Dancing in the Chaos. Cora-belle and Brittaney

 I sit to write each morning, (save for the surgeries days), to clear the clutter and calm the demons.

Me and Magpie.. morning coffee and cuddles in her windowsill at our home.

The day before is always, without fail, a thunderstorm of chaos set to a troops ballet of orderly bodily swoons. We are a veterinary clinic marred in last minute pleas to be seen, some of these dying, as they rush in the doors, and/or mysterious illnesses clutching the lives in moments of breathless abatements. There is never a quiet day, some are less heartbreaking, but, never-ever is there a day without a euthanasia or a spilling of tears at the delivery of an imminently dire prognosis. It can be jarring, draining and cruel. It is life set to motion on fast forward, condensed into a barely manageable work day as the promulgation of being a part of a community based place for decades. I depart home at 9 am, and I arrive back after 9 pm wondering if I have the strength left to brush my teeth, never mind undress from my bloodied, anal gland spritzed, poop/urine smeared scrubs. I melt into bed unable to unwind, process, or compartmentalize. After all of these days the decompression period I should provide myself with evaporates into unconsciousness. This is the justification based fodder for every social media post veterinarians make in response to a current smear campaign at our expense. We post our reality, the grit of our daily lives as a public service announcement in the hopes one soul with a torch in their hands leading the march to our demise over a case that didn't end in their favor will take pity. Unless you have danced this jig you don't know how hard it can be. I mention all of this as a preamble to today's painful sequence of events, and, for the blog, YouTube videos, and professional life-based pivot point I am about to journey upon. It is important for me, and the rest of the veterinary profession, to share these real-life stories of our days. If we can't be genuine with the everyday joy, pain, the losses and the motivations we need to have to rise up again tomorrow for another ballet of mental, physical and emotional marathons how can we expect the public, our clients who entrust their family, with our care? How can we ask for mercy in the face of animosity reaching hatred proportions?

Cora, face in the sun, with my pups;  Charlie, Storm, and Fripp.

Yesterday I euthanized Cora-belle. She was found standing in the middle of the road at the end of my driveway a decade ago. She most closely resembles Eeyore in every way possible. Short-legged, wide-stanced, stubbornly slow, and exaggerated floor length ears that mop as she saunters. I found her standing frozen straddling the double yellow line as I pulled out onto the road from leaving my house one morning. She was stoic as if given an order. After knowing her all of these years I know that was not the case; she has never taken a order in her life. Some primitive nod to defiance sluggish-sloth style. So, I suspect looking back now that she was simply paralyzed by fear. She was endearing for all of her curiosities. She was the face you loved once you knew her, it wouldn't come naturally. She never learned to walk on a leash. To move her you needed food and a short destination. Or, you carried her wheelbarrow style, pushing via shoving. Cora outlived all of my dogs. Sloth style wins. She was adopted out after a prolonged foster period to a family I now consider my own. They were fellow beagle lovers and their older beagle was at the clinic every other week for her anal gland expression, (another less adorable facet of beagles). Mysteriously, as so many of life's doings are, Cora's new family came home one day, just days after Cora's arrival and shockingly found him deceased. She landed here at my door, to be delivered postscript to them just in time. We all believe that. We know that for as many shortcomings as Cora had her timing was always impeccable and restorative. She dodged death so many times with so many ailments, dental challenges (like soft-serve-snot from both nares, twice, that required emergency dentals with end stage renal failure), impromptu bloodhound sniffing escapades as infrequent as they were frightful. one hour she was there, at your feet snoring, the next, Whoosh! Presto! Gone. It wasn't like she ran away. Ran was never in her vocabulary, short legs and "whoa is me" bravado. Nope, she just caught a whiff, let me nose meander and next thing you know there is a bellowing bay that sets the horizon on alarm. She was easy to find once her nose found its destination. It was her charm. One of her many.  Cora's kidneys were failing her for years. Tiny steps an clues that it was progressing, until a few weeks ago when it was confessed that she was confused more than could be safely managed. Last night, with her whole family present we said goodbye. I held her face, twitching with cloudiness, eyes claimed by cataracts and decayed corneas, and whispered my goodbyes in my typical pet-mom fashion. I said all of the things to her I always had, gave her that reassurance to not be afraid. Silently hoped to myself that she would carry those words back to my dearly missed departed dogs she vacationed with here at my home. That they would all be together happy, peacefully blissfully Beagling above. 

