I thought about putting this in dp's thread about Gerry's (RAT900) untimely demise, but didn't want this to get lost in the shuffle there.....

Many of you will recall that back in late 2008 I lost my father unexpectedly. Shittiest of shitty was that he slumped over at the wheel and almost took my mother with him when they left the road at speed and careened through a heavily wooded area. Gerry and I had shared many a PM, and an e-mail or two, and at this moment of tragedy he reached out to me with a tale he had written about his own father's passing.

The news today bothered me all day at work. I'm all choked up and damn near in tears typing this right now. Gerry told me then to share it with anyone who might need to read it. I feel selfish to keep it to myself, so here it is:

DOG-SITTING

Not too long ago my youngest sister Amy was explaining to me that she and a group of friends from her office decided to do something different after work rather than go for the usual drinks at the neighboring pub. Upon consensus they decided to go visit a psychic one of them knew of.

They all thought it would be good for a few laughs. The woman was rumored to have helped locate the bodies of the four youths who had drowned off City Island the other winter after they swamped a rowboat they attempted to row over to Potters Field on the neighboring island.

It started when I came home from work that evening and found a message on my answering machine from Amy. She called me at home to say that she and a few friends had gone on this lark to visit a fortune teller.

They all expected to hear about their prospects for romance and the usual blather that these types dish out. To my sister’s surprise the woman started asking the group of girls for Amy…the psychic had zeroed right in on her, and was asking for her by name. My sister cringed thinking her friends had set her up..so she went along with it and told the old woman she was “Amy”. The psychic looked at her and said, “Your father has a message for your brother Gerry”.

She said his message to me was "Tell Gerry I have the dog."….she repeated it several times.

Amy said the woman was trying to say the dog's name but was having trouble “channeling it”, so evidently according to the medium, my father settled for "the dog" in order to get the message across.

The dog's name was Siegfried.

Amy was a bit rattled as she knew immediately that if any of this was possible, it related directly to a German Shepherd I once owned- however she did not fully understand the value or meaning of the statement the psychic had offered to her. But she certainly got more than she bargained for in going along with the idea of a fun time at a psychic’s shop in the back of an old Italian bakery.

As she related this story to me, my first response to her was; “Great! You mean my poor make the beast with two backsing dog is in hell with him?”………….we both laughed.

We buried our father in 1982, he was 56 years old at the time of his death, and he welcomed the final heart attack that took him out. He had simply decided he had lived beyond any redemption and had made too much a mess of everything to sort it out.

Six months prior to our father’s death, I was in a world in which my wife was struggling to manage our 1 year-old twins and at the time, was in sobbing crisis on a daily basis. She felt she couldn't manage the twins along with our 9 year-old German Shepherd and female Collie Shepherd, two animals I had brought into our marriage. My wife was overwhelmed with the responsibility of twins and suffered from some manner of post-birth depression, I was seriously afraid for her. She asked repeatedly if we could give the dogs away.

That seemed an impossible request on her part as both dogs were bonded to each other and to me. When I would leave them with family or with friends when traveling, neither would eat until I returned. My Shepherd would literally starve himself and once went close to a week without eating. The dog even declined the desperate offers of porterhouse and sirloin steaks from my family when I was away. Putting the dogs out for adoption would have been a cruelty I was not capable of. Death seemed kinder…in my family of origin, death has seemed the kinder option on many occasions for many members…

It broke my heart to do it, but I finally had both dogs put down at the vet's office- I had a greater obligation to my wife and children. Crying like a kid in some vintage Disney heartbreaker, I did what I had to. The decision never sat well with me, it never will and it has always been what I consider to be one of the darkest moments of my life. The dogs were 9 years old when I put them down, a good run, but there were years ahead we did not get to share.

Needless to say my wife's sense of being overwhelmed did not diminish one whit, was not alleviated with the termination of the pets and I was two dogs short in my efforts to make the impossible, better. And I lost two fierce guardians of the children, creatures who adored the twins and were proud of the additions to their “pack.” More than once my Shepherd alerted us to the little crawlers pulling on lamp cords or otherwise approaching danger.

Anyway, at my father's funeral, I had experienced some really mixed feelings about his death...the prevailing one was a sense of relief that he was finally over. He wasn’t a particularly kind sort of father, rather he was pretty damn angry, brutal and devoid of any warmth. It was only in his last years that he was quiet and had softened somewhat but only because he lived in a state of humility borne of defeat…..broken.

I always figured I would eventually find a place for my memory of him to either reside peacefully in me or somehow I would manage to dispose of the weight of his memory…yet I never quite found where to park him or drop him off for the 22 years after his death. I became weary of the bitter taste that came with carrying him around so I knew I’d drop him off somewhere, eventually, hopefully soon.

One of the few things about my father late in his life, that I found redeeming, was his absolute love for my dog. For whatever reasons Siegfried took a liking to my father and my father responded in kind. Here was a man whom every human being (including himself) had seemingly disappointed, we as children, let him down and he in turn let all of us down, he lived alone until the end.

