Slacker Blogger

Sorry I've been MIA lately. I'll be back soon with videos, adorable stories about my darling bullies.

Until then, here is one of the cutest photos I've ever seen (besides my dogs).

This is from my new favorite blog ever- http://fuckyeahbulldog.tumblr.com/.

Christmas News!

Big news for the Bulldog Brigade!!

Buddha's parents are engaged! They decided that their little bastard puppy should have parents who are married and not just living in sin.

Er, wait, it might have been because they are madly in love and want to spend the rest of their lives together.

Either way, today is very exciting for Buddha (and Danny and Heather, and really, the whole family!).

Dreaming about a tiny tuxedo and wedding cake...

Content to be the center of the celebration!

Nothing to do With Dogs

Lately, I haven't been able to come up with anything interesting about the Bulldog Brigade. Buddha is a very fulfilled suburbanite, living the high life in Woodbury [a word you can't help but say with a slight British accent]. Olivia and Griffin are happily going to the park every day, sometimes even twice a day if I have the time and it isn't painfully cold. They are needy, but adorable. They shed and slobber constantly. They love to eat. They cuddle aggressively, ramming their head into anyone who will get near them, and unconcerned about being 60 pounds, climb on anyone's lap they can (sometimes both of them at the same time). But otherwise, there's just not much to share right now.

It's been 25 days since my dad died. Some days are normal. Some days are not. In the first few days after he died, a lot of people gave me advice about taking time to grieve and take care of myself. I smiled politely, but secretly thought they didn't really know what they were talking about because I was fine. I was dealing with the loss really well and even though they'd experienced the loss of a parent, they really had no idea...

It turns out that grief isn't necessarily instant, it's more like a ticking time bomb waiting to explode at random intervals. Also, "fine" is a new four letter word my best friend has helpfully banned me from using, and perhaps those helpful people knew more than I was giving them credit for. 25 days. Right now my biggest hope is that eventually, I don't know how many days it's been since he died.

My therapist suggested that since I am a "processor" (ie- can go on for hours without pause- both in talking and in writing), perhaps I should write about my grief. So I have been doing that.

My secret dream is to someday write a book, or maybe a bunch of books. I don't have a subject yet, but I like the idea of  being about to spend all day in my jammies on the couch, while getting paid to do something I love. Perhaps it will be about bulldogs, but in the past 25 days, I have found myself telling everyone, including random strangers I have met while in line at the bank, stories about my dad. It makes me happy to talk about him and my dad was a character! So maybe I will write a book about my dad.

So, since I have a whopping 16 followers, I thought I'd put my first story on here and see what it is like to take something private and put it out in public. Also, I need help figuring out what you call the guy who works at the cremation society ("cremator"?? "crematory technician"???). I have no idea what that guy's title is, so forgive the brackets. Thanks in advance for reading...

Gold Teeth

“I have a strange question.” I’ve just finished setting up an appointment for later that day and the [cremation guy--- what’s his title??] has asked if there’s anything else he can do for me before we hang up.  

 “I want his teeth. Is there any way that you can help me get his teeth? Am I allowed to take his teeth?” I struggle with the request, not from grief, but because I feel weird and irreverent and I want to explain to the man that I am not creepy or morbid and that I don’t actually even want his teeth.

Years earlier, when I was a kid, my dad had a significant amount of dental work done and instead of just getting normal caps on his teeth, he opted for gold; all of his back teeth, over half of his mouth, were gold. And since that time, he’d told me over and over again, “when I die, be sure to get my teeth! Do not let anyone else take them. They are valuable, take my teeth.” He was strong and healthy and young. It was ridiculous to talk about his death so I always nodded and said, “of course dad, I will get your teeth.”

We got older and he continued to remind me about his teeth and instead of just agreeing with him, I finally told him, “I will get your teeth. I told Danny that I ‘dibs’ them and I am going to have a bracelet made out of them.” Satisfied with my answer, he responded, “Yeah, and then you can walk by your brother wearing the teeth bracelet and I can bite him!” After that discussion, he reminded me of his request less frequently, but the “teeth bracelet” became a running joke and he laughed often about the idea of biting my brother after death.

