by Julie Klam
They all run and play together, but the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. His bright eyes are intent. His eager body quivers. Suddenly he begins to run from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster.
You have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.
Then you cross Rainbow Bridge together. . . .
—Author unknown
We lit the candle, knowing that if there was a heaven for dogs, Moses would be there before too long.
LESSON SEVEN
How to Mourn the Loss of a Friend
As of this writing, my lifetime dog count is seventeen family dogs. Ten during the eighteen years I lived with my parents, and seven dogs with my own family. Seventeen, of which thirteen are gone. Unfortunately “the end” is part of every dog story, and if you have dogs, you have to reconcile with that unless your personal ethics and bank account permit cloning.
When Misty, our standard poodle, died, I was in fourth grade. I made her a wooden grave marker out of a scrap from my father’s toolshed, and adorned it with markings from a ballpoint pen. I walked to the woods where she was buried, a place no one ever went to, and there I found the clearing where my dad told me he had buried her. At least I thought that’s where it was, and at any rate I dropped the grave marker there and ran really fast back to the house. I didn’t want any poodle ghosts after me.
In the fall of seventh grade our great mastiff, Lioness, started having difficulty managing the stairs and then walking at all. Mastiffs are prone to hip dysplasia. I was leaving for school in the morning, following my brothers out the front door, and I turned back and looked at my mom’s face. She was crying. On the bus I began to realize that Lioness was at her end, that it was likely going to be her very last day, and that I had not had a chance to say good-bye. When I got to school, I was sobbing and was brought to the guidance counselor, who called my mom. She picked me up and we were both crying. She told me they would be putting Lioness down later that day. I went into the house and found Lioness in her spot, her tail still, not the usual thump-thump when we went toward her. I lay down on her and I cried and cried and said good-bye and told her I loved her. I went with my mother to the vet in Pound Ridge where our kind and WASPy veterinarian greeted us in madras pants and a starched white polo. He came out to the car and lifted the rear door of the SUV, where Lioness, prone on a chaise longue cushion, waited. I thought about the time we were at the vet and my mother was laughing so hard she was wiping the tears off her face with her sleeve because the country club vet was treating a white husky named Honky. Now my mother was gulping and biting the inside of her mouth and looking off into the distance, trying not to let the tears flow. Lioness looked briefly at the vet, laid her head down, and closed her eyes. My mother covered her with an Indian print bedspread and closed the door quietly and we drove her home. Sometime later my dad did the job of burying her, driving her to the graveyard behind the tennis court. I don’t remember thinking about it after that day.
When my beloved Otto died, I had the time and the space to grieve the way I wanted. I was pregnant, I wasn’t working, and I was flagrantly hormonal, so I felt perfectly comfortable walking down the street weeping.
With Moses, I was in a different stage of my life altogether. Though I’d had Otto for seven years and Moses for only three months, Moses had gotten under my skin. In a brief time, he’d become a dog of my heart. But it was just a few weeks before I was going to leave on a book tour, and with a small child in school, I didn’t have the luxury of letting it all hang out. I remembered years before asking Paul’s mother about how she managed the death of her husband at age forty, suddenly becoming a widow and single mother of four boys. She’d said, “Honestly, I would’ve liked to crawl under the covers and stay there, but for my kids’ sake, I couldn’t afford to.” She pushed her feelings down and went to work. In no way would I ever compare the loss of a husband and father of your children with the loss of Moses, but I wanted to know how it was possible to cope with a death when you’re not at liberty to grieve the way you’d like. So like Paul’s mother, I compartmentalized. I had my sadness, but I kept it separate.
As sorry for myself as I felt, my greatest concern was for Violet. The day after Moses’s death, she started to say he was just lost. We paid very close attention to her. She would say he was in an accident, and then later, that she hoped we would find him soon. Some days she’d be angry with me for losing him and then ask if we could go back out and look for him. One night as we were going to bed she got herself dressed in her clothes again and wanted to head out and find him. She said she knew where he was.
There was, as there always is, a lot going on in our lives, and plenty of potential distractions for Violet. We focused on Beatrice, telling Violet that Bea needed us to take care of her. But if our apartment door opened and Bea went into the hall, Violet would start screaming. It was a while before she stopped thinking that Beatrice was in danger of going to heaven any second she was out of sight. I knew that kids don’t take in what they can’t handle, but it was months before Violet finally accepted that Moses was gone. Several months later, she told a friend that he’d gone to live with a new family who had a house and grass.
I was consumed by the vision of Moses’s accident. It played on a loop in my brain. Every time I left my apartment building and saw that spot where he’d been hit, I felt distraught and nauseated. I could be shopping, or e-mailing, or working out at the gym and I’d see Moses coming and the car and I’d wince and try to shake the images out of my head. Or I’d press my palms against my eyes as if the picture was “out there” instead of in my brain.
In every way I could, I tried to accelerate the mourning period. Throughout the months that followed, I would think about him and feel a sense of having had something that slipped through my fingers. I felt that I’d lost him too soon. Since I never found the silver lining of the experience, I was somewhat relieved when they paved over the spot where he’d been hit on Broadway.
