Musician Fiona Apple cancels tour to be with her dying dog

Cruel as it is, not everyone gets a chance to bid adieu to their best friend. It happens awkwardly, a pause that comes unannounced; blank noise.

When Rusty passed away last summer, I was trekking in the Himalayas. Blame it on fickle signals; it took my family half a day to reach me. The breaking voice of my mother, words choked into syllables announced the close of my beloved childhood chapter. All of a sudden, Gangotri glacier and the glistening snow blurred into oblivion and I could not care less.

Like shadows dissolved in daylight.

On November 2012, news started doing rounds- ‘Musician Fiona Apple cancels tour to be with her dying dog’.

See Also: What you lose when you lose your dog?

Fiona found Janet 13 years ago in a park and since then they were inseparable. Janet had a tumor and Apple believed that the impending fate was closer than she thought.

Calling Janet as ‘best friend, mother, daughter and the one who taught me how to love’, the musician posted a handwritten four-page letter on her Facebook page explaining her decision to the fans.

Fiona Apple’s emotional letter to fans explaining what her dog means to her

It’s 6 pm on Friday, and I’m writing to a few thousand friends I have not met yet. I am writing to ask them to change our plans and meet a little while later.

Here’s the thing. I have a dog Janet, and she’s been ill for almost two years now, as a tumour has been idling in her chest, growing ever so slowly. She’s almost 14 years old now. I got her when she was 4 months old. I was 21 then, an adult officially – and she was my kid.

She is a pit bull, and was found in Echo Park, with a rope around her neck and bites all over her ears and face. She was the one the dog fighters used to puff up the confidence of the contenders. She’s almost 14 and I’ve never seen her start a fight, or bite, or even growl, so I can understand why they chose her for that awful role. She’s a pacifist.

Janet has been the most consistent relationship of my adult life, and that is just a fact. We’ve lived in numerous houses, and jumped a few make shift families, but it’s always really been the two of us. She slept in bed with me, her head on the pillow, and she accepted my hysterical, tearful face into her chest, with her paws around me, every time I was heartbroken, or spirit-broken, or just lost, and as years went by, she let me take the role of her child, as I fell asleep, with her chin resting above my head. She was under the piano when I wrote songs, barked any time I tried to record anything, and she was in the studio with me all the time we recorded the last album.

The last time I came back from tour, she was spry as ever, and she’s used to me being gone for a few weeks every 6 or 7 years. She has Addison’s Disease, which makes it dangerous for her to travel since she needs regular injections of Cortisol, because she reacts to stress and to excitement without the physiological tools which keep most of us from literally panicking to death. Despite all of this, she’s effortlessly joyful and playful, and only stopped acting like a puppy about 3 years ago. She’s my best friend and my mother and my daughter, my benefactor, and she’s the one who taught me what love is.

I can’t come to South America. Not now. When I got back from the last leg of the US tour, there was a big, big difference. She doesn’t even want to go for walks any-more. I know that she’s not sad about ageing or dying. Animals have a survival instinct, but a sense of mortality and vanity, they do not. That’s why they are so much more present than people.

But I know that she is coming close to a point where she will stop being a dog, and instead, be part of everything. She’ll be in the wind, and in the soil, and the snow, and in me, wherever I go. I just can’t leave her now, please understand. If I go away again, I’m afraid she’ll die and I won’t have the honor of singing her to sleep, of escorting her out.

Sometimes it takes me 20 minutes to pick which socks to wear to bed. But this decision is instant. These are the choices we make, which define us. I will not be the woman who puts her career ahead of love and friendship. I am the woman who stays home and bakes Tilapia for my dearest, oldest friend. And helps her be comfortable, and comforted, and safe, and important.

Many of us these days, we dread the death of a loved one. It is the ugly truth of Life, that keeps us feeling terrified and alone. I wish we could also appreciate the time that lies right beside the end of time. I know that I will feel the most overwhelming knowledge of her, and of her life and of my love for her, in the last moments. I need to do my damnedest to be there for that. Because it will be the most beautiful, the most intense, the most enriching experience of life I’ve ever known. When she dies.

So I am staying home, and I am listening to her snore and wheeze, and reveling in the swampiest, most awful breath that ever emanated from an angel. And I am asking for your blessing.

I’ll be seeing you.
Love,
Fiona

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There’s a chorus to the heart which is louder than the cheering crowds, for conscience is its own audience. Like dog lovers world over, l understand and applaud Fiona’s decision.

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