Dog Years

by Mark Doty

  Such a set of rituals represents education in the work of grieving. Such a loss prefigures the ones to come, and, as a point of origin, reverberates throughout a life. It has always startled me that psychology has placed so much emphasis on children’s introduction to the world of sexuality; compelling as such discoveries are, can we truly say they matter more to us than our initial discoveries of limit? The child’s apprehension of mortality is a set of initiations, woundings, introductions to the mystery, and animals are very often the objects of these instructions. The little turtle in the grass, the lifeless snake on the path, the toad crushed by a boot heel, the caged bird whose animation has fled with its song—they are more than themselves for us as children; they lead us into the depths of this life.

  I’m walking Arden, our elderly black retriever, on the street in front of the apartment. Arden’s been with me since he was a pup, himself retrieved from an animal shelter in Vermont. The fifteen years of his life represent the story of that decade and a half of mine; he’s outlived Wally, and came, after a bit of convincing, to be totally devoted to Paul, the man in my life now. And he’s outlived Beau, with whom he shared house and walks and water bowl for seven years. He seems to have been old for so long! As he’s gradually hobbled by arthritis and cataracts, as his deafness intensifies, he grows more and more touching in his persistence, his intent to continue his walks and his descents and panting ascents of the apartment stairs. Paul says that Arden’s like one of those old men you see every morning on the beach in Miami, the barrel-chested kind in a tight, black bikini who throws himself into the water for a swim, no matter what the weather; the colder the water and the more blustery the day, the more he seems to take a fierce pride in his morning constitutional. That’s Arden, panting and hurtling his way up the stairs. I love him fiercely, especially just now, the way he likes to lie in bed between us and gaze into my face while I’m reading, the bedside lamp lighting up the amber depths of his cataracted eye, which looks like it’s covered by a skim of coconut oil, something white and reflective when the light catches it. And the fierce thump of his tail on the black maple floors when we come home and find him awake and waiting for us; he can’t easily leap to his feet to greet us anymore, but he can pound that tail on the floor with a glorious, regular ferocity.

  Walking is too active a word for what we’re actually doing, out on the sidewalk in front of our building—I am standing there and Arden is wobbling a bit on his shaky legs, looking around, considering what next—when a woman, a stranger, approaches us. She’s moved, it seems, by seeing such an obviously elderly creature, and asks how he’s doing. I say not so great, explain his various illnesses and his concomitant courage. Courage may be an imprecise term; what I mean is that he retains a certain unmistakable pleasure in living, an interest in things, despite the increasing failures of his body, of which he is clearly quite aware. Surely, that is a species of courage.

  The woman, who’s been bending over to pet him, stands up and seems to, at least figuratively, dust off her hands. She says something like, “He’s had a good life. Isn’t that just lovely, that we’re all part of the cycle, we’re here and then we go!”

  Well, in truth, she didn’t say those words exactly, but whatever she said struck my ear with that effect; she wanted to assert that in the great current of being, the particular elderly struggling creature in front of her didn’t really matter, that his particular condition was not tragic, because he was just a flash in the great motion of the whole.

  To which I wanted to say, though I did not, Fuck you.

  All right, the woman on the street is (forgive me) a straw dog. I know her statement probably arises out of an effort to control a grief so deep it needs the fencing boundaries of a readily available rationalization for loss. She probably says such things to strangers so she won’t start weeping.

  But I hate the erasure of individual value in her claim nonetheless, her easy embrace of detachment. Grief, her position suggests, is a failing. It means you won’t accept the cycle of life, that you wish always to preserve what you love. Why can’t you say, well, Arden and Beau had good lives? They were lucky dogs. To love what lives a shorter span than you do necessitates loss, so get used to it.

  I am not, resolutely, used to it. Just now death remains an interruption, leaves me furious, sorrowing, refusing to yield. Too easy an acceptance seems, frankly, sentimental, an erasure of the particular irreplaceable stuff of individuality with a vague, generalized truth. That’s how sentimentality works, replacing particularity with a warm fog of acceptable feeling, the difficult exact stuff of individual character with the vagueness of convention. Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of loss or the fierce individuality of passion with the dulling, “universal” certainty of platitude.

