Magical Thinking

My love for you shall live forever. 

You, however, did not.  

~Lemony Snicket 

Today would have been Girly Girl’s 10^th birthday.  She’s been gone more than 2 years now and I still think about her every day.  Since she left, I have read countless stories of people who have lost their greyhounds to cancer.  Some of those people had even less time with their hounds than I had with my sweet girl.  I feel so angry and cheated about our short 3 ½ years together.  I can’t imagine what people feel like who had even less time than that. 

I confess to a certain amount of magical thinking where Girly Girl is concerned.  I often wonder just how far I might go to get her back.  I’ve thought about what I’d be prepared to give up if the end result were she came back to me.  An arm?  My house?  Blue?  Bettina?  Everything?  What if I had the option of a pet cemetery like the one in Stephen King’s novel Pet Sematary.  In that cemetery you had to bury your dead pet in the right spot and it returned to you alive.  The only problem was that it came back evil with the intent to kill you.  There is always fine print in any contract.  Knowing the result of a choice to bury her in a place like that, would I do it?  Would it be worth the eventual loss of my own life to have her back again? 

I think about having her cloned using DNA from the hair we clipped before she was cremated.  They say that you can end up with a dog that looks almost identical to the one you had.   Would it be enough to get a hound that looks exactly like her but is completely different in personality?  My cloned hound would not have a hock fracture, a hatred of snakes or a love for wild strawberries.  What if I got a hound that was similar to her in personality and mannerisms but looked nothing like her?  Would I be happy with either of those hounds? 

Lest you worry, I fully understand how insane these lines of thought are.  I know that these sorts of bargains can never be made and for very good reason.  The fine print gets you every time.  Would I be happy with a Girly Girl whose personality was completely changed from the Girly Girl I knew?  Probably not.  Would the thought of being able to fill the giant empty space in my heart tempt me to consider such an option were it actually available?  I would be a liar if I said it wouldn’t.  Would I give Blue or Bettina back if that were the only way to bring Girly Girl back home?   That’s a Sophie’s choice situation.  One big empty space might be filled, but two more spaces would be created. 

I think it’s the absolute powerlessness I feel over the course of events that led us to this point which causes me to explore these darker corners.  Once the diagnosis was given, the end result was a foregone conclusion.  We were sitting on those train tracks with no ability to get away, signal the driver or in any other way stop that train.  We ran around like crazy chickens with our heads cut off yet every time we looked up to see where the train was, we were somehow right back on the tracks and that train was so much closer. 

The truth of it all is that on any given day, I’m really not sure what I’d do if somehow presented with the option to get Girly Girl back at some great cost to me.  The thing that made Girly Girl so special was her soul and the experiences she went through that shaped her into the steel core magnolia she was.  It didn’t have to do with her mannerisms or her outer shell.    So here’s to Girly Girl’s would be 10^th birthday.  You are so very missed by your crazy Mumma.