The Death of Molly

Thoughts on Died Suddenly and Suffering in Silence on the Three Year Anniversary

Me and Molly on Mt Charleston

Three years ago today began one of the worst days of my life. It started when I woke up and let our little Shi Tzu Max into the back yard at the Las Vegas house. Our other dog Molly did not come out. This was very odd.

I thought our 7 year old black lab mix might be sleeping in my Mom’s room with the door closed. I opened the bedroom door. Molly did not come out. I went into the back yard, perplexed.

“Molly?” I called out. “Where are you, Molly?” I checked the back gate. It was closed and locked. Nonetheless I unlatched it and came to the side of the house and then out front. Perhaps somebody had unlatched the gate the night before, or the dog had somehow run out the front door. “Molly?” I questioned on the street out front. If she had been wandering the street all night, she was not nearby. I decided to go inside and ask my Mom, as I had been the first person to wake up.

“Mom?” I questioned. “Have you seen Molly? I thought she was sleeping in your room.”

“No she didn’t sleep in here. I thought she was sleeping in your room.”

I went out front, scratching my head. When had I last seen the dog? Sometime the night before, I supposed. Had she somehow gotten out after we came back from PetSmart? After we came back from….a sudden sinking thud hit me as I opened the garage door and frantically whipped the car door open. And then I screamed.

Our beloved seven year old dog which I had adopted for my older daughter Jasmine was dead on the passenger’s side floor. Her body was already stiff as I heaved the black lab mix out of the car.

I had gone to PetSmart the night before with my daughter to buy a scratching post for her new kitten Dusky. We had not taken Molly or Max with us, in part because the older black dog did not like PetSmart. She was always apprehensive in there like she sensed a lot of bad energy, and I sometimes thought she must have gotten her doggie vaccines in that type of place.

My younger girl was all about the new kitten, and although Max the shi tzu seemed to tolerate the calico, Molly did not seem to like her and had been mostly sleeping in my mother’s room at night after her arrival a few weeks before. Molly also was terrified of fireworks and often hid under a chair in our living room during the noisy time around the 4th of July. Although it was past the 4th, being July 7, 2020, dogs don’t read calenders and sometimes people shoot off their remaining fireworks one or two nights later. So I hadn’t given the dog’s whereabouts a single conscious thought at the time, as I assumed the black lab was either in Mom’s room or hiding under furniture.

But when we had come back from PetSmart, Molly had jumped into the car as I was unloading the scratching post and a few grocery bags from the back seat. Then my daughter had wanted help setting it up with her new kitten and I got distracted. And the dog was left to suffocate to death in the car in the garage.

I frantically called my older daughter and then told Mom and Eliza the shocking news. And then I begin the task of digging a hole in our front yard for the now dead dog.

Scotty walked up as I was still digging the hole and wiping tears from my eyes. I had forgotten that he had told us he was coming over that day and he had walked from the bus stop as he often did. “What happened?” He asked me simply.

“Molly’s dead.” I told him, as he saw her body still in the garage. For a man with learning disabilities Scotty had a Forrest Gumpish way of showing up at the wrong time.

“How’d she die?” He asked me. I didn’t feel like going into it. This was not something I could post about on Facebook.

I’d already been abandoning Facebook as I was getting far too much grief for my opposition to Covid lockdown measures. I hadn’t said too much directly, but unmasked pictures of me and my family maintaining our road tripping ways was catching bad attention with a locked down and perpetually terrified populace concerned about a Summer Covid Wave. It was so obvious to me by then that the narrative was bullshit that I was more perplexed that so few others seemed to be able to see that. Meanwhile some facebook groups like Stop Mandatory Vaccination were dissappearing, lowering my interest and engagement on the site even more.

But for over a decade I had noted an increasing turn on the social media site towards certain approved content, which would then be amped to credit you with more dopamine hits in the form of likes and comments. Yes, beloved pets could die. But even there, they could really only die in acceptable ways. This meant that an old dog, after an acceptable level of veterinary care, could be put out of its misery to cross over the rainbow bridge to likes, hugs and concerned words. Accidents were far less acceptable. Had you left a door or gate open foolishly?

This was an even more horrific accident. I had left my dog to die in a hot car. There was no way that fault wouldn’t be assigned to me to even mention it.