  In the last days of Beau’s life, when we used to walk to Washington Square in the afternoon, the low, angling sun would enter between buildings and cast a diagonal of nearly rosy gold across half the houses fronting the square, even across the upper half of the trees.

  I loved that light, and in some way, it was his gold—that same warm suspension, held there in the cold air a little while. And then the whole world would seem divided just that way, half a haze of golden light, and half an inky, magnetic darkness.

  Of course, the square wasn’t pitch dark where the light didn’t fall, simply a more somber gray and rose. Pitch dark, after all, is a beautiful color, like Arden’s rich, black luster. But in me, where I kept and carried that pattern of light, it was different: the world seemed split into radiance and a pure, hungry darkness. Because there was that presence—golden, eager, loving, alert—and there was the emptiness that it countered, and I knew so clearly that the gold was failing. Not that gold would go out of the world—of course, that light would still be there, as it has been since the day those houses were built and first interrupted the pour of the winter afternoon sun. And there would be in the world the brilliance of other dogs, many of them, and in them, I’d see Beau’s particular gestures and character echoed, I knew that. But nonetheless my gold was disappearing, failing before my eyes, and I had no power to intervene; anything I could do to help seemed only to slow it down a little, if even that.

  He was a vessel. Himself, yes, plain, ordinary, and perfect in that sloppy dog way—but he carried something else for me, too, which was my will to live. I had given it to him to carry for me, like some king in a fairy tale, whose power depends upon a lustrous, mysterious beast, and who, without that animal presence, will wither away into shadow. I didn’t understand till much later how I’d given that power to both of them, my two speechless friends; they were the secret heroes of my own vitality.

  We’d turn southward when our walk was done, heading home in the cold, usually just at the deepening hour of twilight, come early in winter, when the world went blue. Before us would loom two tall rectangles of little winking lamps, wavering in the exhaust and turbulence of the air. By day, they’d been merely harsh geometry, dully regular office towers, the city’s pillars. But when evening fell, they’d suddenly seem welcoming, a little darker blue than the sky, glowing with evidence of warmth and habitation.

  Entr’acte

  On Sentimentality

  The oversweetened surface of the sentimental exists in order to protect its maker, as well as the audience, from anger.

  At the beautiful image refusing to hold, at the tenderness we bring to the objects of the world—our eagerness to love, make home, build connection, trust the other—how all of that’s so readily swept away. Sentimental images of children and of animals, sappy representations of love—they are fueled, in truth, by their opposites, by a terrible human rage that nothing stays. The greeting card verse, the airbrushed rainbow, the sweet puppy face on the fleecy pink sweatshirt—these images do not honor the world as it is, in its complexity and individuality, but distort things in apparent service of a warm embrace
. They feel empty because they will not acknowledge the inherent anger that things are not as shown; the world, in their terms, is not a universe of individuals but a series of interchangeable instances of charm. It is necessary to assert the insignificance of individuality to make mortality bearable.

  In this way, the sentimental represents a rage against individuality, the singular, the irreplaceable. ( Why don’t you just get another dog?)

  The anger that lies beneath the sentimental accounts for its weird hollowness. But it is, I suppose, easier to feel than what lies beneath rage: the terror of emptiness, of waste, of the absence of meaning or value; the empty space of our own death, neither comprehensible nor representable. Not a grinning death’s head but something worse: the lifeless blank, a zero no one steps around, though we try; repress it and it returns, more hungry, more negating, with more suck and pull.

  Despair, I think, is the fruit of a refusal to accept our mortal situation. Perhaps it’s less passive than it may seem; is despair a deep assertion of will? The stubborn self saying, I will not have it, I do not accept it.

  Fine, says the world, don’t accept it.

