… I felt less ambivalently loving than I have ever felt in my life. … I made sure she was really comfortable. Now I had a pile of facecloths, torn towels, rags. In my house I have beautiful wooden floors.
I'd hear the rustling of her limbs and I'd run to her because she couldn't get up and there was generally a puddle already there. "I took such great care of her when she was dying," Myles writes. As death comes closer, Myles lifts Rosie higher up, fortifying her slow exit with a buoying sense of awe, not just for young Rosie but for old Rosie, dying Rosie and dead Rosie, too. But it is in this portrayal of decline that the love story gains muscle. It is not pleasant to visualize how a sweet pitbull named Rosie withered. It's fair to find descriptions of affliction overwhelming. "Mainstay of my liturgy for sixteen point five almost seventeen years. She wears her body like her favorite clothes," writes Myles, finding valour in Rosie even as she weakens. A soft torso that used to be strong but the width and the heroic bone structure, ripples and inclines now say where the muscles were. "The sun highlights all the wrinkles in her barrel chest. In Eileen Myles's new book Afterglow: A Dog Memoir, the celebrated writer and poet shells out great detail of their beloved pitbull Rosie's physical decline. It keeps bad relationships going long after they need to end, it drags us through morasses of suffering and servitude just to try and corroborate the bond. The concept of unconditional love is dangerous, of course. If you can look right at your sidekick's vomit, rashes, lumps, drool, at the unravelling that renders us all destitute sacks of biology, and still be at par: It's love.
Where is the threshold between love and what orbits outside it nigh enough to be a spoof? In my opinion, it's the burden of disgust.
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