Boo was never a dog to alert us to anything. Someone pulling into the driveway? Deer eating our roses? Someone at the front door? Dante and Atticus would sound the early warning barking system; beginning quite ferociously, they would quickly change their barking tune to “Oh, boy!” if it were someone coming for a visit. Boo would then follow them in the “Oh, boy!” barking, his head up in the air doing his coyote-howling-at-the-moon imitation, as he let out a “whoo, whoo, whoo” kind of bark. Playful and full of hope, it seemed to be Boo’s way of saying, “Hey, guys, are we having company? I love company. Who is it, who is it? Yay, company!” I don’t think it would have occurred to Boo to bark if we were being burgled or the house were on fire.
But there was one evening when Boo broke character and alerted us in a different way to a different kind of trouble. It was one of the worst nights of my life, but I will always be grateful to Boo for calling the alert.
A very snowy first weekend in December, a couple of friends and I attended a dog-training conference just outside Kingston, New York. The presenter, Turid Rugaas, a Norwegian dog trainer, is a well-regarded authority on canine body language. Turid was the first to begin discussions about dog body language and the emotions that go along with it. Her work became a cornerstone for many of us in the dog-training world because she illustrated that dogs as social animals use language to communicate with other members of their species for survival and cooperation. She also theorized that if dogs can try to diffuse an anxious situation within the social unit, that means they can feel anxious or stressed, and they care about the cooperative nature of a social society. Prior to Turid, this thinking was often frowned upon for being anthropomorphic. Her work was a wonderful eye-opener for many dog trainers and behaviorists and allowed us to understand what dogs actually meant by certain body language signals. We had to acknowledge that these animals were indeed communicating and, in doing so, accept that training a dog was a two-sided conversation. Turid observed that when dogs turn their heads, for example, they are likely averting their gaze in an attempt to diffuse their stress levels or tell you they are uncomfortable with the situation. When you call a dog to you and she moves slowly past another dog, she’s not being disobedient or trying to dominate you through slow movement; she’s recognizing that she needs to show a kind of doggie politeness to the other dog.
Atticus, Dante and Boo stayed at home with Lawrence that weekend, snowbound. For many dogs, snow means “party!” and seems to ignite their joy and energy. Even older dogs like Atticus will often become nutty. At thirteen years old, the sixty-five pound Atticus was approximately eighty-two in human years. (To calculate this number, I didn’t use the dog-years equation that ages dogs seven years for every one they live. As we have come to understand our dogs better, we’ve realized that the size of the dog determines the rate at which he ages. In short, a twenty-pound dog the same chronological age as Atticus, for example, would only be the equivalent of sixty-eight in human years.) During the first snow of each winter, he would run so fast that it seemed like his butt was going faster than his front end until it scooped under him as if to push the front end faster and faster. This year after a little romp in the snow and some zooming butt-scooping laps, Atticus began to have trouble trudging through the snowdrifts on his way into the house. Panting heavily, he fell in the snow at the bottom of the stairs to the deck and fell again once up on the deck. The second collapse, more powerful than the first, left him unable to stand. His whole body seemed to quake and struggle for every hard-earned breath through his increasingly heavy panting.
Lawrence picked him up, brought him inside and begged the gasping dog not to die. “Please don’t die,” he chanted. “Please don’t die when she’s away. Please don’t you dare die without her here.” Atticus complied, and over the rest of the weekend, he seemed to recover.
Dr. Cindy had gone to the conference with me and left her car at my house so we could carpool. After I described Atticus’s episode to her, she said she’d give him a look when we got back to the house. Upon returning late Sunday evening, we witnessed Atticus’s typically exuberant, happy dance of joy that I had come home. There was nothing about his demeanor or appearance to make her worry. I figured he had just been fatigued by his silly snow fun—clearly a little too much for a dog his age.
In hindsight, Lawrence and I both remember noticing changes in Atticus over the next week. He appeared a bit more stiff when walking, he tired more easily and his head tilted just a bit to one side, almost as if he had had a stroke. However, because it had only been three weeks since his annual checkup, and he was in good shape for a thirteen-year-old dog, with normal heartbeats and good breathing, we didn’t confer or compare our separate observations. We each believed he was just going through normal aging.