I blamed myself and walked back through the scene all day. Molly had scratched at the door and had clawed out one of the air conditioning vents, probably in a desperate attempt to get rapidly diminishing oxygen. Because it was the hot summer I had driven the car with the air conditioning on and the windows weren’t even opened a crack. How could I have not remembered? I hadn’t even been drinking. I just thought the dog had hidden under something. All I wanted to do was go back in time.

“You’re being too hard on yourself.” BFF 3 lamented a few days later after I told her that I could not get the scene out of my head. Suffocating is the type of death that seems most horrific to me personally. “It was an accident.”

Why hadn’t Molly barked? My Mom had been sitting at the dining room table with the car in the garage only 10 feet away. Surely she would have heard it. Why hadn’t I thought about the dog?

I read some days later an article about children who were left in hot cars and died in the summer heat. I’d always considered this as something that was the fault of negligent parents. One police officer described it differently, stating that in a majority of cases, there was no drug or alcohol use or any clear fault. He called them horrific tragedies and cited a long list of things that could lead to that outcome, including a change in routine, multiple children, multiple caretakers and significant distractions.

I’d never understood it before but I could see it then. It’s Dad’s every other weekend with the youngest child, but then he says he can’t do it. Meanwhile the teenage sister usually takes her brother out of the car, but then her friend next door says she needs help with something. Mom goes inside to take a nap, waking up several hours later to a horror that nobody should ever have to face.

For a long time many substackers have been questioning how those who died suddenly, perhaps in the aftermath of Covid jabs, could be so rarely acknowledged by their family members. It’s not hard for me to understand. There are still prayers up for Thailand’s princess on the Phuket Immigration website and in other places. Ong Bha collapsed on December 14 just a few weeks after a Pfizer booster and never regained consciousness. There have been no royal updates in six months regarding her, even though she is almost certainly either dead or brain dead and never to recover. How could something this significaant be hidden?

I would say that the lack of updates leaves the families holding the bag and enduring the loss in silence. The same facebook that rewarded people for masked profiles with I got my Covid vaccine stickers will deem these deaths as not socially acceptable. It might fuel vaccine hesitancy or something. And then there’s those judgemental, pesky antivaxxers.

The level of grief and pain there is near incomprehensible to me. Just losing a dog to a tragic accident makes me not even want to know. What’s even worse is even true information can now be called misinformation. GoFundMe might not let you get any visibility on paying for your son’s funeral expenses if you even mention the jabs. That’s if you can allow yourself to accept the grief. It’s all about privatizing profits and socializing loss onto everyone else.

This waas my observation on steering the Internet on Sage Hana’s substack yesterday:

Amy Sukwan

Writes Amy’s Newsletter

Jul 6Liked by Sage Hana

I'm amazed that this could continue as it has. I was really pondering something this morning about social media, though. I was on the Internet in the early days, say late 1990's early 2000's when there was no such thing as social media. But there were chatrooms. Back then uploading a single photograph took 1-2 hours and people would complain that it took all of their bandwidth to even see it so it wasn't done much even by those who had the equipment to do so. So what did we talk about in those text only chatrooms? A lot of personal drama, mostly. Health issues came up a lot, as did financial issues, followed on by love drama/relationship things. As things steered increasingly to photos, videos and the like things became progressively more fake. Things were steered more towards the egoistic: look at my nice new car, here's a super snapchat filtered selfie of me that makes me look like an 18 year old supermodel, here's a picture of my cat, I took this lovely vacation to Europe types of things. What became increasingly lost was that human connection to the struggles of being human in this day and age. How did doctors acquire such Godlike status in our current world? Think for a moment about who is likely to know all of the following about you: How much alcohol you drink if you do, how much you smoke if you do, what drugs you take (legal and prescription), how many sex partners you've had and what orientation you are, if you've ever been pregnant (gender specific) and how many times, any mental stressors, and what current health issues you have. Nobody posts all of that crap for their BFFs on facebook. If you're very lucky a few close real life friends or family members know. Those health professionals though, they've got all the secret tabs...

It’s funny to me that the Internet, which was held as a promise to bring people together, was increasingy steered towards keeping people apart. One of the first use cases proposed was to allow people with rare diseases to find each other and share best practices. Perhaps they would have found out that vaccine injury and systematic chemical poisoning was not rare at all. So then you got boosted and rewarded for sexy selfies. Was this really all organic?

I’ve come to terms with Molly’s death, but I wish I had been able to post about it openly. Then again if Facebook is the best the Internet can offer, I’d say it’s time to build alternatives. May she rest in peace

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