Cora, begging, while Jekyll waits for her to break my will power and distribute treats.

It is the magnitude of this burden, among the chaos of being needed simultaneously in three other exam rooms to help other pets, some with impatient, emotionally burdened, desperate, equally heavy chaotically-fraught-life people. It is this that vets try to excuse as our bad press marches on. 

They know what's coming.

While I was stealing a few pivotal moments with Cora, my colleague, the other vet in the clinic with me, was juggling three concurrent appointments while a family, one of the members a former staff member gathered to say goodbye to their life long family pet, Brittaney. She had a bleeding spleen, leaving her essentially bleeding out internally. Her bloodwork was awful, and she had multiple chest lesions which indicates the cancer causing the bleeding internally had spread everywhere. It is a perfect storm that no veterinarian would ever recommend treating for. I wouldn't have either had it been one of my own. This pup of 14 arrived at 2 pm. As she was discussing her preliminary findings the owner received a call that his mother-in-law just passed away. He left to go be with his spouse while we ran the rest of the pups diagnostics. The whole family returned hours later to say goodbye. Their day reminds me how integral we are to our clients lives and how small this town is. Both grandmother and Brittaney will be cremated together at our local funeral home. Life is like that. Brutal and poignant and bittersweetly wrenching just to remind you that our lives are given to us to feel them. 

Brittney

This is why I write in the morning. The cleaning, the folding the organizing. The baggage of lives, the honorable actions and the frailty of the lives we alter and influence. Veterinarians, me included, get so absorbed in the caring chaos we lose ourselves within the flurried storm. It is a ballet, trying to be a part of something that takes so much, and find our reasons to keep dancing when the music ques again. You will drown if you don't accept it, your part in the lives of others. 

For my dearly departed Cora; I will miss you with us. You were the determined, inconspicuous beagle we always knew existed inside. She was always looking for an opportunity or a couch. She spent all of her days considering one over the other and slowly shuffling, or, rapidly exploding into one or the other. We should all be so lucky to live a life of comfortable options.

For the next chapter of this journey, please follow me here. There are two very important blogs to post. Tomorrow morning is another chance for a new day, and the same ballet to attempt to come cleanly home for.

RIP Cora-belle and Brittaney. I am honored, humbled and grateful to know you and your families. It is a gift. I wonder how many other vets feel this as their greatest motivation to getting dressed in the morning?

Here is Cora's original blog post, so many years ago;

Cora-Belle, The Lucky Beagle

Better Left Undone. When Action Breeds Contrition

 

Everyone else guessed it, I had dismissed it as foolishly foreshadowing. A ruse. A game with no clear odds favoring one or the other. When at face value it was so commonplace, that I should have seen myself as the typical ‘subject’ and counted myself as a loss before leaving the gate. Or, to put it literally, crossing the border out of Ukraine.