  The collective continues; the whole goes on, while each part slips away. To attach, to attach passionately to the individual, which is always doomed to vanish—does that make one wise, or make one a fool?

  Chapter Two

  My Beau lived for twenty-four days, his last, in New York City. Of all his life, those days seem most vivid to me, most peculiarly present in memory. Why should this be, out of seven years of pleasures? The way he’d swim out into the tide toward a flung tennis ball, head held above the water, till he’d reach his goal and then strike forward with his jaws in a single, dedicated motion—and later, when we were both worn out, sit on the sand beside me, leaning his damp weight into me in affection and solidarity (a habit that once led to the worst case of poison ivy I’ve ever had, since he’d come crashing through the rugosa roses twined in shiny, pointy-leafed vines to rest against me). The wild intensity of his race up the steep cliff of a high bluff on the ocean side of the Cape in Truro. The salt-marsh smell rising from his body after a walk in June (there is nothing else in the world that smells exactly like a golden retriever dipped in a salt marsh). A windy winter day in one of those same salt marshes when we hiked out on the path to scatter Wally’s ashes, and Wally’s mother threw into the water a single long-stemmed rose, and Beau kept deciding to fetch it back—over and over again, shivering, the pale skin under his strawberry blond growing blue in the cold. A sunny February day when my friend Michael and I went walking in the dunes, and Beau, who’d gone off exploring, came thundering down a snowy sand slope to greet me, his gaze fixed on my face, and I felt exactly like the old woman in Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” who exclaims, “Oh, Buddy, I could leave the world with today in my eyes!”

  I carry this intricately detailed history, but just now, it has been covered over by twenty-four days. Now it seems we were always walking down the long corridor of the apartment building, onto the slightly grungy elevator, its floor scuffed by the grit of winter boots and shoes, out the lobby toward the open courtyard, where the doorman, a particularly egregious example of the way that a person with very little power will sometimes wield what authority he does have with remarkable diligence, glares at us because he thinks Beau’s going to pee on a trimmed hedge that’s either his pride or burden. Then into the crowded pedestrian passageway that leads north toward Washington Square, our landscape: late winter afternoon’s thin sun, the paths angling toward the circle at the heart of the park, then the dog run with its rich, acrid air, its leaping and bounding and intent watching from the sidelines. I am not sure that Arden and Beau actually like the dog run; it is, clearly, a source of deep interest, but they seem to spend a lot of time on the sidelines, eyeing the leaping and playing, the elegant breeds with their extravagant grooming tossed in with the pit bulls and the flop-eared mutts. I think neither of my dogs is up for the fray. I try to imagine what it would be like to go to a public place fraught with the immediate possibility of either sex or fighting. Would that be a pleasure, exactly, would it make you feel more alive?

  But today it’s only Beau and I, going not toward the dog run but north to Ninth Street, walking to the vet. Dr. Cain works in the East Village, blocks away, and our walk takes us through what’s becoming a familiar passage. We refuse the allure of open space pulling us toward the park, walk on, up University Place—little anonymous shops, dry cleaners and dress shops and opticians—then go past the big apartment buildings on East Ninth, across Lafayette, where the character of the neighborhood starts changing, and then across Third Avenue into the East Village itself: red tenement buildings, little patches of ice on the sidewalk, unreadable spray-painted scrawls, razor wire spiraling over a door frame, a gray gown in a designer’s window, like an architectural column made of satin. Carvings from Bali, an extravagant shadowbox display starring plumed hats, like lost bits of costume from The Count of Monte Cristo. Past the natural pet food store, with its abandoned cats up for adoption sleeping in the windows, past the Ukrainian restaurant with its expressionist murals, then the toy shop.

  I love the windows of the toy shop, where a cardboard puppet theater painted with stars has been set up, Punch and Judy leering from behind its little velvet curtain. AURORA BOREALIS THEATER, the glittery cursive over the stage proclaims. Beau stops here, too, head up, alert, eying the windows—what does he see? Stuffed animals, puppets, a mobile? As if he wants to go in to see the wonders. (Sudden odd sensation, a bit of imagining what it’s like to be a father, witness to a child’s delight. Reacquainted, thus, with delight’s beginnings?)

