Cherished (7 page)

I took the picture when I was twenty-nine. My new husband, Michael, and I had found little brown Spud and his four all-black brothers in a clear plastic pen at the store where we bought food for our cats and turtles. We set him on the floor and watched him run back and forth between us, throwing his stubby little front legs out straight with every stride, like a cartoon puppy. We paid three hundred dollars for him and brought him home, believing our landlord wouldn't notice a dog so tiny. When the landlord caught Michael sneaking Spud outside under his jacket, we found a loft apartment in downtown Saint Paul with high ceilings and a lobby that every day after work filled with yipping dogs and the singsong voices of the people who talked to them.

Now that Spud had forced us to move where dogs were legal, I saw no reason to settle for just one. I set to work combing the newspaper listings for the dog I'd wanted since I was a child surrounded by mutts and poodles. A dog that would follow me anywhere and could be trained to do tricks. A cairn terrier, like Dorothy's Toto.

I found him in the classifieds. He had been born to a family on a farm, the progeny of ratters, and Spud and I went to meet them all in a parking lot on the outskirts of town. The breeder, three little boys, and a pile of puppies spilled out of the car, and before long, one of the puppies had pinned Spud on his back. Only one hung back, and I claimed him as mine.

Seamus, as I named him on the way home, must have been sick or nervous that day, because within his first week at home, he took to standing over the water dish with his upper lip curled and an eerie rumble emitting from his puppy throat. Neither dog nor cat nor turtle dared come near. The first time I tried to move him away, he bit clear through the soft skin between my thumb and forefinger. One of our turtles died in his jaws; we hastily gave away our pet rabbits. The cats hid. Still in his puppyhood, Seamus held us captive in fear.

“You can't keep that dog,” Michael would say to me. “He's vicious. He's going to hurt somebody.” But it wasn't in me to give up a dog. Instead, I took him to obedience class, where I was told that my dog was too aggressive for a class setting. I tried another class, but Seamus lunged at an Airedale, and I left. Finally, I found a woman just over the border, in Wisconsin, who trained Rottweilers — Rottweilers! Big-headed dogs, powerful and skilled. I figured there was no kidding around with them. Her name was Marion, and she lived forty-five miles away. I diligently went to her beginner class once a week, which more than once required driving through a blizzard.

Both Marion and her peaceful Rottweilers found my scrappy terrier delightful. “You need to have more fun with him,” she told me once, skittering her fingers around on the floor, watching him puppy-pounce among them. Obedience trainers back then had yet to come around to schooling dogs with clickers and treats, so Marion taught me to hold my dog at heel with a chain collar and praise him boisterously when he cooperated. Within weeks, Seamus had stopped growling and started to work. Within a month, he lived to work.

At his novice class graduation, he earned the title Most Improved Dog.

There's nothing like training a dog to forge a relationship with one. I will never in my life cease to marvel at the way dogs learn things — the ferocity and speed of it all, the apparent joy they take in knowing the meaning of a cue. In a world full of rebel terriers, Seamus was the rare biddable one. He learned to heel. He sat up and begged. He'd give you five, then ten; roll over, jump into my arms, fetch. He could sing — a joyful, pleasantly medium-timbre howl — on cue. His rehabilitation from snarling cur to devoted pal brought up in me a passion I had not yet felt in my life, for anything.

And yet he still gave Spud not a moment's peace. Seamus guarded everything — refrigerator, dog door, tennis ball, food, chair, cat, hat, radio, car. Anything Spud wanted to get close to, Seamus defended with a growl that would crescendo rapidly into a snapping lunge. Spud would snap and lunge back, in his bouncy little Ewok way, but he always backed off. Had we never intervened on his behalf, he might have died of thirst.

Over time, it became clear that Spud would be Michael's dog, while Seamus was mine, and the simmering war between the dogs no doubt mirrored the low hum of our marital discontent. Two years after we acquired the dogs, when I was offered a job in California, we considered splitting them up while I got settled and waited for Michael to join me. But perhaps I knew the future. In the end, I wasn't able to leave him behind. Seamus traveled to California in a crate buckled into the back seat of my Subaru Justy. Spud — for some fifteen hundred miles through Iowa and South Dakota, and through the mountain passes of Utah and the deserts of Nevada — slept in my lap.

