Regret.

I don’t have a lot of regrets in my life. It’s not that there aren’t major moments of cringe and shame that still haunt me, but I don’t actually want to go back and change the events that led up to them because that’s where I learned the most about myself, my character, who I am and who I’m not. For me, regret is about the decisions you wish you could go back and change and the only one that comes to mind was not being there for Emma, my yellow Labrador Retriever, the moment she crossed over. The week she died I was all the way across the country for work. I had a project in New York and I was planning to stay a couple extra days to play. I was still living in San Francisco at the time and Emma was staying with my mom and her husband on their three acres in McCloud, at the base of Mt. Shasta. Emma loved my stepdad in a way that she no longer loved me. I remember talking to my mom on the phone at the beginning of the week when she suddenly gasped and yelled ‘Emma.’ I asked what was wrong and she said Emma had collapsed in the yard. Every day I would check in to see how she was doing and it was clear that she was on her way out. So I called the airlines and told them a friend was passing and I needed to get home to say ‘good-bye’. They changed my ticket without penalty so I could get home on Friday instead of Sunday. I landed at SFO around 3:30 or 4:00 and got a cab to the Marina. Surprisingly, there wasn’t any rush-hour traffic yet. I had mentally rehearsed the steps I would take to get there as soon as I could in a way to send her home feeling loved and filled with the happy memories of our time together. As soon as I got home, I packed a quick overnight bag, grabbed two small jars, and drove to Chrissy Field where Emma first learned to swim. I filled one jar with ocean water and one jar with sand. They say that smell is our most powerful sense to evoke past memory. I can only imagine how much more powerful it is for dogs with their 300 million olfactory receptors compared to our paltry 6 million. When I got to McCloud almost six hours later, I rushed in the front door with my two jars and was stopped in my tracks by the stench of physical decay – it was Emma, rotting from the inside. She hadn’t eaten or drunk since the day she fell. Her eyes were glued open and she lay there, conscious but unblinking. My mom tried to keep her eyes hydrated but to no avail. We agreed to take her to the vet and put her down in the morning. After I adjusted to the putrid odor, I knelt by Emma’s head, opened the jar of water, and placed it next to her sweet pinkish-brown nose - it came to life and started twitching! I could see that she remembered better times, for her and for us. I intended to sleep by her side that night, in spite of the smell. I lay my head, lightly touching her belly, massaging the soft little spot between her brows. I had heard that dogs sometimes hang onto life when their owners are near and told myself that I didn’t want Emma to do that for me – she had already waited three lifeless days for me to get to her, she didn’t need to wait any more. I told myself that she was suffering too much and went to sleep in the guest room. I told myself it was for Emma, but deep down, I can’t escape the guilty feeling that I did it for me – the smell was just unbearable. I felt it clinging to my nostrils, my clothes, my hair, my skin. Around 3:14 in the morning, I felt a fluttering by my ear. It woke me up. I was about to go back to sleep when the thought occurred to me that it was Emma. So I got up to check on her. Sure enough, she had just passed. Her eyes were still glassy and her body was warm, but she was no longer breathing. She waited for me to get home. And then she visited me to assure me that she was finally free. I can’t shake my regret that she died alone. She deserved better than that. She deserved better than me. I should have stayed and held her paw. This is the memory – and regret – that still breaks me.