Ease My Troubles That's What You Do

"Marissa, Dad died."

I didn't recognize my own voice as I said "how?" as an immediate response. I don't remember what my Mom said, but they didn't know the cause at the time. I said I had to go, twice, and hung up.

I felt my stomach pass through every inch of my legs. When it hit my knees, the weight made them buckle and I fell to the floor. I don't know how long I was on there. Dakota came into the room; we were living together and dating at the time. His face was pale with concern as he asked what happened. I don't know if he heard me hit the floor and ran right in, or if I made any other sounds that I was unaware of at the time.

Peritonitis and a duodenal ulcer. Weeks later I learned those terms. I learned they were a partial cause for the last conversation I had with my Dad to have included the topics of turkey burgers and his sex life. The other cause was the hospital staff that had turned him away for treatment the night before he died. They had assured him he was constipated. The medical professionals literally thought he was full of shit. He wasn't, this time.

I was allowed three days off from work. The turkey burger discussion had been over Skype; my Dad was living in Northern California and I was in Texas, near Austin. I had moved from my hometown in upstate New York to Los Angeles in 2011, and then to Texas in 2012. My Dad had moved from New York to California in 2012. During my time off, I tried to remember the last time I saw him in person. I couldn't. It's been eight years, and I still don't remember.

I went into a strange zone during those few days. I had not always had a decent relationship with my Dad. He was a paranoid schizophrenic with OCD, and his doctors spent the majority of my childhood trying to get his medication figured out, to control his physically violent outbursts and his need to sometimes picture the face of a man who had an outie belly button at a Long Island community pool, and other times recall the face of a woman he had known with "hair past her butt" named Fermina, when he said goodnight to me in the evenings. I despised him for over a decade.

Somewhere around the summer of 2006, I changed my mind. I realized I had misunderstood and judged an illness that was out of his control when a friend's openly gay father made an innocent comment to me at a dinner table at their house on Elm Street in Hudson Falls, New York. This man had slid into the room as his daughter and I had been watching America's Next Top Model. He and I had not spent a lot of time around each other, even though I had known his children and ex-wife for several years. "It's no wonder you two are friends," he had exclaimed during the commercial break. "Neither one of you have soccer dads!"

The comment was meant to be a joke. I think I managed to laugh on the outside but inside, I was flooded. My stomach had dropped again then too, from guilt. From that point onward, I focused on forgiving my Dad for everything that had happened. I put my energy into getting to know him. I don't know how much regret I would have if it had not been for that ANTM commercial break joke.

My Mom had called me in the morning, and somewhere around the middle of the afternoon, my grief-stricken and shocked mind wandered into thinking about Rod Stewart. Naturally. Despite my hatred of my Dad, I had decided when I was nine years old that if I ever got married, I would dance to the Rod Stewart version of "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You" with him for the father-daughter dance, under the now-bold assumption that he would be in attendance. I had made this decision after my seventy-fifth viewing of the movie One Fine Day, as the song is part of the soundtrack. Or at least I thought it was; it turns out it's the Van Morrison version, but I didn't learn that until my wedding in 2018. Dakota and I got married five years after I lost my Dad.

When I remembered this childhood plan, I immediately looked it up on YouTube. I found a live version of the song, and I listened to it. I listened to it on repeat for three days in my bed. The song would end, and I would start it over again. I would fall asleep here and there and restart the video when I woke up. I talked to a few friends and family members, and some co-workers, but I don't remember most of the conversations. I was cemented to the bed. Three days is really a lot of Rod Stewart, but it helped.

A few weeks later, we decided to adopt another dog.

We had adopted Beeker, our terrier mix, in Los Angeles in 2011 as a puppy. I had been looking at him online and then Dakota surprised me with him on my birthday that year, after I had lost a dog. We decided to repeat the same death-equals-new-dog trend and started looking at an animal shelter in Bastrop, Texas. Beeker is on the fluffier side, but his hair is also thin and whispy. We came across Capri, and her profile looked like she was a smaller version of him with the same texture, but different colored fur.

We went to the shelter to look at her in person, and the employees told us they had found her on the streets as a stray. As we approached her cage she started to emit a horrifying sound. It was worse than nails on a chalkboard. It was a high-pitched, endless screech. She sounded like an owl that had been caught on an electrical wire. She was so happy and her tail was wagging as she pressed her face through the bars of the cage. But the noise was painful enough to almost make us hesitate.

As we stared at her and tried to stop our ears from bleeding, we convinced ourselves that we could live with the unearthly sound. We decided if we had to, we would put her in some kind of training class to try to lessen her barking if you could call it a bark. It was already looking like we were going to have to consider a training class for Beeker, who doesn't get along with any other dogs. Until, and only, Capri.

The shelter made us bring Beeker to do a meet-and-greet before they would allow us to adopt Capri. When we arrived with him, we thought for sure we would be rejected. We expected him to immediately bark and tear into her. But he didn't. He started running around the fenced-off area they had designated for the meeting, and Capri followed him. The two are still an inseparable couple.

It turns out, the brutal scream is something that she only does when she really wants something. After we brought her home, we kept preparing ourselves to hear it and kept noticing that she did not repeat the sound. A few months later, she made it again in our yard when she saw and tried to catch a squirrel.

Adopting Capri brought light into one of the darkest periods of my life. She is the sweetest dog I have ever encountered. To the point where Dakota and I are convinced of two things; she must have been owned by someone elderly who lived alone and died, causing her to escape because otherwise there is no way anyone could ever be evil enough to have abandoned her on a volunteer basis. And two; we have to always be on the lookout for anyone who tries to break into our home, as she would happily greet them and likely become the victim of a dognapping.

A few days after the loss, my Mom told me that the first time you lose a parent, it changes you. I have found this to be true. But rescuing a dog can change you, too.