I'd been in Los Angeles less than a month when Michael admitted an affair and I fell impossibly in love with a sports reporter. I filed for divorce.

O
N THE FIRST OF JUNE,
just before his seventeenth birthday, Seamus stood up in the wire crate that served as his refuge, ignored the open door, and tried to walk out through the back. He bumped his head, tried again, and finally lay down with a moan of miserable surrender. He was blind, deaf, and incontinent. I had dreaded the moment when I'd have to decide whether his life was worth living, but there was no mistaking it. The house-call vet came to the house the next day. Seamus held his last meal — a piece of cheese pizza — between his small graceful paws the way a child holds a fallen bird. After he'd chewed it to the crust, we took him inside to his favorite spot on the couch, lighted candles, and talked as the vet prepared the first needle. As the doctor's hand came close, Seamus jerked up to bite it.

Spud had remained hearty, bright-eyed, and sharp, still responding to voices, and still jumping into laps. I kept him out of the room while his lifelong adversary was silenced by the second needle, the one that stopped his heart, and when I returned, Spud was as he had always been: sitting in the toddler's lounger I'd bought for him at IKEA, panting and wagging his stubby tail, looking forward to whatever would happen next. He had never had a day of physical distress in his life — no bouts of diarrhea, no sudden limp, no kennel cough, no worms, not even a flea. I thought it was possible, after seventeen years of strife, that Spud would live out his last years in blissful, simple peace.

Oh, how little humans know of dogs and their happiness! Spud spent the first night without Seamus pattering back and forth through the rooms of the house, looking for where that other dog had gone. In the morning I found him crumpled in the spot where Seamus's kennel had been, lying in a puddle of urine. I put the crate back where it had been, and Spud went inside. He would not eat. I picked him up periodically and put him outside to relieve himself, but when he came back in, he went straight to the crate.

I fed him stinky cat food. I took him to the groomer, who adored him — he always liked to be groomed — and he cheered up for the hour he was there. But when he came home, he drooped over in my hands like a loose sack of beans.

A week and a day after Seamus had died, I asked my friend Pandora to come over and mind Spud while I went to a yoga class. A bright, sweet-smelling, gentle-voiced beauty, Pandora had always loved Spud, and he'd responded in kind; I figured a visit from her would turn him around. I left a few minutes before she arrived. As I was headed into class, she called and told me to come home.

Spud had tottered out of the crate toward her, she reported, and climbed into her lap when she sat on the floor. He looked up at her, offered a lick, and dropped his head. She considered whether to rush him to the vet, but he was already lifeless. So she simply held him quietly, and watched him die.

An hour later, at four o'clock that afternoon, I got a call from Spud's vet, who had given him a geriatric exam the week before. The results of his blood tests had come back.
They showed him to be astonishingly healthy. “Just get him in here and get his teeth cleaned!” she admonished me.

“He's dead,” I told her. “Spud died an hour ago.”

She gasped.

He died of a broken heart.

W
E MAKE A DISTINCTION
between the deaths of humans and the deaths of our pets, but grief still follows the same old rules. It causes the same unraveling, provokes the same disintegration of character and beliefs. After my mother had died, I had gone to clean out the attic of the house where I'd grown up, and found a box full of flowery pastel birthday decorations, bought for a twenty-first-birthday party that never happened — I'd capriciously decided not to come home that weekend from New York, where I was attending school. The moment of clarity, and deep regret, that seized me in the wake of my two little dog companions' coincident deaths was no less sharp. I had screwed up again.

When the dogs died, I was living in a tiny apartment attached to the house of a man I'd been involved with for three years, who had made it clear to me that I was not his first choice. Nor was he mine, when I sat down to think about it. “It's for the best,” he said to me as I rocked little Spud's form in my lap, paralyzed with sobs. I screamed and swore: What did he know? He didn't. Because I wasn't crying only over the loss of Spud. I was crying for what I'd just learned, and what I would continue to figure out over the next few grief-stricken months. We think love is cuddling up together on the sofa, but it's not. That's just what you do to get your body warm. Love is something altogether more fraught, and tangled up, than that. And I didn't have it.