Being a part of the rescue group helped me immeasurably. It became like a support group. There wasn’t a single member who couldn’t identify with the depth of my anguish and the fact that it was hard to express to the outside world. Every time someone said they prayed for him or lit a candle, I felt grateful.
Often when I meet people and tell them I have dogs and work with a rescue group, I hear stories of the dog who was, without question, the sweetest, the smartest, and quite simply the best dog who ever lived. If I talk about my dogs, I see a look in their eyes that says, “No, you don’t understand, this dog was different.” And I always understand. That dog was different. There are some people who experience the loss of a dog and decide never again to go through that. They don’t want to get another dog; they don’t want to feel that thing again and have it taken away. There are risks when you love someone and maybe people feel that this is one way they can control it.
Otto’s and Moses’s deaths were significantly different. Though I was unprepared for both, I don’t think the dogs were. I have often felt that dogs know, however they die, that it’s coming. Not long ago my parents’ beloved golden retriever, Frankie, was hit by a car. It was the kind of accident you feel should not have happened. They were going for a walk, the same walk they’d done every day for the six years they had him. He was already on the other side of the road and they heard a truck coming, so my dad called the dogs. Frankie, ever obedient, just came bounding into the road without looking. He never knew what hit him.
Later when we talked about it, my mom said she felt Frankie had been acting strange all day. “There was something going on with him,” she said with certainty. And their other dog, Peaches, didn’t have much of
a reaction to his death. It was like they’d all dealt with it on this higher plane in their magical dog way. If only we were privy to what goes on there. I’ve always thought that dogs are spiritually superior to humans, which is why I think they have such abbreviated lives. They do their business here on earth and then move on.
Some months ago I was having dinner with a friend of mine, Diane, who lives near me in New York City. We’d actually been to a screening of Marley & Me together, and naturally the topic of dogs and death came up. I told her about Otto and Moses and she told me about her son Sam’s dog, Radar, who was now in his twilight years. Sam lived in Los Angeles and was grown-up and married, but he’d gotten this dog shortly after her husband had died, when Sam was twenty-two, and they all credited Radar with getting Sam through his father’s death. She was very concerned about how devastated her son was going to be when it was Radar’s turn—it wasn’t something that appeared to be imminent, just inevitable.
I thought about them a lot, Sam and Radar, though I’d never met them. When I walked Beatrice in the park in the mornings, I often ran into a man in his mid-fifties who had an old shepherd mix named Gravely (after the brand of tractor because when he was a pup he’d “mow everyone down”). Gravely was sixteen, which is pretty old for a big dog. He couldn’t walk much, so his owner would carry him from Riverside Drive to the park where he’d once run and set him down in the grass. Gravely would take a few tentative arthritic steps and lie down. His owner would stand beside him looking out at the Hudson River. Sometimes I’d come over to pet Gravely and say hello; other times I sensed the man and Gravely needed their privacy. They were going through a process. I didn’t see them every day so it took a couple of weeks before I realized they’d stopped coming and I sat in the grass Gravely and his owner had once claimed and said a little prayer for them both.
Not long after Diane told me about Radar, she went to Los Angeles. Something was happening with Radar and she felt she needed to say good-bye to him. Sam assured her there was plenty of time. A couple of weeks later, Sam e-mailed me Radar’s heartbreaking obituary.
I have talked so much about dog death because almost every time someone close to me goes through it, the same question comes up: Why is this so hard for me to deal with? A very close friend admitted to me that losing his dog had been harder than losing his loving aged father. Another friend said, “The hardest part is that most people don’t understand . . . it wasn’t just a dog.” There’s a framework in place for dealing with human death that doesn’t really exist for animal companions. Otto was a beloved friend, but also an incredibly significant comfort to me. He knew when I was sad or worried and often acted it out for me (hiding under the bed and such) and it would help me to cope. I kept thinking how badly I needed him to help me deal with his death.
Everyone talks about it, but animals are so selfless and their love is unconditional. They aren’t angry with us for more than a few seconds and their actions don’t mask ulterior motives. Well, except for one of my dogs, who pretends to be a good watchdog if he wants something I’m eating. He says, “Woof woof,” but means “Look how brave I am; you should give me some of that cheese.”
We are responsible for our dogs. It’s up to us to figure out when they get walked or vaccinated and what they eat and when (except for garbage; they decide that on their own). We also decide whether or not to put them through chemotherapy. And when the time comes, we decide whether or not to put them to sleep. It’s an awesome guardianship to be entrusted with.
That responsibility is not one I take lightly. At best, a dog’s life is short, compared to a human’s. There was a black Lab in my old neighborhood who died at age twenty-four. The oldest dog ever lived to be twenty-nine years and five months. And that’s a part of the human-canine bond we have to reconcile with. When Otto died, I was told by a really wonderful animal communicator that he had work to do on the “other side,” namely helping my unborn baby into the world. Somehow that made the task of accepting that he would never get to know my new daughter easier.
