The Unspeakable (20 page)

As has been well established in these pages, such blatant displays of sentimentality are almost unheard of for me. My aversion to in-your-face adorableness, especially the kittens/babies/kids-saying-the-darnedest-things kinds that are endemic to the Internet, is so pronounced that I have been known to block people from my Facebook feed altogether if they so much as click the “like” button on a video of a kitten riding a turtle or a photo of some unwitting toddler sitting on his potty seat reading
People
magazine. But for every rule there is a hulking exception and the exception I make to my rigid antischmaltz policy is for dogs. At the heart of that exception was Rex. In his presence, my normally dry, undemonstrative personality flipped upside down. I talked baby talk to him. I hugged him constantly. I told him I loved him approximately eighteen times a day. I used words like
furrylicious
. I once entered him in a charity “mutt show” contest in the category of “best coat” and was incensed for weeks afterward (in truth: months, possibly years) when he didn't win. His face was—and for more than a year after his death remained—the wallpaper of my digital self-presentation: my screen saver, my social media avatar, the photo glowing on my cell phone. As I write this, the bulletin board above my desk holds five snapshots of Rex, one snapshot of my husband, and a couple of taxi receipts.

Though babies and children tend to elicit little enthusiasm in me, the sight of a puppy, particularly if it's some permutation of the large, long-haired breeds I favor, turns me into a swooning, drooling fool. I have been known to cross several lanes of traffic in order to fawn over some fluffy young Saint Bernard or Bernese mountain dog lolling on the sidewalk while his owner gazes into a store window or lunches with a friend at an outdoor café. These interactions, as owners of such dogs know, tend to embody the rather wincing combination of sweetness and awkwardness you see in interactions between children and people inside giant Easter bunny costumes. There's a soft, huggy vibe about the whole exchange that doesn't necessarily extend to conversation or even eye contact. There's a sense that the dog is both humoring the admirer and also very consciously performing a job. Having been on both sides of the transaction, having been the gusher as well as the human at the other end of the gushed-upon animal's leash, I see why pets can lower blood pressure and increase serotonin. I can see why dogs can do more for trauma victims than an army of clinical psychologists. They are security blankets for grown-ups, “comfort objects” no one expects you to outgrow. A fifty-year-old man who takes his golden retriever with him everywhere he goes is essentially no different from a five-year-old boy with a teddy bear. But a dog confers status on a man. It shows he is responsible and capable of love. It will probably even help him get laid.

*   *   *

I was an animal person from a very early age. And I'm sorry to say I was a proclaimer. My first foray into philotherian pride came when I turned seven and was allowed a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cake for my birthday. This was a very big deal, as it was the first birthday cake ever that had not been baked by my mother and therefore subject to her apparently irremediable inability to write on a cake. When we visited the Baskin-Robbins store to place the order, I made my selection among the thirty-one flavors (mint chocolate chip) and was then asked what written message I preferred. My mother had made it clear that “Happy Birthday, Meghan” was too conventional for her (and therefore also my) taste. She suggested I think about what other ways I might describe myself besides simply invoking my name. When I could not come up with anything off the top of my head she suggested we go home and think about it for a few days.

I stewed over this for nearly a week, cataloging my various attributes as though they were going on my permanent record. What was I? A second grader? A devoted fan of
Little House on the Prairie
, ABBA, and Nadia Comaneci? A reluctant piano student of Mrs. Dorothy Terhune of Pine Mill Road? The cake deadline imminent, I finally arrived at what should have been obvious all along. I loved animals. I had towering piles of stuffed creatures in my room (no dolls), boundless adoration for our cat, and a sensitivity toward animal suffering so acute that any picture book depicting even a moment's unhappiness on the part of an animal character upset me so profoundly that my mother had to draw smiles over their frowns or tears. And so it was decided.

“Happy Birthday, Animal Lover.”