At that late date in my father’s life, he only seemed to find genuine comfort in spending time with my dog. I would leave that German Shepherd with him for hours and it would leave my father with some animation in his eyes. My father’s interactions with all of us were so contaminated with his own sense of guilt and shame that it was painful to spend any protracted amount of time with him. The conversations were stilted and awkward and never of any genuine substance, we, in turn were all too angry to let him off the hook.

The dog was extraordinary in many ways; he came to be with me in one of the blackest, bleakest loneliest periods of my life. It was during a time before I re-met and ultimately married my future wife. This awkward puppy with tree-stump legs gave me something to live for when I was at an age and circumstance where I had no real obligations tethering me to the world and no credible idea of why I was even here.

I invested every ounce of caring and effort I could muster into training the 10 week-old puppy, he responded to my efforts with incredible clarity and speed to the degree that it appeared he was an intuitive learner. The dog never ceased in his desire to let me know that he was operating on a level far above what I might ever expect. At nearly every opportunity he would seek to demonstrate or communicate to me that he was actively thinking. I never ceased to be impressed by him. None of my Shepherds since have come close to him in terms of sheer intelligence, but then I have never since been able to invest as much effort or attachment into any of them.

Anyway, I had Siegfried and his partner Sadie put down only a few months before my father's death- a far more painful event than burying my own father. Only my sister Cathy's suicide surpassed the pain of giving up those dogs.

At the time my father took the news about Siegfried in stride during a dog-less visit to him, probably viewed it as just one more loss in a life choked with disappointments and losses.

Well back to the point now; at the close of the viewing/wake for my father at the funeral home, everyone else had gone out to the limo's to queue up for the ride to the cemetery.

Before the ushers sealed up my father's casket, I asked them to wait a moment. I went up to his coffin and looked down at him one last time- he was old beyond his years, tired, self-defeated, consumed by his demons and now as lifeless in body as he was lifeless in spirit in his final years of living.

I don't know why, but I felt sorry for him, I took a momentary break from my lifetime of anger and resentment toward him. For a moment all I saw were the remains of a very scared human who was so lost in life, he tried to bluff  his way through it, unfortunately for him life turned and called his bluffs and he folded. I found myself hoping he wouldn't be equally as lost in death.

It was sad that in the end the most I could come up with for him, was pity, I had no place for him that could feel any sorrow….. for I could not find the love in me that would have made that possible- that had been bullied and beaten out of me decades before..

For some reason, I brought with me that final day, one of the more beautiful snapshots I had of my German Shepherd. I tucked the photo inside my father’s coffin and just whispered at his body; "go find my Siegfried and take good care of him for me".

I guess in some part of me..I was just hoping he would find some peace and companionship wherever he had gone, and that I might get some peace for myself in return. I then turned and left.

I had forgotten I had placed that photo of Siegfried in my father’s coffin nearly 22 years ago…..and said those words. I only remembered it after speaking with my sister the other night about her adventure at the psychic’s shop

“Tell Gerry I have the Dog”,…. who really knows what is exactly real and what isn’t?  I don’t pretend to have all the answers anymore………..

But since that conversation with my sister, I think maybe I don’t have to figure out how or where to dismiss my recollection of my father.

Maybe he finally heard his son’s heart speaking to him that day in that funeral parlor, and for the first and final time he listened and honored what I asked of him.  

So I think maybe I have found a gentler place in my heart where I might carry my father- where he won’t weigh so heavily on me….alongside the memory of an old German Shepherd dog I once knew and so dearly loved

GFH

Thanks Gerry, I'm glad to have known you at least a little.  

Thanks for sharing this

....choke...

What a story, thanks. 

Damn...  For a few minutes there, I was connecting with Gerry and his amazing story telling.  Sad to come to the end and realize that he is gone.

Thanks for sharing this...

Sooo many stories/lessons he had.

It had actually crossed my mind after you mentioned this story previously about asking you if you would share and then... there it was.

Thank you.   

 
and this is what made him special, his unique take on things that also had an large element of relatability.
Don't mourn him for losing him (just imagine how he'd roll his eyes at that and point out some of the absurdity of it), instead celebrate the fact he was here at all and the memories he left us.
My favorite thing he ever told the tale of was the mime getting his ass kicked. I've repeated that one quite a bit and of course properly credited the source of the story.

Thanks lethe, good point.
The mime story is my favorite too, and so very RAT.
to Gerry

I've been stealing a few moments here and there today to go back and re-read some of my favorites of his writing here. It still makes me smile and leaves me in awe of his skills as a storyteller. I played hookey from work this morning, rode over Mingus mountain with a friend for breakfast, and thoroughly botched the re-telling of this story in an attempt to explain to my buddy just what a singular fellow Gerry was: http://www.ducatimonsterforum.org/index.php?topic=54722.0

^^ the chimps!!! I'd forgotten about them, thanks!


RAT opines on mimes:
http://www.ducatimonsterforum.org/index.php?topic=40307.0

What a tremendous story and so typical of Rat - hard to read without misting up a bit.  I had a few PM's with him and sure wish we could have had some face time.  He had a lot to teach.

thank u for sharing DOG-SITTING

i hope somebody within his family finds and publishes his stories.

Quote from: bobspapa on June 27, 2013, 08:29:05 PM
i hope somebody within his family finds and publishes his stories.

I talked to him about writing a book, he said he might do it.

Bravo.