Meanwhile, my life was a runaway train. I had just finished writing the 501(c)(3) for H.A.R.T. Programs; was doing two or three Pet Partners visits per week, alternating between Dante and Boo; was still working at the literary agency while doing part-time dog training; and now, as soon as I got back from the conference, I had to deal with the imminent arrival of new windows and doors for the entire house. The Sunday after the conference, in more bad weather, the material arrived, and the installation men came at the crack of dawn the next morning. Where there had once been windows to hold back the cold, there were now huge holes, architecturally dramatic but not so good for insulation. I started burning the cardboard boxes the windows had come in to keep the house warm, and because the work took up so much room, I had to double up some of the living room dog pillows. I caught sight of Atticus relaxing in prime warming position next to the fire on an über-comfy, double-high pile of dog pillows and chuckled at the thought that he had grown to love the luxuries in life. The day had gone well, the dogs enjoyed the visitors and most of the bigger windows were in, with the doors on the agenda for the next day.
Tuesday was going to be frenzied: I had to be up for the early arrival of the installation men, pop out with Dante for a quick third-grade visit, return home to continue monitoring the installation, catch up on some office work and end the day by going out again to teach two classes. Days like this were pretty typical. I had gotten good at jamming actual paid regular work into the cracks between volunteer visiting and not-so-great-paying training. Because Monday left me no time to get Dante ready for his visit, I had to bathe him and do his nails that night.
It is always necessary to be sure a dog’s nails are trimmed and smooth before a visit. Neither Dante nor Boo would dream of intentionally hurting anyone on a visit, but dogs’ nails can be sharp, and without a good trimming ahead of time, a simple request for a paw from a student could result in a scratch. I use a Dremel rotary tool to trim the dogs’ nails, and since I knew Boo would be visiting later in the week, and Atticus always needed a trim (as dogs get older, it’s important to keep their nails short so long nails won’t interfere with how they stand or put unwanted pressures on aging joints), every dog had his pedicure that night.
That Monday had been a pretty good day for the dogs—snuggled by the warm fire, fun with the dog-friendly instillation men and the evening capped off with the super-high-value treats they received for their nail-trimming efforts. Lawrence and I clearly remember all three of them sitting in a row on the rug in the dining room, looking at us with wet eyes as if to ask, “We can do it again, right?”
As Atticus aged, he had grown less and less comfortable in the bed next to me, so I kept a pillow next to my side of the bed. That way, whether he was in bed or not, he could still be by my side. I guessed that his joints were a bit sore and that having more room to spread out allowed him to position himself differently depending on his level of pain. Atticus’s favorite pillow was an old, faded, very regal brocade dog pillow that I had restuffed with a threadbare down comforter when the original stuffing had begun to wear thin. Atticus was among a very small group of dogs on this planet (I’m guessing) who actually had a doggie bed stuffed with down.
Tummies full of treats and nails rounded and smooth, we all climbed the stairs (Atticus more slowly than the others) to bed that Monday night, Atticus on his down bed right next to me, Dante at the foot of the bed and Boo snuggled between Lawrence and me for his poky-Boo/snug-a-Boo position. There, “nestled all snug in our beds,” just as in “The Night Before Christmas,” we drifted peacefully to sleep…. Until we heard a series of bumping noises coming from somewhere else in the house. At first, we stirred only a bit in our foggy, middle-of-the-night state of drowsy confusion, but then there was a larger clang, and we both jumped up—noticing as we did that Atticus wasn’t on his pillow, Boo was nowhere to be seen and Dante had abandoned his post at the foot of the bed. Following the sound of continuous clanging and banging took us into Lawrence’s office across the hallway from our bedroom.
It wasn’t unusual for Boo to move off the bed in the middle of the night to find a bit more room for himself on one of the dog pillows scattered around the room. However, this night it seemed that when he’d gotten up, he’d made a wrong turn somewhere and wandered into Lawrence’s office. This room was the catchall room, especially when there was a chaotic project going on in the house. Lawrence didn’t seem to mind working around boxes or furniture that didn’t belong to him, so given the window installation, there were a few extra things in his office that night.