It wasn't until more than thirty years later, while sorting through family photographs and stumbling on that year's birthday portrait, that I realized the absurdity and borderline obscenity of the inscription. There was my seven-year-old self, wearing a pinafore dress from Sears and beaming over a green ice cream cake celebrating not only my special day but also, by all appearances, my wildness in the bedroom. It also wasn't until then that I appreciated the extent of my mother's generosity and her willingness to place her daughter's wishes above her (quite substantial) fears of public mockery.

Mostly, though, I winced, remembering suddenly the rawness of my feelings for animals. I loved them too much back then. This love got in the way of things. Every day on earth is a minefield of animal tragedies, of baby birds fallen from nests and insects smacking onto car windshields and roadkill of all varieties leaving lumpen streaks across the pavement. When you suffer from hyperempathy toward animals, the entire day can be an exercise in averting your eyes, trying to shift your thoughts, holding back tears. But when you're a child with this condition, when days feel like weeks and roadside carnage is closer to eye level, when your natural, childlike inclination toward anthropomorphization means every squirrel and firefly in your midst has been assigned its own little personality, the whole world can seem like the saddest picture book you ever opened.

So, as I got older, out of some kind of unconscious, self-protective instinct, I began to wring the sensitivity out of myself. Not all of it, mind you. Not even half of it. Not even half of half. But enough so that I did not run crying from the room when crocodiles sucked down zebras on
Wild Kingdom
or when I heard aphorisms like “There's more than one way to skin a cat.” I did not shed tears when, at twenty-four, I got the call from my mother saying that the last of our family cats, Niffy Two (Niffy One had met a grisly demise under the tires of a car shortly after that seventh birthday; wisely, my parents shielded me from the optics), had finally died at the age of at least thirteen. I traveled to Africa and watched in real life as lions ripped the limbs off gazelles and chewed until their manes crackled with dried blood and shards of bone. I even managed, in my early thirties, to live on a farm and cope with the brutality known only to those “lucky” animals that live in the country. The horses stood in the pasture through blizzards and hailstorms. Barn cats lived off mice and the occasional bluebird. A trio of Canada goose eggs by the pond, tended by both parents, who never wandered more than steps from the nest, was suddenly gone one morning, snatched by coyotes that had likely swallowed them whole.

Amid this carnage, I learned to buck up. I learned to care less, or at least to turn the pages quickly when I spotted a newspaper article about abused racehorses or circus animals beaten into amusement-worthy submission. But in the case of one species, my senses simply could not be dulled and that was dogs. Depending on their size and temperament, they were—and are—capable of delivering a joy I rarely accessed elsewhere. The mere sight of a doe-eyed golden retriever puppy or a massive, Sphinx-like Leonberger can temporarily alter my brain chemistry. To encounter a Great Pyrenees or a malamute feels to me like meeting a unicorn. That such creatures roam in our midst seems nothing short of magical. That such creatures might share our beds or lie on the sofa with us while we watch TV seems like proof that heaven is capable of dipping down and grazing the earth with the tip of its toe.

And there we have the sole exception to my antisentimentalism, my one area of unapologetic schmaltz. I love dogs so much it hurts. When I'm driving, any foreign object in the road, be it a plastic bag or a cardboard box or a disintegrating sofa that's fallen off a truck, produces a wave of panic brought on by my fear that it's a dead or injured dog. I have covered my eyes while riding in the passenger's seat, only to have the driver ask why I'm shielding my eyes from a garden hose.

I loved Rex so much that even leaving him at a friend's house for a week while I went out of town felt like a vital organ was hanging loose from my body. Once I read something in which a mother described her love for her child as feeling like her heart was walking around outside of her body. As a nonparent I'm wary of dog/child comparisons, because they essentially open the door for a flood of indignant reminders that the love for a dog is
nothing
compared with a parent's love for a child and that putting kibble in a dish twice a day is a
joke
compared with feeding/clothing/educating/shaping the moral compass of another human being for eighteen-plus years. So please understand I'm not making any comparisons. I'm just saying that Rex, the collie-shepherd mix who was my companion for more than thirteen years, lived with my heart permanently lodged in his gut. When he snoozed all night at the foot of my bed (and sometimes next to me, head on pillow, so we could spoon) I slept soundly in unclouded peace. When he rolled in the beach sand, scratching his back and flopping his tongue around as though having some kind of euphoric seizure, I, too, felt my every itch had been satisfied.

