Cocoa Puffs.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. You do seem to have bad luck.”

I am very much Type A. I like to know where I am going, how I am getting there and when I will arrive. I make plans and lists only to cross things off and create new plans. Before making a decision I take a 360-degree look at my options. All of them. I second guess my decisions and I see all the grey between the black and the white.

I don’t like to be left in limbo.

But that’s exactly what’s happened. I’m left with a life unorganized, unplanned and undefined. And recent months have left me without plans and timelines and answers, turning limbo into an uncomfortable lurch. I have a life to live and hiccups, headaches and headwinds have grown tiresome and teary.  

After my husband died our dog … his dog … spiraled into a vomit, feces and urine-soaked decline that added insult to my injury. Because another death in the house wasn’t an option, my bank account hemorrhaged while we sought answers and allowed him to leave peacefully and comfortably until we were ready to accept his departure. And with one last sigh he laid his head in my lap and closed his chocolate brown eyes for the last time.

Our vet has guided us through the loss of three dogs in eight years. The first, mine, trotted happily around the neighbor until cancer took him and was partially responsible for my son’s premature arrival. The second, a Christmas gift that refused to stop giving, treated us to endless nights spent keeping his seizure-addled brain from going for a midnight dip from which there was likely no return. And then there was my husband’s dog, whose untimely decay reflected that of our own lives and his death a reflection of our own liberation.

And now this.

For two years I stood firm against the onslaught. Mom, when are we getting a dog again? I want a puppy and we’re naming her Hot Cocoa! We’ll walk her and pick up her poop. We promise.

In a moment of puppy-breath weakness I caved and for 10 months our life and our home have been a free-for-all that no amount of rawhide bones can save. Hot Cocoa is Coco-nuts. But watching her puppy love as she devotedly follows my daughter around the yard in the rain for hours, I remind myself that we’re halfway to normalcy in puppy years.

“Well, the tests are all negative, and her gums are starting to grow back. If she ate an electrical cord, you would know and she’d probably be dead. The only other cause might be that she ate a black widow or a brown recluse and it bit her on the way down.”

“And she’s still alive?”

“I hate to tell you this, but you could hit her with a truck AND chop her leg off and she wouldn’t even notice.”

Yes. I’ve noticed.