In all the years of telling me to get his teeth, we never discussed the logistics of said task. Once, when I questioned him on it, he said, “take a hammer and knock ‘em out.” Even as a child, I knew that wasn’t a practical answer, so I didn’t bother to press him further. I assumed that when he died, he would be really old, which would mean I would be really old and as a “really old” person, I would automatically know what to do in that situation.

At 29, I did not feel really old and I did not know what to do about getting his teeth. When my dad’s sisters, my aunts, heard about my quest, they were horrified and gently tried to talk me out of it, reasoning, “it’s not that much gold and it won’t be worth that much money.”

It had been less than 24 hours since my dad suddenly died- that they thought this was even remotely about the money was only mildly insulting. I didn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, think that my dad’s gold teeth were my ticket to wealth or even actually worth any money. I didn’t know much about dental work, but I assumed we weren’t dealing with 24 karat, pure valuable gold, rather, some form of gold plating or maybe even just gold colored dental metal. I had no idea and it didn’t really matter because it wasn’t about the value of the gold.

My dad had just died and I was in shock and walking around in a daze while calling people to break the news. I had to tell people over and over again that he died and then comfort them as they reacted, while all I could think was, “he was my dad. I shouldn’t be supporting you.” Repeating the news over and over was worse than even his death. I was trying to be strong. I was trying to take care of all of the details because it was the only way left for me to take care of him and I was going to do everything I could to make sure I did everything he wanted. And he wanted me to get his teeth.

I know that he didn’t think through the details of that request- he didn’t imagine that less than 24 hours after he died, his 29 year old, grieving daughter was going to have to explain this morbid request as she attempted to figure out how she was going to carry it out, even though all she really wanted to do was lay on the couch and cry. In health and happiness, he could suggest smashing his mouth with a hammer- he wasn’t thinking about how impossible that would actually be to carry out. In a strange way though, figuring out how to get his teeth was a good distraction. I didn’t think about it as my dad’s teeth… which he won’t need… because he’s dead. I separated the fact that I was trying to remove part of his body, and it just became a problem I had to solve. No time for crying or sadness, I had a task to complete. So in that way, “get my teeth” was a good thing to focus on and get me through that first day of loss.

It’s against the law for a mortician to desecrate [ie--- “take apart”/mess up /take a hammer to--- word????] a person’s body. However, as the [cremation guy] explained, I could call a dentist and they could remove the teeth before he was cremated. My dentist office isn’t open on Saturday and even if it had been, there was no way I was going to call my dentist in the suburbs, and ask him to go to the morgue to remove my dead father’s teeth… “oh, and could I schedule my 6 month cleaning while I’ve got you on the line?” No.

I thanked the [cremation guy] for the information and said I would work on it before our appointment that afternoon. I hung up the phone feeling defeated and knowing that in a few months, when the overwhelming feelings of grief weren’t so strong, I would regret not fulfilling my dad’s request. But in those first moments of shock and pain, while googling, “how to plan a funeral”, answering my phone as it rang repeatedly, and struggling to remember simple things like how to breathe, searching for a dentist sketchy enough to get involved in this situation seemed insurmountable.

When I hung up the phone, my boyfriend Nate gently suggested, “what if you just waited until he was cremated and then went through his ashes? Gold doesn’t disintegrate, does it?  It would be sort of like panning for gold. He would like that- it seems fitting.” When I brought the idea up later that day, the [cremation guy] told me that part of the cremation process is to sift through the ashes to remove any chunks or medical metal that have been left behind and he could make a note that anything recovered should be saved and returned to me. I wasn’t sure if that would actually work, but I was satisfied with that arrangement and I thought my dad would be okay with it too.

On the day of his memorial, the [funeral guy] handed me a cardboard box with my dad’s ashes and an envelope with 6 chunks of melted metal. I was surprised that they were not shiny gold, rather, covered in a hardened layer of ash. Later, I dropped them into a cup of water and some of the layer washed away, revealing tiny flecks of gold.

Holding the glittering chuck, I said out loud, “I did it dad. I got your teeth. I didn’t even have to wield a hammer or smash your face. I hope you know what a ridiculous request this was. But I did it.”

Helping Dogs

Today I am writing the final paper for my class this semester. It is a 10 page financial analysis on a nonprofit organization. It was due Tuesday and I'd planned to spend all last weekend working on it. But then my dad died and, well, it was just a little difficult to concentrate. My professors gave me an extension until today, which is actually not a very good extension at all because I alternated between planning a funeral and randomly bursting into tears all week.

