Sometimes life gives us a hint, or a sign, before it hits us.
A few weeks ago I came across this passage about dogs and death in the New Yorker. It was one of those things I tore from the magazine while on a plane and stuffed it into my pocket. In part because it spoke to me, and because I wish I’d written it:
A dog’s death is like no other. Not worse than any other, of course. But unlike any other, inasmuch as the disparity between the loss and the profound grief it provokes is so bewildering to outsiders and even to those who feel it…Dog grief somehow passes beyond appropriate sadness to unfathomable feeling.
Why is this so? Because our dogs love us unconditionally? Is it because we see our dogs every day? We see the Amazon guy every day.
Maybe part has to do with the privacy of the loss. There are no wakes, no shivas, and so the feeling has nowhere organized to go. A dog did not accomplish anything, it simply was and its being filled the house.”
We were in New York last week when we got word our 16 year-old Havanese made a bad wheezing sound when she slept. The vet said she was fine, just old. When we returned home, a few days early we saw the weight loss, the tail down, the empty eyes.
My wife is not a crier.
That’s an understatement. She doesn’t have time for tears.
So when our first dog Roxy died in 2018 I was more than a little startled by my wife’s reaction. The pain was palpable and the tears ran like the Johnstown flood.
“You have no idea how much time we spend together,” she said.
And that’s perhaps the root of it for me. There were moments over the years, many moments, when I was home, in my office, on the couch and it was just the two of us.
But with Lulu there was something else.
As a man of a certain age there are times I get up at night to go to the bathroom. And at those moments she would startle awake. And when I returned she would be there, in the night, looking at me and I would look at her and for a moment I felt a connection with this dog as if we were the only two people awake in the world and she was saying I see you, and I saw her back.
It reminds me of a stanza from a poem Jimmy Stewart wrote about his dog:
And there were nights when I’d feel this stare
And I’d wake up and he’d be sitting there
And I reach out my hand and stroke his hair.
And sometimes I’d feel him sigh and I think I know the reason why.
He’d wake up at night
And he would have this fear
Of the dark, of life, of lots of things,
And he’d be glad to have me near.
And now she’s gone.
We bought her on vacation 16 years ago when the kids were 10, 12, and 14 and they were browsing a mall pet store where the little pups were kept in cribs. She brought delight into our house and now there is hole.
So this past Sunday, once we’d made the decision, we called the kids from the veterinary hospital and for the second time in their lives FaceTimed a goodbye to a loving pet. We were drowning in tears and gratitude.
I will miss her in the middle of tonight.
