suppose that’s not very original.”
“I don’t know it.”
“It’s a poem.”
“I gathered.”
“I’m just clarifying. It’s not a blues album.”
Jenny ignores my swipe at her intelligence. “Does your response need to be original? Isn’t that what poetry is for? For the poet to express something so personal that it ultimately is universal?”
I shrug. Who is Jenny, even New Jenny, to say what poetry is for? Who am I, for that matter?
“Why do you think of that poem in particular?”
“ ‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone; Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone; Silence the pianos and with muffled drum; Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.’ ” I learned the poem in college and it stuck.
Jenny savors these words like she’s testing a bottle of wine before saying, “Not inappropriate.”
And this is where Old Jenny returns. This is where her observations are all wrong; this is where she’s a nightmare as a therapist. It is inappropriate. It does not fit the situation or merit consideration in the context of our discussion, mostly for one glaring reason: Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
I can feel another tantrum rising inside me.
“It’s inappropriate if it’s the dog you are mourning!”
Sunday
The frozen turkey lands with a thud in the sink and it startles Lily awake. “Keep it down! Jeez.” Lily hates to be interrupted from a good nap.
I hadn’t intended to buy a frozen turkey, or a turkey at all, for that matter, but it’s hard to find a fresh turkey in June and I was desperate to prove I’m not grieving. What better way to demonstrate I’m not suffering a pathological condition than to throw a celebration, in particular a celebration for everything we have to be thankful for? And nothing accompanies the giving of thanks better