It has become my form of PTSD. I can’t leave it, them, or most of what I encountered, behind. It’s become a haunting. It’s been a month since I got back home. Twice as long as I was there, and, still,, I can’t let them go. I can’t let almost any of it go. Worst, most painful of all, the animals. Not their medical stuff. The stuff so routine I dismiss it as collateral damage to pet ownership, domestication of the species. The medical needs of the animals struggling to survive in a war, all look like the medical needs of animals the globe over. No, it’s not those. It has become my lack of belief that they were better off after our acts of intervention. Our pulling them from the home they knew, whether it still stands any longer, or not. I am not sure if my efforts, my time, the efforts of those who are there has helped the pets we intervened upon made a better difference for them. They are now caged, full time, and stuck in purgatory limbo inside Ukraine. There is little hope they can be moved out. Little hope they can be adopted once moved. The numbers of pets in need is so great that the ocean just swallows them and grows a little bigger with each soul it consumes. With that burden, on top of the rest of the burdens, I have given them all names. The names they never had the time to be troubled with before. The designation of belonging when the concept of that left permanence and citizenship. I was a visitor. An overnight guest. They, the animals I was brought over to care for, they were residents. If their parents hadn’t deemed them worthy enough for a collar, a name tag, or even a bus ticket out, why would I give them names? Who was I to claim them? Baggage leads to expectations and I had no plans to stay longer than the pre-purchased round-trip ticket date designated. Ukraine was set up/expected to be, just a brief stay. A substitute teacher venue. Arrive, deliver a little vet-med grub hub style, meet/greet-guh-bye. I’m an expert vacationer, world-traveler, veterinarian on the fly. Surely this wasn’t going to be a big challenge. Nope, not for me. Indoctrination at the Academy lasted two weeks. Those were the longest two weeks of my life. That set the bar. I didn’t quit then. Why would I quit now? Sea year lasted (you got it) a year. Alone on a big cold, ocean for weeks on end. Nope that didn’t wash me away. The Academy, vet school both 4 years. Hard work, lots of grit and very little mercy for weakness and meekness. I know what serving a sentence voluntarily feels like. I can do it, bide my time, count the days, survive a great unknown. I can even make it memorable, dare I say, enjoyable. Ukraine from the outside, at the beginning was an adventure in serving a people whose country was so inconceivably violated. I was going to have my protests heard by volunteering to help their plight, vet-med style.

Four weeks later they have names. Five thousand miles away from me, and I give them names. It's madness. I have slipped in, gone all Rosemary’s Baby and become consumed with faces I will probably never see again.

I’m stuck. I now understand why/how it happens. Being here and feeling you should be there. The people who are there, willingly, volunteering, surrendering their life, the lives of those who love them from their home countries, they don’t get it. They don’t understand the compulsion to go there and the stickiness of wanting to stay. There is no allure to being there. No magical beauty that ties you to Ukraine. No amazing food, culture, architecture, luxurious accommodations, attractions, music, art, visitors Bucket List items for natural, manmade or otherwise wonders of the world. There are indisputably familial ties. Ancestral influences, but for those of us lacking that it is inconceivable anyone would go there wanting/willingly, and even more unfathomable that you would go back.

But, disaster, plight, travesty of any kind serves a void. A place of emptiness that can be filled of one’s own accord. You can become the answer to your own prayers, and fill a need not challenged by candidates en mass. There is a motley crew, and I use that term appropriately of volunteers cycling in and out of Ukraine. A small collective of die-hards who cross in and out with such frequency that the obvious realities of Ukraine have been dissolutioned/diluted away. There is a missing reality to their opinions and observations of living inside Ukraine while it is at war and the rest of our impressions of how that might feel. They have consciously, or, subconsciously decided to overlook it. They are able to let the air raid sirens come and go without pause. They work, live, fulfill purposes inside a country that I think has swallowed their self-preservation skepticism. I say that not as a point of judgement or contention, I say that as a character trait I now understand, identify with and consider re-succumbing to. I am debating what ‘going back” might look like. I am talking, tip-toeing, back into getting closer to that war, again.

There is unfinished work there. Nagging, gnawing, imprisoned memories of stories merely witnessed and not truly improved upon. There is need. That yearning, compulsion, despair in knowing, need is like its own addiction. The secret-shameful kind you cannot rationally explain away to those not bitten by it. The one insane thing that keeps that core group of crew, all running from something unmet at home, into a place full of so much stress and chaos. It is the explanation to too much of the fuels they consume in rabid proportions; Coka-Cola in liter jugs, chocolate, cigarettes, adrenaline. The diet of no sleep, no real meals, no real time off, no slowing in the tidal waves of need/requests/cruelty/neglect/abuse/injuries/devastation is a recipe for suicidal decisions. Why would any of us want to go there? Want to go back there? And not be able to explain it to others? I’m going back someday. Maybe not this month, next month, or (good Lord not while Russkies still traipse about pillaging and plundering), but I now understand the affliction, and the quiet shame in admitting there is a problem with that.

