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11/2/06

Saying a Doggie Goodbye

Wednesday, October 25th: This morning my friends had one of their beloved dogs put down. This decision is always made with great reluctance, from love, from wanting the animal not to suffer any further. Sugar Bear was very ill from cancer, and for the last few days he was clearly already partly somewhere else.

These animals are our friends, co-conspirators, companions on the path. They teach us how to play, and to give ourselves over completely to all that life offers. They show us how to trust, and to love without reserve, even in the face of ugliness and pain.

Years ago I had a boyfriend, a pony-tailed troublemaker, and I had a dog, a White German Shepherd-Doberman mix. Lather went everywhere with me; he was the first dog I had that deep affection for, and it was a revelation of delight. Once my boyfriend said, “I think you love that dog more than you love me,” and I just looked at him and raised my right eyebrow: if he didn’t already know the answer to that statement, I didn’t think he’d want to hear it voiced.

Dog lovers are people with such a passionate connection to their canine buddies that they are nearly a breed apart from the rest of humanity. Dog lovers are devoted, slightly goofy, and are probably seen by the rest of the world as a bit over the top: we pull photos of our pooches out of our wallets, can stand around for hours exchanging stories, and order headstones for their graves. But they teach us to love deeply and madly, and to love over and over again, and how bad can that be?

It’s a strange position to be in, helping our dog go from this world to the next. Even when it has become so clearly the action to take, to do right by creatures who are suffering, it is still a very bizarre and, for me, uncomfortable feeling of playing God.

One moment they’re here, the next they’re gone, and that moment of transition can put us in a very altered state. With Dillon, a Portuguese water spaniel, after the vet gave him the shot and he faded away from us, I howled – the canine version of keening – and wished anything to be able to take it back, to have one more moment of him being alive. After Tesseract, my White German Shepherd and one of the best dogs who ever graced this planet, died, I spent three weeks in a daze, wondering how I could keep going with a broken heart.

But they keep walking by our sides. Pam Houston, in her novel Sight Hound, writes from the dog’s perspective, “Once you’ve had those times together, they become like a present you can open again and again. Humans call this memory, because they can’t open their eyes wide enough to see around time, but real love isn’t any less solid than picture frames and colored pencils, and a great deal more durable. Death can’t take it from you once you’ve held it in your hand.”

Though we must let them go, they are nonetheless set into our lives, and we continue to love them beyond time and space. We mourn them, who own a piece of our heart, a piece we gave willingly because to love them was our joy. We mourn them…and we keep walking, into the rest of our lives, as they continue to fill us, and to make us better people because of their love for us, which continues beyond time and space.

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