After the whole dog adventure, I can finally get back to nursing the pulled muscles that I have in the center of my back. This one is new for me. It’s in that one spot where you can’t reach it with your hands, no matter which direction you try.
I’m laying in my room, which happens to share a wall with the living room. On the other side, I can hear Sabine and Shadow just playing. They’re doing a tug of war, and he’s barking in such a cute way at a ring that Sabine found him to bite, I think.
After the dog adventure today and traveling down to Florida, just all of it put you in a spot to think.
If there were two things that I remember about Tito of recent, one was how much he loved the dog. There was only one thing that superseded that, his love for Sabine. He was so incredibly close to her. My mother always reminds me that he would never lose a moment with anyone that he met to share her picture, to tell them about her, and to share with pride how she took her first steps with him. He made her his beneficiary on his life insurance, but sadly couldn’t pay it after he lost his work. She was absolutely everything to him.
It dawned on me that there are a whole bunch of people that didn’t know Tito prior to him getting sick. Only a couple years ago did my mom mention that he suffered from juvenile diabetes. I knew that, but it never really dawned on me that this was something that was slowly eating at him, but I just thought to myself, “For any of the people that met him after he was sick, they didn’t truly come to appreciate who he was and how close he and I were.” I took him with me to Plattsburgh, and he tried to follow in every footstep that I did. To this day, on his nightstand, he has the extra-large mag light that he used when he was a bouncer at a bar because I was a bouncer and I used a mag light. I was a DJ, so he became a DJ. I went to college, and he wanted to go to college. I studied computers, and he wanted to study computers. There are people that have that memory of Tito that don’t have the memory of him being sick, and that was a very different person.
Tito had a temper, but he would be the person that would give you the shirt off his back, literally. I think that was a common Concepción trait. The stuff you had was really just stuff. He was just into wanting to have a good time and had an amazing megawatt smile.
I still remember him coming to visit me in Florida after his first heart attack and just seeing that version of Tito slowly disappear. As he got sicker, his personality changed. He got grumpier, he got depressed, as he lost the ability to be able to do things for himself. That changed him. The only time that I saw the old version of Tito come back was when he was around Sabine, and she loved him immensely. It’s been a couple of years, and she still is very cautious about bringing him up, both for herself and for me.
But we still talk about him in quiet moments. I give her the same message of him being in a better place, him being at peace, and him being happy, but I don’t tell her that I spend nights scrolling through his old text messages, hoping to see a new one pop up. I don’t tell her that I logged onto a Facebook account with his username and password, just so that I’m working on the computer and get to see his icon appear as available. Maybe something would happen, and I’d get a message. It does feel very much like waiting for Godot, but it provides a weird comfort.
Sabine’s been really wanting to take care of Shadow for a while, but he belongs with my mom now. My mom, however, needs to go on a trip, so he can come and stay with us for a little while. This should give her the flexibility to move around for a little bit. When she wants Shadow back, I’ll bring him back down. If Sabine wants me to bring him to her college to spend some time, I’ll make the drive to do that.
I tried very hard to take care of my brother. There’s a part of me that feels like Shadow is an avatar for that. While I know that I can be a bit neurotic about a dog being alone, or not taking care of them, or not tending to their needs, I feel like this was a promise that was worth keeping.
Listening to her play with him on the other side of the wall and getting pictures of him sleeping on her bed while she’s happy that he’s lying on her foot fill me with such bittersweet joy. My brother Carlos said it best: he would have loved to see how she’s taken care of him.