For all of the haunting, the nagging, the pulling apart the insides in silence I thought my one last act to gain some closure might be to get the animals I could back to a place where I could provide a happy ending from the perpetual purgatory. Even that has been met with resistance to the place of impossibility. The CDC won’t have it without lying. The adrenaline junky with the ego so fierce his temper is the only fuel he can’t medicate away, and the vet who wants to work for a paying client at the cost of a caged pet still in purgatory and I am here ruminating. Still. Compartmentalizing to the point of justification in some small, albeit unsuccessful, attempt to quiet the faces and break the bonds of the chains I cannot excuse away as kindness.

I need to stop... although I am not sure that it's not just contrition.. find another task to throw my heart into.. see if I can resurrect a soul I am not sure I left behind in Ukraine. 

For more information on the people and pets of Ukraine please see my previous blogs. To all of those struggling to find answers within the challenges of the places their heart strings lie I hope you find peace there, even if the world around you cannot.

purgatory

Purgatory is that place between places. The place where bad outweighs otherness. "The place of temporary suffering," as Webster notes. It is the word I used in Ukraine when the group asked me what my thoughts on being there were? I said "purgatory." When I did I got back puzzled faces? I had to define it for them. They were Romanian, Ukrainian, or long time UK military. It wasn't a word any of them used, knew, or could place in the reference I had given. I had used it because it was the best word my mind could find to express my deep concerns for the plight of the animals I saw there. The animals we were all taking care of.  The animals we were all risking our lives for. But now that I am home I think it defined the whole mass of the entire experience.

I was reading the New York Times, (one of my bucket list items from COVID), and in it I saw that there is a new series by Stanley Tucci (something about food? I think? and Italy?). It caught my eye as I have developed a serious crush on him. On the 10 hour plane ride home from Bucharest to Dulles I watched Supernova. It is an intimate love story between Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth, who are quite possibly the sexiest over 50 duo to land on the big screen. Their story, their ability to capture their characters, draw you within them, and keep you suspended within hopeful curiosity to a story that can't possibly have a "happily ever after" captivates. Watching that film in the dark, seated in 23D, (middle row, who booked this seat for me??!!), was one of the few escapes from purgatory that trip permitted me. It's a story that pits dying within the despair imbued within trying to live through the saying goodbye. It is two men destined for one another and dealing with the end to their love story on their own terms. I got lost in it. I cried. I cried buckets for them and to purge my purgatory sentence. It was the beginning of my onboard movie marathon. The "jump in and drown yourself in tear-jerkers" to see if you can just purge yourself of the ocean you are drowning within. Next up with 2 hours down and 8 to go, was, Land. Robin Wright putting herself in the middle of the harsh, brutal, winter woods of northern Colorado to be mercilessly faced with dying alone at the unmerciful hand of nature she was excessively ill equipped to face solo. It almost appears as if she has a death wish she dares to claim her. It is a bit of a love story with forgiving herself for the life changing, heartbreaking series of horrible losses she has faced. It is also a bit of a finding yourself as you cannot permit suicide based on a promise she made with her only remaining close relative, her sister. It is about accepting loss as you find out who you are and what you are made of. An intervention based on facing survival alone. My favorite quote, "only a person who has never known hunger would chose to die of starvation." Can one outwill themselves from their own purgatory? Robin did. Why can't the rest of us? Specifically at this moment, why can't I?

   

Hour 6 was yet another chick flick meant to wet your face. I rode that horse into running the tear well dry. I had hoped I could cry it all out before I got home. Last move, "Eat, Pray, Love." 'Cause why not watch a movie about another woman with a lost purpose who dumps, runs, journeys far away and tries to find herself within the muddling, meandering, and muck? (Why didn't I just have a Minions marathon? Laugh that crap out? I always feign to my feelings. Do I always choose cry over laugh? Glutton). 

I was shocked to hear an NPR news interview driving to work about how it is believed crossing a large pool of water cleans all your woos. I swear it was true for me to. Something about crossing the Atlantic, crying through three movies, 6 plus hours of tear-jerkers and I felt better. Here's my entry from my journal as we trekked along at 30,000 feet above the great big blue..