AFTER OTTO DIED, I wrote something that was so painfully depressing that I have never been able to read it again. I wanted so much to evoke the sadness I felt and make sure everyone else felt it, too. My fear was that since Otto was a dog, he’d be forgotten. What I wrote emulated the stirring valedictories written for Lou Gehrig, the great Yankee who died at age thirty-nine from ALS. Fitting? I am not sure.
Is that what Otto would have wanted? Would he want me to be morose and sacrosanct? I always listen very closely when someone talks about what they want people to do when they die. “I want everyone to have a big party and laugh and play the White Album!” or “I want a small group of my closest friends to tell stories and get drunk.” My father doesn’t want a funeral; he wants to be cremated and for everyone to just go about their business. My aunt Mattie, on the other hand, has asked my brothers and me since we were kids to promise (and she gives us money when she’s saying this) that when she dies, we’ll throw ourselves on her grave wailing and sobbing, “Don’t go, Aunt Mattie, please don’t go!” I appreciate this. Really, I’ve always agreed with her. When I die, I want people to be sad. Actually, I’d like to have one of those services that are standing room only. (But really I don’t want to die.) So my transference with Otto went to the end; I thought he’d want me to mourn him like a Victorian widow.
I wrote back to Sam after I got Radar’s obituary, but it wasn’t until a long while later that I met him and heard how he was finally able to let Radar go.
One day he had been running a few errands with Radar. The back of his SUV had always been Radar’s place, with a bed and toys and treats and water. Now, Sam had to lift him in and out of the car instead of his leaping in and out. Radar’s feet were really hurting him at this stage, and walking on concrete was almost impossible. Sam drove past a street lined with lush grass and pulled over to give him some relief (he had to hold him up to use the bathroom at that point). As Radar stood on the grass, not quite feeling like taking any steps, Sam rooted him on and stood, prepared to help. A flatbed truck drove by them, slowed down, made a U-turn, and drove back to where Sam was standing with Radar. A man around age fifty got out and approached them. He asked Sam if Radar was his dog. Sam said yes and the man looked at him with compassionate eyes and said, “I have had dogs all my life, and I currently keep three dogs at home. I drove by and could just tell that you are not seeing the truth in your dog. It is time to let him go. You really have to do the right thing by him now.” He got into his truck and drove away.
Later, when Sam told his wife and mom and mother-in-law, they all told him that the man was an angel sent to him. He made the appointment soon after to put Radar to sleep.
Being the one who has to make the choice is a terrible responsibility, and it’s almost never as clear as you wish it would be.
A very wise dog woman once told me that dogs find owners, not the other way around. They pick you and they choose to stay with you. In that way, they are also giving you the end of their life. The deeper the bond, the harder it is to say good-bye. I know I’d rather have any amount of time with a dog I love and suffer the mourning than not have the time at all.
LESSON EIGHT
How to Uncover Truths
We had remained committed to our ban on fosters, even though our time with Moses had proven there were potential dog soul mates out there.
About four months after Moses’s death, our home was empty of guests, and we were asked to be a layover for a transport of two Boston terrier puppy mixes. I agreed, since it was just a day or two and they were little teeny cute pups. I hooked up with the transport very early Friday morning in Tribeca and picked the little armloads up. They were unsurprisingly cute, and they went by the names of Sarah and Lizzie. We would only have them until Sunday night. Piece. Of. Cake.
You would think that I’d have learned at some point that nothing involving rescue dogs is ever simple. They were puppies!!! Unhousebroken!!! Totally destructi
ve!!! In an hour, one of them had eaten the power cord for Paul’s laptop and my iPod. The night after they arrived I had to speak to a book club in New Jersey. While I was getting ready to go, Lizzie jumped on our bed and took a pee. I was so insulted and stunned. I took the sheets off the bed while explaining to her that she was a guest in our home and while I didn’t expect her to wash dishes, there were some house rules I’d appreciate her following. She walked with me to the washer and dryer and stood beside me as I put the new clean sheets on the bed. I asked her to please leave the bedroom because I would be closing the door with her outside. Unfortunately, I was missing one pillowcase, and I stepped out to the linen closet. By the time I put the pillow on the bed, she’d done it again! She got back on the bed and pissed on the same spot. Twice in five minutes. “Someone is not angling for an invitation back here!” I said.
Paul got home from work early to be with Violet while I went to New Jersey. About every seven minutes my phone rang. It was Paul.
“They are pissing and crapping everywhere!” he said. He didn’t expect me to come home; he just wanted me to know what the situation was. And, evidently, make sure I was as miserable as he was. I said I’d clean it up when I got home, and then he called me one final time to say, “Lizzie just pissed on our bed again!”
Three days after they were supposed to leave, Lizzie and Sarah finally left. I wanted to help, but I wasn’t sure I could again. I thought it might be better to arm ourselves with another foster, just in case any puppy transports were passing through and looking for a way station. My marriage was strong, but those puppies could chew through anything.