Some of those extra things were our dogs. We found Boo struggling, stuck in the tripod legs of a telescope, trying in vain to move toward Atticus, who had embedded himself in a little cavern he had made between the tripod, the Christmas decorations trunk and the solid log wall behind him. Dante, meanwhile, was navigating the extra items with ease but also seemed to be headed for Atticus. Atticus’s breathing was hard and shallow, sounding just like it had the day he collapsed in the snow. Making our way toward him, we saw spots all over the floor where he had lost control of his bowels and bladder—very unusual for the dog who usually held both with great control for hours. He lifted his head as I approached, and I could see that his gums were pale and his tongue looked dry. I called to him to get up and climb out of the little hollow, but he couldn’t move. I could see the pleading in his eyes. I didn’t know whether he was pleading for me to leave him alone or to help him out.
Lawrence finally freed Boo from the tripod cage and escorted him and Dante out of the office while I dug Atticus out from his furniture cave and hoisted him up. I’m still not sure how I carried all sixty-five pounds of him back to the master bedroom, but when I’d put him on the bed in his old spot next to me, his breathing was still hard and short. I stroked his whole body gently while Boo and Dante approached him in turn and sniffed him in the same order: first they sniffed his breath, then his ears and last his hind end. After the final sniff, they both each stood still for a moment and then walked away to their respective spots, Dante at the foot of the bed and Boo up to Lawrence’s and my pillows. I will never know exactly what was going on in their heads, but I would be willing to bet that they had both said their goodbyes.
I snuggled next to Atticus as I had for so many years. His breath was the very definition of putrid. I knew he was dying but couldn’t express it out loud.
“We can’t take him to Bedford,” I said to Lawrence. “He doesn’t know them. He would be miserable at a vet’s he didn’t know.” It was 5:30 in the morning, and Cindy and Julie’s office wouldn’t be open until 8:30.
“You’re right,” said Lawrence. “We can’t do that to him.”
“So, we wait?”
Lawrence was quiet for a moment. “We wait.”
Atticus still seemed uncomfortable, so I put him on his down bed, hoping he’d relax, maybe even sleep a little, until it was time to go. Lawrence and I couldn’t sleep, so we lay back down to wait for dawn to take Atticus to the doctor. His hard, labored breathing was as regular as storm surf, and I started to drift in and out of awareness until I heard him sigh a deep sigh.
Lawrence sprang up like a coiled spring. “He’s gone.”
I shot up and was at Atticus’s side in an instant. His eyes were fixed, and he didn’t seem to be breathing anymore, but I wasn’t sure. Frantically, I called Cindy. “Cindy, it’s Lisa Edwards.” I think Cindy said something, but I don’t remember what she said before I continued, “I’m sorry for calling so early, but I think Atticus is dead.”
There was a pause before she asked, “What happened?”
I described the episode for her and knew she was thoughtfully considering the situation until I asked, “How can I be sure he’s dead?”
She said, “The eyes. The eyes will always have a reflex response even if he’s passed out.”
I aimed my finger toward his closed eye and pointed at them—no response. I touched his eyelid—no response. When I described this to Cindy, she said, “I’m sorry, Lisa, but he’s gone.”
It was still only six o’clock in the morning. He never would have made it to the emergency hospital, and I was glad we hadn’t tried to get him there. I couldn’t have lived with myself if we’d turned the last half hour of his time with us into frenzied screeching along windy back roads in the middle of the night. Instead, we all had the chance to say goodbye, with Atticus in his favorite spot at my side. If Boo hadn’t been the klutz Lawrence dubbed him as a puppy, we would have woken hours later only to find that Atticus had died alone in a pile of his own urine and feces. I can’t imagine a greater gift of dignity than what Boo gave Atticus and us that night simply by being devoted and clumsy—and I’ll always be grateful that Boo woke us up that night so we could be with Atticus at the end.
The trip to the animal hospital with Atticus’s body in the back of the wagon was icy in every way imaginable. The weight of the cold just turning to bitter winter made the air hang heavily, and there was some sort of amorphous rainbow formation over the reservoir. It wasn’t the typical arched shape of a rainbow but a shapeless specter that drifted over the water and appeared to move with us as we drove along. We thought of this as Atticus’s passing into whatever life comes after this one, or perhaps it was his way of saying goodbye. As I thought of all the myths of rainbows as bridges that take warriors to the home of the gods or allow pets to reunite with their humans after all have died, I began to think about the life of the dog who, like his namesake, Atticus Finch, had been a wise, patient guide and protector for his family, and about the moments that best portrayed his true character.