"Maybe it is this wretched ocean? The Atlantic Ocean. (I spent a decade sailing this ocean, it's a legitimate adjective in my hands). Where so many years were spent washing away the time. Suspended life while the world still turns and others live theirs. A parallel existence with the same measure of time, and yet, mine was stuck. Away at sea is stuck. A purgatory of its own, with the exception of being so busy with the work at hand you are too tired, too focused on catching rest while you can, that you cannot see the purgatory for the absence of self. Going to sea is an endless cycle of home, push play and begin to live, to pause-pack a seabag and head offshore. Play-pause-play-pause-repeat. The continuum you cannot fit your life into off season. Big gaps of time passing with the currents and tidal changes of the oceans you cross. And now I cross it again, this time headed home, and as I do I just feel better. washed clean. Absolved. Christened. Baptised. Home calls and the ocean absorbs the tears of loss, abandonment of those faces I cannot suppress, nor bury, nor leave behind. Maybe we are square now? You the ocean, and me the lost soul bobbing back to dry land.

Even if I don't feel like I am wearing that cape of despair the Ukraine trip brought me to the same degree, bending under the weight of the pain, suffering, despair and dismal chance of any of that changing anytime soon, that cloak isn't so weighty any longer. The ocean crossing with the movies of other misplaced/lost souls seeking validation/acceptance and inner forgiveness seemed to bring some resolve. But the perception of purgatory now having a place on the map, a feeling of tangible faces with names and unknown, unsettling possible futures, the sights, the smells, the sounds, that kind of purgatory still lives on Ukraine. Defining it is only a matter of finding your place within its borders. Crying your way home to buy your way back into heaven is the cost of a plane ticket without sleep. 

For more on the trip to the Ukraine to help animals displaced by the Russian invasion please see my previous blogs.

If you would like to help the animals of Ukraine please consider adopting a pet in need in your back yard. Or, donate to these amazing organizations;

Sache Foundation in Romania

Big Dog Ranch Rescue

The faces of Ukraine;

Walking Away. Can Empty Handed Be More Painful Than Heavy Hearted?

Walking away. 

For those of us who choose to travel abroad with the hope of helping, do something meaningful, and, influence an unjust reality, it is deeply painful to have to walk away empty handed. 

I wanted, upon my return home, to feel as if I had done more. Make a more meaningful impact.  I quite honestly want to take them ALL away. Pack up every little face I saw, all of those fearful eyes, bowed defeated heads, and hungry souls, and stuff them into my carry-on luggage and just head west. Cross the landscapes of the safe Nato countries skirting the western borders. Hop that big pond with our own 747 and fly the coop Big-time-America style. Just bust outta Ukraine and be done. Dust on our heels, blue skies ahead. It’s the only real tangible hope for them. The only way I can stop the suffering and save their lives. And I can’t. I don’t accept inability nor denial. It is not in my vocabulary. I didn’t go so far away to just bear witness. I went to change fates. Move trajectories make happy endings from a war. It didn’t happen. I feel defeated and guilty for departing. For leaving them behind. Abandoned and in the same predicament I found them. 

I hadn't traveled this far, 5,000 miles from home, with three days of traveling into Ukraine to see Droog shelters massively overcrowded 500 head count, and just witness the problems there. No, I came to influence them. Surely I couldn't solve many, maybe a tiny pet on a tiny scale, but, I wanted to try. Me and my ever present operative word, TRY. It just doesn't feel like enough right now. Isn't always enough,, but, it is sometimes all you have.

Two Ukrainian rescued dogs out for the evening walk.
I miss them every single day.

For more on the Ukraine trip please see my previous blogs.

Be better than you ever have to be.

What if I told you that the problem was 100% you?

Land mine marker, side of the road driving in Ukraine.

Could you accept it? Or swallow it?

What about start to process and digest it?

How capable are you of rising above and introspection?

Deworming puppies in Ukraine

It's called adulting. You will learn it at some point. Or, die bitter still stuck on the silly, petty, bullshit that takes up the first 40 years of most peoples lives. Move on, chin up, be kind, let it go. It's really never worth the effort. People either love you for who you are, accept you for what you haven't yet mastered, and wish you well regardless of the differences, or, they just don't. How is that your problem? Why does it bother you? Or, matter, at all?