But you know what's coming next. It's what always comes next with dogs. Graying muzzles, creaking hips, tumors. To have an old dog is to look into the eyes of the sweetest soul you know and see traces of the early light of the worst day of your life. When that day comes there is no universally recognized ritual of mourning. No one expects you to take time off from work. No one understands that you cannot answer the phone for a week. No one likes it when you say the barbaric truth, which is that because pets occupy a sphere of uncomplicated, unfluctuating love, because their love actually becomes absorbed into the architecture of your home, their deaths can be more devastating than even the death of a close friend or family member.

I won't lie. Rex's passing was the worst grief I've faced in my life so far. Even weeks after the fact, I had bruises on my forehead from where I'd dug my fingers in while sobbing. Even when he'd been gone for nearly a year, during which time I acquired two new dogs for whom my fondness grew every day, his absence felt like a hole I was forever stepping around. I often thought about how, as a high school actress with desultory ambitions of growing up and going pro, I'd worried about my inability to cry on cue. In the era of postmortem Rex (and actually for months prior, when, despite his relative spryness, the mere anticipation of his demise had me choking up on a near daily basis) I pictured myself triumphing as an inconsolable, suicidal Ophelia, summoning images of Rex while flooding the scenery with a monsoon of tears.

But it was not just Rex himself that brought out such blubbering. Upon his death, as though enduring a series of aftershocks nearly as traumatizing as the main event, I had the misfortune of receiving from several well-meaning parties a copy of a poem called “The Rainbow Bridge.” Actually to call it a poem might be pushing it. It's more like a pitch for an animated children's television show that's been broken into lines of verse. Except it doesn't even always appear in verse form. Sometimes it's more like a five-paragraph essay. Often you see it printed out in a fancy font on pastel-colored paper, like a morbid wedding invitation. On YouTube there are multiple video versions, many featuring gauzy footage of clouds and pastures and using the music of Enya, surely without permission.

The idea behind “The Rainbow Bridge” is that there's a vast green meadow “this side of heaven” where pets that were especially loved by their owners go when they die. In this meadow, which is also the entry point of a bridge that is literally made out of a rainbow and that leads to heaven, all sickness disappears and all injuries heal. The animals return to the spirited, bright-eyed creatures they were in the prime of life. In this meadow there is always fresh food and clean water and the sun always shines and the animals spend their days frolicking happily together, though they always miss the special human they had to leave behind on earth. Every once in a while, however, one of them “stops suddenly and looks into the distance.” Body quivering, he leaves the group and runs across the meadow as fast as he can.

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.

 

And then you cross the Rainbow Bridge together …

I try to avoid this piece of literature at all costs. Whenever I encounter it online or run into it in a veterinary office, where it will frequently be laminated and tacked to a wall amid pet-themed thank-you cards from grateful owners, I avert my eyes the same way I do when approaching something on the road that might be a dead dog. I do this not because the poem is bad, though it certainly is, but because by the third line my eyes will be glazed with tears and I will have to make a very conscious effort to shift my thoughts to something less personally upsetting than pet death. For instance, rectal cancer.

According to Michael Schaffer's
One Nation Under Dog
, a book I devoured a few years ago much the same way, as a teenager, despite never having owned a dog, I devoured
Your Neapolitan Mastiff and You
, “The Rainbow Bridge” emerged sometime in the early 1980s and has been published online at least 35,000 times. The byline almost always appears as “Anonymous,” though several would-be authors have claimed credit over the years. These include a psychologist who says the poem appeared on a dog club's website after he wrote it for a grieving friend, and at least two authors of self-published books about the Rainbow Bridge, one of whom threatened to sue Universal Press Syndicate after it appeared in a Dear Abby column.