There was the day when Dante was chasing a ball in the dog run in Washington Square Park, and another dog tried to take the ball from Dante by biting him, hard. Dante screamed, which is risky because a dog scream can begin a dogfight or bring other dogs into an existing fight. At the sound of Dante’s cry, Atticus sprang from his spot next to Lawrence and landed in front of Dante. With his back to Dante and teeth bared to the rest of the dogs in the park, Atticus circled Dante, warning the biting dog and all the other dogs to stay away until Lawrence could get there and escort them both safely out of the park. Dante had puncture wounds through his tongue and lip as it was, and he could have been more badly injured if Atticus had not stopped the fight from escalating. When humans protect each other out of love like this, we call them heroes. Atticus was a hero that day. The episode always reminded me of the scene from To Kill a Mockingbird when Atticus Finch sets up a chair and reading lamp on the steps of the courthouse to stand alone against the mob set to hang Tom Robinson.
As I remembered all the wonderful things about Atticus, it became clear that the simple act of picking him up that fateful day had shaped me for the better—more than most of the people in my life. He protected me for so many years when I lived alone in the East Village, gave me the gift of recovery and unconditional love and brought me a husband, a loving second dog, a vocation at which I seemed to excel, and Boo.
It was with this last thought that it struck me like a bolt of lightning: without realizing it, we had named our third dog Boo, like another hero from To Kill a Mockingbird, Boo Radley. In the hours after Atticus’s death, the strange connection between Atticus Finch and Boo Radley and my own Atticus and Boo took on a spooky resonance for me. Both Boos were misunderstood and often bullied, and Boo Radley quietly watched over Atticus’s children, Jem and Scout, just as our Boo’s calling was to work with and help children. And on that Halloween night, when Mr. Ewell tried to murder Jem and Scout, Boo Radley stepped in and saved them. Although our Boo’s arrival on Halloween hadn’t literally saved our lives, it had given us countless gifts that we would never have otherwise had, including allowing Atticus to be with his family at the end so he could die with love and dignity.
To quote Crazy Horse, Atticus picked “a good day to die.” Since I had a school visit with Dante in the morning, construction during the day and classes to teach at night, I was able to keep myself occupied so my mind could slowly absorb the depths of the sadness that might otherwise have overtaken me like a tsunami. I was constrained by my early family teachings never to display to the world the weakness of emotions, so I spent the day putting on a quiet show of calm, but when we were finally alone that night, Lawrence and I were soaked in the sadness. For the next few weeks, it was difficult for us to make it through the day without weeping uncontrollably at a sight, a sound, a smell that reminded us of Atticus.
It even seemed that the dogs were grieving. Dante and Boo would start to chase each other in play, and then, as if a penalty buzzer went off in their heads, they would suddenly stop and just go lie down. Other times, I would hear Boo pace around the house from room to room, starting downstairs and finishing in the master bedroom. I followed him one day to see what he was doing. As if he was searching for something, he started by sniffing the couch in my office, where Atticus slept during the day when I was home. Next was the living room, where he would check out the dog pillows, then the front door, where Atticus often held vigil. When Boo found nothing on the lower level, he went upstairs to the master bedroom to check out my side of the bed, where Atticus also slept sometimes. Finally, after sniffing the spot where Atticus had died, Boo circled the bed, ending with his paws up on the credenza behind the bed, where Atticus’s collar lay, waiting for the day we could bring ourselves to remove it. Boo sniffed the collar intently, gave out a sigh and then went to lie down. There is no doubt in my mind that Dante and Boo missed Atticus as much as Lawrence and I did.
The universe is a very efficient place that continuously re-creates itself, turning matter into energy and energy back to matter time and time again. In short, it recycles itself, and we and all we know are simply the by-products of stellar waste. Somehow, as dying stars scatter themselves on the solar winds to be born again as flowers on a distant planet in the spiral of this unremarkable galaxy, I knew Atticus would move heaven and earth and stardust to find a way back to us. We just had to give him some time.