Maybe it is all you? Maybe it is all your responsibility to improve your own life? Maybe, even, just maybe you have the power to improve someone else's along the way too? Maybe you just need to forgive yourself for not being perfect, try to grow kinder, and wish others luck in doing the same? Maybe it's all about perspective, independent self assurance, and living the example that makes the world a better place to be in?

Start there. Be better than you ever have to be. Kinder than you ever imagined anyone could be. And just be happy with that.

The note left with two bunnies abandoned at the clinic this week.
There are always people struggling more than you can see on the outside.

oh,, and go hug your cat.

It is impossible for me to come back from a war where everyone is afraid, suffering and unsure of what tomorrow holds, and see the staff at the clinic fighting, crying, and despairing over clean up duties. I know I am supposed to empathize, talk it all out, and find a calm peaceful resolve to the petty ridiculous juvenile puling,,, but I can't. I just can't. I can't lower my worries to include the bullying being tolerated by empowered, privileged white women who are apparently so immature it is important enough to cry over. 

Maybe I will pay for it down the road? This inability to see problems that manifest out of air from perceptions that aren't worthy of the time it takes to address it? But, then again, it was war. Maybe they all need to set foot on Ukrainian soil to remember what life might look like if you weren't so caught up in the mopping injustices of closing time?

Found in Ukraine. Broken back, poor use of her back legs, and afraid.
After two days of calm, gentle support she melted. She is the sweetest, most grateful girl. 
She is one we could save. 

... I guess the parting thought is that life is full of so many challenges. Think outside of yourself. Remember how lucky you are and how little anyone else's opinion matters.

For more on Ukraine please see my previous blogs.

P.S. I find it implausible that anyone thinks this blog is specific to them.. it is not. It is as much an internal dialogue with myself,, as it is an external discussion with the way I know see things differently. I am not the same person I was before going to Ukraine. I will never be the same. I left grateful for all we have here, all of the incredible wealth, freedoms, and access to,, well, anything here, but I came back not more grateful, but instead less tolerant. Less tolerant to other people's real problems and my ability to empathize with them. I just can't see the little problems as big problems. Isn't life all about perceptions? And isn't the answer to hardship empathy? Why is it then that I don't want them back?

The Little Things, Part One, Passport Paranoia.

Everyone is asking for snippets. Little pieces of the far away trip to share. The stocking stuffers to add flavor and texture to a place you have to live to begin to digest. Ukraine is just like that. Something you have to live, but no place anyone should want to go, at least for right now. 

kept in my passport keeper

There is the omnipresent pervasive black cloud over Ukraine. It exists, or so it seemed to me, over the entire country from the first to my last minute there. True the skies grow darker and the cloud cover closer the closer you move East, but it manifests from the clear skies at the border of Romania you leave from and arrives as you cross into Ukraine. (The borders are oddly like that,, that snippet I will share at another time). I asked myself for a long while whether this was just placebo effect. Maybe I was just imagining it? But, on the way home to Romania my carmate admitted, in fact she asked me, if I had noticed it too?

There is an overarching sense of despair, of sadness, a gloominess you cannot wipe away. Sleep away, or awaken from. Even in the off moments of peaceful aloneness it is there. Every step of every minute of your life has to be thought out. That in itself is excruciating and exhausting. At minimum you have to plan an exit for every possible scenario. How fast could you run? What do you need to take? Where would you go and how would you get there? (Remember there might not be roads, or gas, or open roads). What would you do if they (Russian troops) are at your door? Knocking, Invading, Intimidating or Interrogating? What documents do you have? Are they with you at all times? (Let me talk about passport paranoia).

one of the tokens that I carried with me to Ukraine

So I will start here..

