This morning, I read a lovely blog post from my friend Patrick talking about the four years he has shared so far with his dog, Elwood.
This afternoon, I buried one of mine. Life can be funny like that.
Burying a pet is one of those things that you really can’t prepare for. It’s raw and emotional and yet feels natural, at its core. This is how owners are supposed to take care of their pets, through the very end.
It leaves me in a reflective mood, unsurprisingly. But Ginger is the fourth family dog I’ve buried, so I’m not sure what to reflect on, per se.
We’ve always been a two-dog family. So that “they can have someone to play with”, was the theory. Buddy wandered into my father-in-law’s work one day and he eventually became ours. How a dog wanders into a police station is unknown; why Larry would bring him home was a given.
Buddy was the first family dog I buried. My girls were young, maybe late elementary school. He died in the car on the way to the vet, my wife was wrecked. The veterinarian staff were wonderful, kind, sensitive.
Earlier that week, our neighbor had given us a crepe myrtle sapling. It was wrapped in a plastic Publix bag; it wasn’t from a nursery. I’m guessing she’d dug it up herself. They have a lovely garden that overflows their backyard, and I suspect that this little guy had gotten in the way.
She’s actually the mother of our neighbors who happens to live with them. She’s this sweet older Asian lady who always waves at my girls, and she doesn’t speak a lick of English except “Hello” and “I don’t know”. I know this because that’s what she says when you say anything to her.
But I was in the front yard and she walked over with the crepe myrtle sapling wrapped in a Publix bag, holding it out to me and motioning like, “Don’t you want a tree?”
Well, you can’t say, “No” to a tree from your neighbor’s nice mother who doesn’t speak English. Come on.
Later that week, when Buddy died in the car on the way to the vet, I buried him and planted the tree on top of him. It became “Buddy’s Tree” and it has grown to over 12’ tall, branches listing in the sun. It’s a fitting tribute to arguably the best pet ever. Buddy was pretty great, you see.
We got Logan while we had Buddy (“So Buddy would have a friend.”). Logan was a big dog with a big heart who loved everyone and killed any animal that dared invade out backyard, be ye possum or lizard. Our friend, Jon, dubbed him “The Kraken” and no one disagreed.
Logan was an escape artist. He’d dig under the fence gate until I poured concrete. Then he dug under the back of the fence. It got to the point where we just gave up chasing after him when he got out. He was too fast and too wily; even luring him with hot dogs eventually was pointless.
You just let him go do his thing (which usually was racing off into the woods near our development). And about an hour later, he’d be on the front porch, panting heavily, speckled with mud, and happy to come in, drink a bowlful of water, and collapse on the floor in contentment. He’d been free and wild (as was his heart) and now he was willingly choosing to come back to us (for now).
Maybe he knew we needed him as much as he needed us.
When Buddy passed, we got Emma. Old, grouchy Emma. A corgi mutt, she never was taller than a foot or two, but even Logan didn’t mess with her. She had the softest fur I’ve ever felt on a dog. We joked about spinning it into yarn to make a blanket (but never did). For all her crankiness, she was ours.
The best thing about Corgis is that they’re not tall enough to jump on anything or pull plates of meat off the counter (see: Logan). She was also my wife’s dog and would constantly follow her everywhere she went.
I was in the office once. Emma literally poked her head into the doorway, saw that it was me, whimpered, and went to find Laura. Adorable? Adorable.
Logan got lymphoma; it came on quickly. We knew the day he needed to be put down and did the right thing by him. I held his paw and cried as the light left his eyes. The nurse cried too, even though she’d probably done this 100 times. Logan was special like that.
Now Emma needed a friend and along came Ginger. Our girls long wanted a Chihuahua (no, sir) and a Pomeranian. One of my wife’s student’s was moving and lamented to her that he wasn’t going to be able to take his dog with him.
“What kind of dog is it?” she asked.
“A Polmer… Pomma…” he scrunched his eyes in concentration.
“A Pomeranian?”
“YES!”
When we asked how old she was, they said she was “old when they got her”, and they’d had her for five years at that point. So when people asked how old Ginger was, we said she was “old plus X”.
(X being the variable for how many years it had been since we’d gotten her. You can thank your algebra teacher if you didn’t need that explained to you.)
Ginger was always on borrowed time, it seemed. But she didn’t know that and just kept plugging along.
Emma passed peacefully, laying on her favorite mat by the patio doors. She had lung cancer and we knew it was just a matter of time until we’d have to make the call. But she wanted to go on her own accord. We were watching TV one night, the show ended, and my wife looked over.
“I think Emma’s dead.”
And she was.
It was at that point that our girls said, “Hey. Let’s not keep getting old dogs that die. Can we get a puppy?”
(Logan had been a puppy,
So we adopted Lady, a beagle mix puppy. Ginger, the matriarch of the house at this point, wanted nothing to do with this happy yapper of a pup.
Lady wanted everything to do with Ginger. And so their love/hate relationship began.
I like to think that Lady actually helped Ginger live longer. By pulling at her hair and dancing around her like a coke-fueled ballerina, I think Lady forced Ginger to stay active and live out the last of her days at 100%.
Unlike the previous dogs, we were always counting the days for Ginger. Her end seemed pre-ordained by her age. And when she finally decided she’d had enough—resting peacefully on the porch in a beam of sunlight on a cool winter day—it was time.
So what does all this mean, this litany of pet love and death? What can we
I think so. And it’s this—that pain gets easier over time.
Each of our pet’s passing was different. And the pain of that passing was different. But each moment, over time, ebbed from the wracking sobs of the loss to the duller fond recollection of their once-having-been.
The sadness is never gone, entirely. No. Because when you love someone, the loss is both temporal and eternal. That hard moment when you realize they won’t take another
But it’s just a scene, not the movie. Even if it seems like you’re frozen in time and could never move on.
Yet the story still goes on, it always does. And (hopefully) we choose to move on with it.
On Sunday, some friends gave me a papaya tree. They’d been saying for weeks they’d bring me one, but this week it showed up (wrapped in a Publix bag, of course). So Ginger now has a tree, too. She’s in good company.
Life gives way to death gives way to life. It’s always been this way, and we fool ourselves if we pretend otherwise. Make time to love those around you while you can. And remember those who aren’t with beautiful heartache.
