Earlier, I wrote about the problems a friend's mentally unstable daughter had brought to the family, about how not jumping to bail her out of her trouble--and jail-- had been the way to get her out of jail and into rehab. It turns out the story has an even happier ending. Prepare yourself, though, because on the surface it's very sad.
For the past five or six years that my friend's daughter was moving around the low end, drug dealing part of an urban area, her constant companion was a blue-eyed Husky dog rescued from the pound. No matter how low she got, how homeless or foodless or drug addled, she very faithfully took care of that dog, refusing to be parted from it, even when she was homeless.
The insistent love she lavished on this most astonishingly mild mannered animal, even in the darkest moments of her descent from decency, seemed to me a sonar beacon. I suggested to my friend that bond was transmitting from the depths a clear, hopeful message. Her daughter's greatest suffering was not the ravages of street drugs. silicone implants, bulimia or pimp violence. It was that she knew all along she wasn't right, that she had a dangerous mental imbalance. She could see it taking over but she couldn't stop it. Her attempt at hanging on to a "normal" live was keeping that dog, a non-judgmental companion who wouldn't leave her no matter how awful things got. He was there to share her secret truth, and be a reminder of her innocent childhood with the family pet.
That husky was a patient, generous canine who never demanded anything. He was thin but he looked fed and alert. He never jumped on people, howled or got in the way. He was just there, hovering, year after year hovering as my friend's daughter went from horrible circumstances to worse and then even more worse, around and around in a vicious cycle of depravity.
When the police took her to jail, the one call my friend's daughter was allowed to make went to her mother: "Please take my dog," she pleaded. "Take care of my dog." This was not the first time my friend had been asked to do this and not the first time that she took the Husky in, even though her aged cat was not amused. He was an old dog now, but no trouble really, mostly staying in the barn on a mound of blankets.
A month went by. The first thing my friend's daughter wanted when she got out of jail was the dog. She took him to the room she got while trying to be admitted to a year-long rehab program. She brushed him, she fed and walked him. She even thanked her parents for their help with him--a first. My friend told me her daughter upon questioning, confessed she had always clearly known that she was not right and not doing the right thing. "I knew when I was 13," the daughter told her Mom, "that there was this bad me taking over the good me."
Three weeks ago, the state found a place for my friend's daughter in their rehab program. It is also a safe place for someone turned states' evidence in a drug dealer case. When she moved in to the dormitory, my friend got the dog again. After the week of orientation and evaluation, my friend went to the campus. What she found there was re-assuring, so re-assuring it started to loosen the 30-year load on her mind. She was impressed with the care and the concept but mostly she couldn't get over how determined her child had get back to a normal, decent life, and to make up for her lapses with her brother's girls. But she wasn't getting her hopes too high.
In the middle of that night, the dog had seizures: horrible, painful, scary seizures. The next day, my friend raced him up to see her daughter, so her daughter could see something was happening to the dog. Then she brought him back to her house, into the house, and that night surrounded by my friend, her husband and her daughter's son, he died.
"I know what you're going to say," she said the next morning on the phone. "I've learned how you Buddhists think and this time I know what you're going to say and you're going to be right. Huskies are sled dogs; they pull people through. This dog knew my daughter had reached safety, so his job was done. He was 12 years old. That's much longer than the average Husky lives. He must've hung on to go that whole far distance with my child. And I think he left us to say: she's going to be all right now. You won't need me."
~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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