I rode my bike around a lot in those days, talking to myself out loud, grateful for the rise of the Bluetooth headset, which now blurs the lines between the busy and the crazy. “I should have never left Minnesota,” I blurted. “I should have never left my husband.” I believed this at the time — not because I would have been happier had I stayed, but because it would have been better for the dogs. I could have gone on obedience-training Seamus with Marion the Rottweiler lady; I could have taken him to agility class. I could have continued living the sensible life I was cut out for and the dogs were born to, in a house with a garden and a nice fenced yard to play ball in. I should have had their teeth cleaned.

It also occurred to me during this time that I should have learned to properly groom a cairn terrier. Their hard, thick coats require regular thinnings, accomplished with a small instrument called a stripping knife and an agile flick of the wrist. I let Seamus grow shaggy and messy. I was wrong.

Most of all, though, I regretted not paying more attention to Spud. To who Spud was. I had dismissed him as vapid and silly — an intrepid little hiking buddy, but not exactly deep. And yet in the clarity that comes with death, I had to wonder: What does it take for a perfectly healthy being to lie down and die of grief in a week? If that's not depth of character, what is?

Spud was all heart. Love was all he had, all he did, and he did it well. Spud loved: cats, other dogs, baby squirrels, rabbits, children, all the people at the Silver Lake dog park. “
SPUUUUUDDDD
!” they'd yell as we walked in, and he'd come bounding, with his silly, rocky, straight-legged gallop, across the park into the crowd. And he apparently loved most of all that shaggy little dog on the other end of that stick, the one who in those grumbles had imparted information I failed to intercept. Spud had loved Seamus, more than I had ever loved anyone. Loved the standoffs, the mock battles, the difficult pleasure of getting to the water bowl. I was ashamed that I had taken them for rivals.

I can't say it was an abrupt, conscious decision, that I suddenly stopped while sweeping the floor and said to myself: “What if I die this way?” It was more a feeling that crept over me in odd moments. On a walk through the hills with my still-surviving dog, a pit bull named Molly, when a sharp loneliness seized me so hard I thought my own heart had stopped. (Molly was lovely, but she followed her own discriminating tastes when it came to humans, and I was not, sad to say, among the select.) It happened in front of the computer, when I'd forgo deadlines to obsessively search for new dogs on the website of Colonel Potter's Cairn Terrier Rescue, hoping to find a stand-in for the departed. It happened before the office vending machine, when I'd pretend to contemplate the food products behind their battered plastic doors while tracing back the string of events that had brought me here. It felt less like a choice than the inevitable result of random luck, or lack of it. I pressed the button; egg salad moved out of sight, replaced with hard-boiled eggs.

A man came around the corner, one of my coworkers, Al, who edited the news section. “So,” he said, sincerely meaning
to be funny. “Kill any more of your pets today?”

Right there, in full view of my lunching coworkers, I fell to my knees and sobbed.

T
HREE OF THE FIVE PEOPLE
in my immediate family died young. Each left me with a sickening sense of failure I will carry with me the rest of my life. I will never have another father with whom to make belated peace. I will never have another twenty-first birthday to celebrate with Mom. My big sister and I can never put aside the respective files of sins we kept on each other. My brother and I — the survivors — now say “I love you” to each other perhaps more often than is necessary. Because you can't make up with a person who has died.

You can, however, try again with a dog. One night I had dinner with a writer friend, Susan, who has lost many dogs and keeps adopting more. “You think you've lost everything,” she said to me, “but when you look into that next dog's eyes you'll know: it's all one big dog soul.” That's not to say you will have the same relationship you had with the dog before, mostly because you are not who you were when that dog showed up. You will have something different.

Two weeks after Spud's death, a puppy turned up on Petfinder.com, where homeless pets from around the country line up for human suitors like prospective dates. He looked precisely like the cairn terrier who struggled with that stick so many years ago: big ears, wheat-colored coat with black ears and nose, suspicious gaze in the one dark eye that loomed out from his profile shot. The rescue people had named him Thomas and tied a red bandana around his neck to make him
look sporty. You could tell it was an act.