passport paranoia. I bought a travel purse before leaving. The kind that goes around your neck, hangs at the chest. Multiple pockets to hold things. A drawstring to cinch higher or lower based on the threat and quickness for access. It was never out of my sight, save for traveling. We keep the passports in the dashboard for quick passing to the checkpoint guards stationed about every 30 minutes, and at every major town, and every key place of transport, military base, communication tower, and not so inconspicuously hidden troop bunker. I don't speak the language, and I am a visitor. My USA passport is the one thing anchoring my safety in this warzone. Yes, I guarded it with my life. There is no embassy here, and no way to call out for rescue or retrieval. The group I was with had lost all sense of passport paranoia. They were far more comfortable with fate as it might fall than I. There were many times I heard one of them inquiring as to which vehicle, or when, they had misplaced theirs? 

not so sexy,, but a needed accessory...

This was a common theme for me. Trying to grow more comfortable with the war and nullify its impact by the number of sands that have passed through the hourglass. Two weeks there wasn't long enough to soothe or ease the passport paranoia. It was just one of the many I entered and left Ukraine with. The rest of the group, who had been there for months, or multiple trips back and forth, to and from had outgrown their passport paranoia. The newness, the risk, the danger, and the paranoia had been misplaced some miles/days/weeks back. Mine remained overhead, the Linus storm of grey over the neophyte clinging a cheap no brand purse close to the heart but clung to nonetheless.

Please see my other Ukraine posts.. and please remember to hope,, you can never surrender tha,, #peaceinUkraine

The Faces, and the Ghosts. Coming Back From Ukraine.

The panes keep flipping. One after another, almost every single one a snapshot of a face that haunts me like the ghost of a departed too soon relation. Those faces. The innocence, despair, fear and immense sea of need contained within their little skinny souls. 

Momma dog and Stewie.. both equally adorable.

I see them as this: tiny souls. Lost and dependent. Expecting nothing, the same as they have known their whole lives, and yet optimistic and hopeful. Some of the dogs took days to decompress when they arrived. Days of huddling, hiding and running through the fates that lay ahead quietly in their heads. I feel as I know them all. Some hidden primitive calling from an ancestry that binds us even if we have just met. These pets cause me, I want to believe, others too, to melt. They were my singular focus. My only task and the compromise that made all of the rest of the obvious, and not-so-obvious hardships worthwhile. 

Ukraine, as I will remember it, is an old soul, built on organic gatherings. Time honored traditions that don’t give way to modern amenities. People live off their land. The earth is black with rich fertile soil. So dense it cements to your shoes, holds you fast to its grip. Women, the majority of which are old, bent and bowed to the earth they pay gratitude to. They are subdued, embedded, artifacts of this place. Long layered worn long skirts. Cardigan-coated, scoliosis spines topped with home-sewn clothes. Weighty, permanent, and unwaivered inside a war they will persevere through. Their fortitude is the constant of this country. They may have to live under another mans rule, lose their flag to a neighboring bully, but, they will never lose their traditions, their ages old agrarian practices, and they will never surrender their soil which blossoms forth food, flowers, and the stories of all of the women before them. The elderly who are still here are poor. Dirt poor. They tidy up their tiny quaint unembellished homes each morning and each evening. Small handless brooms held at knee level, sweep, sweep, sweep. The dirt is pushed away for a few hours only to crawl back in with the breeze. Nothing stays clean here. Nothing shines. Nothing is made, brought, or found here that wasn’t made before 1970. 

Bunkers and Checkpoints.

The fruit trees dominate. Pruned to a twisted spine, with blunted arms, the trees for fruit are forced to reach for the sun, but never allowed to outstretch their arms in glory. And yet they flower in explosions of white and pink. The afternoon breezes blowing kisses of snowflake petals. It is this beautiful as the country gets forced to live less. Less time to read, to relax, less food, almost no available gas. Less television, internet and access to the world outside of this war living its daily life and working for a brighter future of better. Colleges are struggling to stay open. Malls, and shopping centers are trying to keep entertainment and distraction of teenage goods and meet ups, open. A go-cart center still opens at 10 am, lines up the carts, and awaits the boredom of children to convince their parents to spend cash they need to bank.