  Then a Taoist temple below street-level, clutter of antiques, a fancy boutique where a glamorous small dog in an angora sweater guards a window with a big vase of calla lilies. Down the metal stairs, under a walkway to St. Marks Animal Hospital, with its warm, crowded waiting room. A boy with a turtle in a pasteboard box. Two tailored women with a small, carefully brushed terrier; a Latin transvestite with a long-haired white cat in a carrier on her lap, sitting beside her boyfriend, both with an air of impenetrable sadness. An earnest, bookish young man in his early twenties, holding on his lap a shoebox with air holes punched into the sides and top, through which he gazes down at some undeterminable living thing.

  The place is crazy busy; the phone rings all the time; the receptionist must interrupt her conversation with everyone who’s arriving or departing to answer and make new appointments. Beau is thoroughly interested, and simultaneously on cautious good behavior; he lies down at my feet, head upright, turning from one loved creature to another, taking it all in.

  Our turn, finally. Dr. Cain is short, authoritative, speaks quickly, and has the businesslike air of a Harvard MBA; he’s probably thirty, a new-school, high-tech vet, white lab coat, but it doesn’t take long to sense, beneath his clipped and rapid discourse, the lineaments of compassion. He examines the charts I’ve brought, info from Beau’s old doctor; he describes the blood work that’s needed to monitor Beau’s kidney condition; he seems to notice that I have been paying attention to what my old vet’s been saying and am now conversant in kidney-function levels, low-protein diets. Beau’s lost a few pounds since he was last weighed: bad sign. Pinching his coat shows he’s a little dehydrated. He holds still for the blood drawing, accomplished by the doctor’s holding one front paw in the air while I hold his head; he’s hugely cooperative, as ever, but he winces at the first stab, which doesn’t, in fact, find the vein; Dr. Cain must do it again, and this time, both he and Beau flinch; the darkish blood starts flowing into the tube, filling the syringe.

  It’s days before the phone call comes with the news, and it isn’t good. Kidney counts elevated, too much creatinine in the blood. What there is to do: keep the protein in the diet very low, and he should begin receiving fluids beneath his skin. Beneath his skin? The doctor means that a saline solution should be introduced directly into his bloodstream. He says
dogs on fluids “stay around a lot longer.” I can bring him to the vet’s office for this procedure every day, or I can learn to do it myself. “It’s easy,” he says, “if you can handle it.” Dr. Cain says he’ll have the technician teach me.

  We make the walk again. New faces in the waiting room, new dogs curled on the floor or held on laps, new cats peering out from their carrying crates. The technician calls us in. She’s in her twenties, kind, and she looks at Beau with a look I’ve not seen directed toward him: the sort of pitying look we give to the dying. I remember, all at once, when I met this look before—when Wally first took a trip into town in his wheelchair, after he’d lost the use of his legs to a viral brain infection, a complication of AIDS. That afternoon I knew that other people saw him as dying. There is no reason in the world this should have been a surprise, but still it was stunning, seeing my own reality so directly stated in the eyes of others. It’s the look—wordless, freighted with meaning—that makes our experience feel real. We know ourselves by how we’re known, our measure taken by the gaze of the outsider looking in.

  Today my instinctive response is not to acknowledge this, not quite. On we go, to do what needs to be done. “Fluids”—saline solution, electrolytes—come in plastic bags marked with measuring lines, like the indicators on a measuring cup. The bags must be hung high in the air, so that the liquid can drip through a tube, propelled by the force of gravity, and flow through a needle inserted beneath a dog’s skin. The idea is to grab a clump of that nice loose skin that dogs carry on their backs and insert the needle just so, so that it doesn’t enter the muscle or come out the other side. It takes practice—both to get it right and to deal with one’s own aversion to poking a thick needle into a living body.