Goodbye, Glenna

Glenna Skye McMichael 2000-2010

I put Glenna to sleep yesterday, then drove to McCall and buried her in Dave and Lori’s pet cemetery. Angus kept me company the whole day, and seemed finally – on returning home – to realize she was gone. When Leslie got home from work she cried hard because she hadn’t been able to at work. I felt bad for her and tried to cheer her up. We’ve been taking turns grieving. I seem to do it better alone for some reason.

I’m almost, but not quite, embarrassed by how much this whole dog thing has affected me. She was my first dog and was my unflagging companion for the most intense decade of my life. I got her just a couple weeks after quitting academia and moving to Boise, where I had no job and knew nobody. If I’ve learned anything in the 24 hours since she passed it’s that I vastly underestimated how sad I would be.

What I want to say most is that she helped me with a lot of things. I realized this early on in our relationship. Here’s an excerpt from a log I kept for the first month or two, when I was trying to develop a freelance writing career and struggling with writer’s block:

“This morning Glenna wouldn’t eat. She’s developed this weird habit of running to her bowl, grabbing a mouthful of kibble, and dashing a few feet away, dropping the bits to the floor, and eating them one by one. As I stood on the carpeted and dog-free side of the little fence between the kitchen and the living room, I looked down and watched her drop her mouthful of food directly below me, the chickpea-sized dark brown chunks scattering randomly over a foot-wide circle on the white linoleum floor. For an instant I noticed her trying to decide which bit to go for first but she seemed stymied by too many choices, and in the same instant I recognized myself in her rapidly moving, gorgeous hazel eyes.

“Writing is such an odd medium of communication. We take reading for granted, those of us lucky enough to be able to read, and we kind of need to take it for granted or we would not be able to finish reading the back of a milk carton. But writing can’t be taken for granted because the writer faces infinite choice on every level – word use, sentence structure, paragraph strategy and organization, rhetoric. And much more. Choice expands exponentially, of course, for those writers who choose their own topics. And this explosion of choice I watched Glenna experience with her chow this morning helped me realize something about the “writer’s block” I’ve experienced lately. I have too many things I want to write about, so many that I don’t really get to any of them. It seems obvious now, but was nothing but frustrating in the midst of it.

“And the great thing is that Glenna not only revealed the problem to me, she also provided its solution by coming as close to writing as a dog can. She began her day’s food intake by picking up one piece at a time, finishing it, and moving on to the next one. And I went to my computer and wrote this.”

Click to see a photo album of Glenna

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