Deworming puppies

The banks are open when days seem bright. They shutter when the air alarms take most of the day. They just shake their heads with “no” when you inquire as to why banking hours now permit half-days and full days of closing. There are long lines at the bank ATM machines. Most, like the gas stations are merely closed. A sign indicating an absence of indefinite length. 

For me, there was a cloud that found me once I crossed into the border. It stays the whole time you are there. The rest of the group have been inside long enough to have forgotten it. It remains, like Linus, looming above, grey/black turbulent and daunting, but like an old chronic ailment, it gets ignored by the events of the day, the tripping stones and obstacles that take up every small task. Pushed back into the subconscious where it makes its den and waits for a crack in the armor to invade and metastasize.

One of the homes I stayed at. 
She lives alone with her cats and dogs and loves her garden.

My friend had organized this trip. We had been talking about how much the wars existence, and our easy lives had burdened us. When people asked why I was considering this trip I answered honestly that I felt ‘compelled’ to go. Driven to add my voice, my anger and my actions of defiance to the pleas of a country that was once part of a dynasty and the parents wanted their kids back, even if they desired to keep their independence. Wouldn’t I want someone from halfway around the world to do the same for me? Shouldn’t every other human being with means be joining the crusade? If only to protect their children’s independence somewhere down the road? Maybe the news of a country being invaded, forced to die or surrender, be so inconceivable and unacceptable that all nations and all people stand up and just say “NO!”? I will not permit it? 

Arrival Cluj Romania airport.
One personal bag and 4 large luggage suitcases of medications and preventatives.

This protest, internal proclamation has the same fervor and intensity as my deep conviction to protect the animals stuck, and injured in the cross fire. Not all who fled took their pets. Not all who could leave with them did. Somewhere left with friends, or in shelters, no doubt with the hope that the conflict would be won in days, perhaps weeks, and they could return to the life that they had led in Ukriane. The shelters are burgeoning with animals. So overcrowded that they are stacked on top of each other. The weak cower in the back, hiding and huddled into tiny shivers of fur. No face, no identity. Just hoping to get a piece of the meal at its next delivery. Competition for all basic needs is reduced to brutal will and dominate strength. Very few dogs are neutered which promulgates and perpetuates the aggression, the dominance. A few females are spayed, many are not, therefore when one, or all, go into heat the hysteria climbs even higher. The idea of adding pregnancies, puppies and even more mouths to feed, souls to assuage, and frailty to protect is the chasm of the fault line that allowed the contents of my heart to fracture. There is no attempt to slow the tide here, just a pessimistic acceptance that it will most definitively worsen before there is hope for it to improve. 

Sergei sleeps at our feet during dinner.
Likely the luckiest puppy in Ukraine.

Where many countries across the globe are making humanitarian efforts to offer passage, placement and assistance to Ukrainian refugees, most are making precautionary measures to deny animals sanctuary within. The rules, the paperwork and permits, and fear of the flood have caused the numbers within the countries few shelters to explode. To care for these animals has caused internal personnel exhaustion, desperation and corruption. The opportunities to divert dog food, supplies and medications has caused most shelters to seek food from all available options. Feeding has been leftovers, some fresh, most not. It is survival at every level and consequentially the weakest will be the last to be fed or defended. 

I called her Sunshine, the others called her Piglet,,

It brings me back to those faces. The ones who have been treated like cattle. Moved by force and packs or herds. Collected in the last minutes of an eminent invasion and sent to be housed in another place that is fraught with fear and lacking in safety from fights, food access of personal preferences or liberties. These are the ones I am drawn to. The ones so overlooked and so ignored they have surrendered. The ones who make you melt with them as they learn what affection feels like and let go of the armor that they resorted to. These are the faces I filled my time, my head and my heart with. These are the faces that are burning inside of me asking to be refueled again with. These are the faces that would compel me back into a war zone with worsening conditions and very likely a death sentence to surrender, willingly or not to. Can a face call you to your own demise? It is calling me to consider it, and consuming me to submit to it. Again. 

This girl needed more than I could give her. She was still so happy to see me...
one of the many I fear I left behind,,, and in need of rescue.

Please see my previous posts about my humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.

More faces to reminisce over.