Fiona Apple on Saying Goodbye to her Dog

It’s 6pm on Friday, and I’m writing to a few thousand friends I have not met yet. I’m writing to ask them to change our plans and meet a little while later.

Here’s the thing.

I have a dog, Janet, and she’s been ill for about 2 years now, as a tumor has been idling in her chest, growing ever so slowly. She’s almost 14 years old now. I got her when she was 4 months old. I was 21 then — an adult, officially — and she was my kid.

She is a pitbull, and was found in Echo Park, with a rope around her neck, and bites all over her ears and face.

She was the one the dogfighters use to puff up the confidence of the contenders.

She’s almost 14 and I’ve never seen her start a fight, or bite, or even growl, so I can understand why they chose her for that awful role. She’s a pacifist.

Janet has been the most consistent relationship of my adult life, and that is just a fact. We’ve lived in numerous houses, and joined a few makeshift families, but it’s always really been just the two of us.

She slept in bed with me, her head on the pillow, and she accepted my hysterical, tearful face into her chest, with her paws around me, every time I was heartbroken, or spirit-broken, or just lost, and as years went by, she let me take the role of her child, as I fell asleep, with her chin resting above my head.

She was under the piano when I wrote songs, barked any time I tried to record anything, and she was in the studio with me, all the time we recorded the last album.

The last time I came back from tour, she was spry as ever, and she’s used to me being gone for a few weeks, every 6 or 7 years.

She has Addison’s Disease, which makes it more dangerous for her to travel, since she needs regular injections of Cortisol, because she reacts to stress and excitement without the physiological tools which keep most of us from literally panicking to death.

Despite all this, she’s effortlessly joyful & playful, and only stopped acting like a puppy about 3 years ago. She is my best friend, and my mother, and my daughter, my benefactor, and she’s the one who taught me what love is.

I can’t come to South America. Not now. When I got back from the last leg of the US tour, there was a big, big difference.

She doesn’t even want to go for walks anymore.

I know that she’s not sad about aging or dying. Animals have a survival instinct, but a sense of mortality and vanity, they do not. That’s why they are so much more present than people.

But I know she is coming close to the time where she will stop being a dog, and start instead to be part of everything. She’ll be in the wind, and in the soil, and the snow, and in me, wherever I go.

I just can’t leave her now, please understand. If I go away again, I’m afraid she’ll die and I won’t have the honor of singing her to sleep, of escorting her out.

Sometimes it takes me 20 minutes just to decide what socks to wear to bed.

But this decision is instant.

These are the choices we make, which define us. I will not be the woman who puts her career ahead of love & friendship.

I am the woman who stays home, baking Tilapia for my dearest, oldest friend. And helps her be comfortable & comforted & safe & important.

Many of us these days, we dread the death of a loved one. It is the ugly truth of Life that keeps us feeling terrified & alone. I wish we could also appreciate the time that lies right beside the end of time. I know that I will feel the most overwhelming knowledge of her, and of her life and of my love for her, in the last moments.

I need to do my damnedest, to be there for that.

Because it will be the most beautiful, the most intense, the most enriching experience of life I’ve ever known.

When she dies.

So I am staying home, and I am listening to her snore and wheeze, and I am revelling in the swampiest, most awful breath that ever emanated from an angel. And I’m asking for your blessing.

I’ll be seeing you.

Love,

Fiona

seen on Brain Pickings

lizarts:

kateordie:

mockingwords:

This is what people see as they commute to work in Philly. 
Hollaback Philly is absolutely doing it right. 

YEAH

AMEN. Confronting all of the awful sexist mother fuckers who make me feel unsafe in my own neighborhood.

(via edwardjkelly)

Source: poweredbygirl

The Roundest Lady: "Have you fallen in love with San Francisco yet?"

theroundestlady:

The confronting thing about 6th Street wasn’t so much that I felt unsafe (although I did and wanted to get out of there as soon as I realised where I was). It was confronting because it made me realise all the problems we see on TV and in films – the crime, the gangs, the poverty, the drug use, the downward spiral into places we can only imagine – it’s all real. We watch shows like The Wire or any number of programs that show the extreme levels of disadvantage some people experience in the U.S. and we know at the back of our minds it’s all based in reality and that the culture exists, but we’re so far away from it for it to be real to us. We are literally an ocean away from it – the only place we see it is in the media, so in a way we can’t even comprehend how it could be real.
…

I’ll affirm pretty much all of this. San Franciscans have the most bizarre ability to look right through the terrible sadness that surrounds them pretty much all the time. Everyone has their pet cocktail story about the shockingly disgusting thing they saw in the Tenderloin last week, and everybody agrees it’s a real problem all right, but isn’t San Francisco the most beautiful place you’ve ever been?

Denmark sounds nice.

(via pragmagic)

Source: theroundestlady