According to
a lengthy, handwritten letter posted on Facebook, Fiona Apple's beloved dog
is dying, causing her to cancel her South American tour.
She writes that a
tumor has been found in the chest of her 14-year-old rescue dog, a pitbull named
Janet. The note is pretty heartbreaking, especially towards the end.
You can
read the whole thing below (we included an image of the actual note as well),
but be sure to grab a box of tissues first:
It's 6pm 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 tumor 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 child.
She is a pitbull, 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 dogfighters use
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 anymore.
I know that she's not sad about aging
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 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
One of the most admirable, beautiful and heartbreaking things I have
ever read. -- Ricky Gervais
