Jakk reminds me of a Paul Verlaine poem, "Mon Reve Familier." I never know what or who he will be from day to day.
| Je fais souvent ce rêve étrange
et pénétrant D'une femme inconnue, et que j'aime, et qui m'aime Et qui n'est, chaque fois, ni tout à fait la même Ni tout à fait une autre, et m'aime et me comprend. Car elle me comprend, et mon coeur, transparent Pour elle seule, hélas ! cesse d'être un problème Pour elle seule, et les moiteurs de mon front blême, Elle seule les sait rafraîchir, en pleurant. Est-elle brune, blonde ou rousse ? - Je l'ignore. Son nom ? Je me souviens qu'il est doux et sonore Comme ceux des aimés que la Vie exila. Son regard est pareil au regard des statues, Et, pour sa voix, lointaine, et calme, et grave, elle a L'inflexion des voix chères qui se sont tues. |
He recently lost one of his companions, Xena the Warrior Cat. She was 20 years old, and until she got sick, was very active. She, like Jakk, would not back down. I can't say that she won any battles with him, but she was stiff competition. Not a whoos like Frankie. She would wait for Frankie and as he tried to sneak by, ears back, tail down, she would extend the claw and swat him.
I remember taking Frankie to the yard and coming back upstairs and much later realizing he hadn't come up. Realizing he was still downstairs, I went down to find him like petrified rock - frozen in front of Xena. She wouldn't let him cross through the door to come up. They had quite different relationships with one cat. Bully to one, coward to the other.
So when she passed, Jakk got angry at me and refused to go to sleep. He also developed this habit of walking into corners and not knowing how he got there or how to get out. So when this happened, he would start whining for help. This usually happened in the middle of the night. I remember hearing him whining through my sleep. I went to find him and he wasn't in his usual corners (behind the bathroom door, wedged between the night stand and the wall,in the living room stuck behind a plant stand). I even looked under the bed.
At 2 o'clock in the morning I had all the lights on in the house looking for this dog. And I couldn't find him. And of course, he stopped whining. Finally, he materialized out of thin air and just sat there as if to say "looking for me?"
This went on for a few days until I finally called his vet, who recommended dementia medicine (a no-no) or melatonin. Did I rush out to buy the melatonin? In the words of Sara Palin, "You betcha."
And I finally got some sleep.
He still looks for her, just not in the middle of the night. But he will go into the far reaches of the yard under thorny shrubs and seek her out. And expect me to rescue him. And I do, because that's what friendship is all about.