Writing a paper about the finances of an organization is a nearly impossible subject for me to focus on normally, so writing it this week didn't really happen. I am determined to get it done today because it is hanging over my head and making me miserable, and, well, I don't want to take an incomplete in a class I've gotten A's on every assignment in thus far and should be rocking.

But obviously it's going just as well today since it is 10:40am and I am blogging about my dogs, but really, any minute now, I am going to dig into those audits and get researching. I have two assistants who are by my side in solidarity with the project, but unfortunately, their peaceful snoring is EXACTLY how I feel about this topic, so I'm conflicted. But perhaps it will be a nice break from real life.

Bring on the budgets!!!!!

One Upper

My brother called me this morning with huge news- Buddha has learned to read. They were at the dog park and Buddha went running off to a farm area and when Danny called him back, he pointed at a sign and said, "that sign says no trespassing!" Buddha went over to it, looked at it, studied it, peed on it in annoyance and then ran off in the opposite direction to avoid trespassing. Amazing.

Of course, I had to break the news to Danny that Olivia recently completed writing her first children's book about a puppy named Juddha who gets beat up for being obnoxious (it's fiction, but there are some elements to real life in it).

Danny told me to tell her congratulations, but that she's kind of a one-upper. That's probably true, but that's just the way the Bulldog Brigade is...

Learning to read

Please teach me to be smart...

Exhausted after a long day of writing...

"I read and write, so what? Don't annoy me."

Irreverence

Over the past few days, I've been alternating between hysterical crying and being totally focused on taking care of details. When I've been able to switch into detail-mode, the crying has stopped, but so has the filter that usually prevents me from just blurting out every last thought. To be totally honest, the filter I am speaking of is not the most highly functioning part of me regularly- I have a tendency to be pretty honest about things and I have never had a poker face, so you pretty much always know what I'm feeling. 

On Saturday I met with the funeral home director to make arrangements to have my dad cremated. It had been less than 24 hours since my dad died and I think I was supposed to be hysterical, but I had cried the entire night before and I just didn't have any tears left. I was ready to answer questions, fill out paperwork and check another awful, heartbreaking task off my list. 

I have always been interested in the "behind the scenes" part of things. Whenever I go anywhere, I always wonder whose job it is to choose what hangs on the walls and where things go. I'm always curious about staffing, schedules and management. And so when the funeral guy said, "do you have any questions?" I couldn't resist. I asked several questions about the cremation process, about the urns that were displayed around the room, the morgue, and so on. I'm not sure if he thought I was heartless, or if friendly/smiling/ lack- of-emotion-while-discussing-one's-recently-dead-father is normal. 

My dad didn't want to be set on a shelf, so I wasn't shopping for an urn, but I was very intrigued by them. As I was browsing, I noticed "memorial necklaces" and asked about them. They take some of the ashes from your loved one and infuse it with the glass to make a pendant. I think my dad would have told me wearing him around my neck was creepy (and I agree), but when the funeral guy asked if I was interested, my response wasn't a normal, "no thank you". What flew out of my unfiltered mouth was, "I'd like to have that done when my dogs go, but I don't think it would be right with my dad." 

That was the point that my boyfriend gently put his hand on my arm and guided me out, wincing with apologetic embarrassment as we left. 

For the record, I would consider that for them and no one (including my dad) would be surprised by my dead dog ash necklace. 

Losing My Mind

In case you were wondering, yes, I mentioned the bulldog brigade in my dad's obituary.

Preceded in death by father, John and niece, Ria . Survived by children Natalie and Danny Jr., mother Carol, sisters Vickie, Val, & Amy, countless friends, and three loving grand-dogs.


My dad always claimed he hated all three dogs, except that I can't tell you how many times I overheard him talking to them, sharing whatever he was eating with them or telling people stories about them. Imagining that look of disgust he made whenever I referred to them as "grand-dogs" makes me laugh, because it was all an act. He thought I was ridiculous with them and I can just see him in heaven saying, "come on", but, as I said out loud when I wrote it, "look dad, if you can hear me, this is payback because you left me with a lot of paperwork, so, ha ha, now we're even." I like to think that even though he's gone, we can still play-fight about his relationship with the puppies...