By March, we started searching, with the help of Dante and Boo, for puppies, hoping to find one who might be Atticus. Perhaps I underestimated Boo’s effect on Lawrence because even though he had fought me on adopting Boo, he was fully on board when it came to this puppy search. He may grouse at the dogs, but he cried like a baby for days with me after Atticus passed. When I told him I had found a litter of three black Lab mixes that were being shipped up from the South to be fostered in Stamford, Connecticut, we put in our application. It was approved, and I awkwardly asked if my two adult dogs could meet the puppies to see who got along with them. I was happily surprised when the rescue group said yes; too often, puppies are not allowed to meet adult dogs they are destined to live with, and this creates the potential for a lifetime of troubles. To allow people to be sure their dogs will accept the puppy they want, a proof of vaccinations for the adult dogs and a nice leash walk for everyone will keep things safe and secure for all. Our meeting was a little more chaotic.
“The mother dog isn’t great with other dogs,” the foster mother told us, “so I’ve sent her upstairs. But if you go into the living room, I’ll bring the three pups to meet you.”
Two of the pups had zero interest in Lawrence or me. They zipped and zoomed around the living room, bouncing off everything, treating me and Lawrence as just two more objects in the obstacle course, no different from the sofa, the chairs and the dog crates. However, the one oversized boy—exactly what I had not wanted—approached me politely and sat himself calmly and cheerfully between my legs. Lawrence liked this one.
“I didn’t really want another bigger boy dog,” I said, pointing to the girl puppy with some white on her, like Boo. But she ignored us and had no desire to do anything but chase her brother around the room.
“Let’s see what the boys think,” said Lawrence, just as I had said to him three years earlier. (Turnabout is fair play.)
We brought Dante and Boo in from the car to see the puppies. The smaller puppies remained completely focused on each other, pausing only for a drive-by sniff at Dante and Boo, after which they went back to their racing, chasing and pouncing game. The bigger puppy, however, sauntered over and sat patiently as Dante sniffed him intensely up and down. Once covered in Dante scent, the big baby dog made his way over to Boo, and there he sat as Boo favorably poke-sniffed him—a little more irregularly since Boo’s sniffing skills were a bit rough around the edges.
“He’s the one,” said Lawrence.
I was the one outvoted this time around. When we got home, and the new puppy curled up on the mat at the front door, Lawrence was quick to remind me that this had also been Atticus’s vigil spot. This was a good sign that we had gotten the right dog, but I was completely convinced after we took the puppy out to pee. When the new front door was replaced after Atticus’s death, the door was reversed at my request. Rather than opening awkwardly from left to right, where it obstructed the stairway, it now opened from right to left so there was always clear passage out the front door. When we headed back into the house after the pup’s first official pee on the front lawn, he immediately went to the left side of the door and sat. Opening the door from the other side, I gestured to him to move to the right, but he seemed adamant that he should enter from the left side. My doubts were gone, and I knew we had the correct dog—smart, loyal and officially stubborn.
He required a fitting name as majestic as his predecessor’s. Again, we were stymied until later that weekend when we were watching The Man in the Iron Mask. Gérard Depardieu played the role of Porthos, the honest, extraverted, wine-guzzling, womanizing, gluttonous musketeer. As I watched a scene in which Porthos sauntered to the barn to hang himself, buck naked but for his boots, the baby dog sauntered past me, and I noticed the naked butt scars his mother had given him during, as we were told, some exuberant cleaning. The puppy’s butt was a dead ringer for Gérard Depardieu’s, and baby dog became Porthos.
For Boo, Dante had been the caretaking, surrogate mamma, and with Porthos, it was Boo’s turn to become the nanny. To this day, Porthos puts up with behavior from Boo that he would never tolerate from another dog. Watching Boo try to teach Porthos mouth-wrestling skills was like watching a parent try to teach a fifth grader how to use a computer. Yet, despite the fact that Boo was constantly outwitted in all the games he played with Porthos, he managed to teach Porthos a terrific soft mouth. Mouth wrestling can sometimes be mistaken for fighting, but it is actually play that teaches dogs how to control their mouths—the pressure, the positioning. It’s like kids playing scales on the piano, and playful mouth wrestling usually includes some slow, languishing noises that are very different from fighting noises, which are louder and more staccato. Mouth wrestling also generally only occurs between dogs who know each other well and trust each other. Trust is critical because they have their mouths wide open and intertwined with each other’s.
On occasion, the babysitting assignment was more than Boo could handle, and when I found Porthos with Boo’s back leg securely in his mouth, obviously testing the back-leg-bite/hold maneuver on Boo, I had to laugh. Our family was different, yet intact, once again.