Just We Two

If you capture a life in a eulogy or memorial service or blog post, what kind of superficial shitty life did they lead? It’s impossible for one with any sort of life that was rich and full, like lightly touching one dangling thread and saying you knew every feel of the fabric and every shape of the garment. 

In the beginning, there was Phyllis Ann Lacey, the eldest of four who lost her dad at an early age. She loved and lost, made and mended, danced and laughed, studied and sassed, listened to music and played music and sang music, and had the best childhood one could have in spite of circumstances and surroundings that were less than idyllic or ideal. 

Then, just under seven months before I came on the scene, there was Phyllis Ann Haight, a teen mom from St. Helen in a time and place where either was a challenge. A wife and mother, a friend and a traveler, continuing her education in school and in life, an inquisitive spirit searching for the next challenge and the next adventure, even if it was only in her back yard. 

Finally, after a beat and a breath and a brief intermission, there was Phyllis Ann Dale, still a wife and mother, but now a member of wider communities borne of marriage and vocation and the acts of creation. Some of those memberships offered lasting joy, like grandmother and great-grandmother, while others were bitter trials, like the passing of her mother and two separate bouts of leukemia, but she knew there wasn’t magic without loss. 

The moment you were stitched into the fabric of her love, you would never leave. She offered the comfort of this fabric to all, from strangers to family members old and new, and while the fabric may stretch and fray from time to time, she always knew how and when to care and repair, to change the dimensions as needed while still keeping the garment supportive and intact. 

For me, she was my #1 fan, as immutable as the elements and as predictable as the seasons. She wanted to read what I wrote, listen to what I sang, watch what I performed, and hear what I had to say. Who was I to deny such an audience? I took for granted there would be more time, one more “like” on a Facebook page, one more chuckle from my dumb jokes, one more phone call or voice mail, one more song to shout somewhat on key, one more dangling thread. 

She was Phyllis Ann Dale for over half her life when a nagging pain in her side in October became the calling card for the cancer that would ultimately claim her life less than three months later. As I sit today under the constant curtains of anger and sorrow and fatigue, I feel that she died twice – first when we received the official diagnosis in a hospital conference room in early December, and again when the prognosis of six months fell away in a matter of weeks, time taken and time lost, the fabric ripped beyond repair or recognition. We didn’t even get Christmas. 

Regardless, as I look at the lives she gave me, time and time again in ways great and small, I try to take comfort in the knowledge that there will always be one more time, for as long as I draw breath and see and feel her creations. And when I am gone and those creations find their new homes and hearts, Phyllis will be there, to warm and to comfort, a story to tell one thread at a time. 

“and the dust returns to the Earth as it was, And the spirit returns to God who gave it” – Ecclesiastes 12:7 

I always liked dogs, whether they were our family’s or someone else’s, but I never quite had my dogs. As she was the first, Happy was most likely the closest, but we had a physical break when we moved to Colorado for Dad’s time in the military, and when we returned to Roscommon, Happy was fattened up by a steady and unrelenting diet of people food largely cooked by Dad’s grandmother. We got her thinner with time and exercise back at the Pere Cheney house, but some spell of ownership and personal connection had been broken, and when she died on Halloween in 1984, I was sad but not bereft, as I could toggle my affections to Chocolate at Dad’s tiny house on the Au Sable. 

When Courtney and I first started dating, her visits to Petoskey were without her dogs Wyatt and Olive, but I met them soon enough when I visited her apartment in Belding. I wasn’t used to smaller dogs, especially dogs that wanted to keep their place in the bed where we tried to sleep, but soon enough, I was won over. The first moment that comes to mind was when I walked them in the apartment courtyard and Olive looked at me with her human eyes while stepping right into Wyatt’s fresh turd. How could one resist that? 

When we became a family in the little Petoskey house, and later the Gaylord home, I tried to warm Olive up without really knowing that the Scottie breed was a bit standoffish by nature. Regardless, I eventually got her to lay by my hip in the early morning and late at night, even if she stuck to her own personal space in between those times. Wyatt – the white West Highland Terrier – was always the cuddle bug, so he was easy to love. I got so used to our family of four that when Olive was diagnosed with bladder cancer, dying months later, I was struck with sorrow like I never felt before. It’s been more than three years since she left us, and I’m still heartbroken. 

Less than a year after she died, we moved our family of three to a house outside of Petoskey during the first flush of the pandemic, and when Courtney went off to work under uncertain and dangerous circumstances, it was Wyatt and me alone while the world raged on around us. I was out of the classroom for a year and a half, with Wyatt as my constant companion morning and noon and night. And even if he was quieter and less playful than he was when Olive was alive, he was still my guy. And it hurt to watch my guy get more and more gimpy, losing traction on the faux wood floors of the house as his sight and hearing eroded by the month. 

In the end, it was a mass on his liver pushing fluid into the abdomen, which made his heart work harder and faster to keep the lights on. Hours before we euthanized him, I was walking him along our usual early morning route when he wobbled and fell over, his aged body wracked with a seizure, and I thought he was going to die right in front of me. Once the seizure passed, we walked around a bit more until his shivering was too much to bear, then I brought him into the house and wrapped him up in blankets and held him to my chest until he warmed up enough to banish the shaking cold. Four hours later, he was gone. 

If I work hard to throw myself into this thing or the other, I can have a few moments where I stand outside time and don’t think about or feel for Mom or Wyatt, but then it passes and I’m like a ship buffeted by gales of grief from different directions, the unpredictable pitch and yaw of a journey that feels colder and darker than before without their guiding lights. Cliches are mobilized, thoughts and prayers are summoned on my behalf, and one day passes into the next in a reality I don’t want to live in but am forced to endure, sad forever, hoping for the next sliver of distraction. But I'll never stop missing the gifts of their love and affection, and despite the pain, I hope for everyone to have that love and affection in their lives.