We know the ones we love by the things they love. Molly loved to dig. Left on her own, she’d transform any likely patch of ground into a whorl of flying dirt.
She loved the car. If we were taking a road trip, she’d go sit inside it long before we were due to leave. I’d find Molly behind the wheel, upright and eager in the driver’s seat, as if impatient to peel out with me as her passenger.
She loved to destroy things left within her reach and was endowed with a cast-iron stomach. She chewed, and eschewed nothing: shoes, pens, even double-A batteries became fodder and then debris.
She loved to burrow to the bottom of a sleeping bag or bed. Though she slept tucked beneath a blanket in her living room chair (good thing, since her snoring was robust), she’d trot in during the early morning hours to paw at my bedside till I sleepily pulled aside the covers so she could crawl into the depths.
She loved Thomas the cairn terrier, a quarter of her size and power and endowed with an ear-bruising bark. Molly’s maternal side surfaced when she wrestled with him, an endless entertainment. They’d leap and roll and fall upon each other like a pair of mismatched movie dinosaurs, teeth ferociously bared, but Molly moderated the intensity of her attacks so that Thomas never got injured. She’d endure his lunges and nips like an old boxing coach indulging a newbie-in-training.
She loved to run. She’d been hell in her wild youth. There was a long, deep scar around her neck, from the time she dashed out of a dog park to be hit by a car.
A scar on her right side was the ghost of a cancer. Maybe these brushes with death contributed to Molly’s mature equanimity. By the time I met her, she wasn’t easily excitable. She was calm in repose, and her long nose gave her face a sleek femininity instead of the squat, bullish look of your average Am-Staff. Like Petey from Our Gang, she had one eye encircled by a patch of brown fur on her white face, and that eye was haloed in black, as if mascaraed. Possessing a soulful gaze with a centuries-old stare, Molly had a regal air of autonomy. When she chose to sit beside you, you felt privileged.
QUALIFIED LOVE: WE HAVE PLENTY OF THAT — from exlovers, step-siblings, de-frienders. Live long enough, and the chambers of your heart will be lined with the shrouds of expired passions. The love that never questions, that never swerves from its devotion, seems more common to the movies. Too many of us hear of it only in pop songs.
I count myself among the lucky few who have walked down that paradisiacal path. So I’m not here to complain about what’s gone, because love of the purest strain lives on. It’s as strong and everlasting as the loss.
CERTAIN PEOPLE ARE PORTALS. You meet them and your world widens, deepens. My wife-to-be, Judith, came with two dogs and two cats. I walked with her into the animal world. The felines were an easy add-on, and Thomas, a dead ringer for Toto, was suffused with cute-osity. But when I first met Molly on the end of Judith’s leash, she terrified me. Knowing nothing of the truth, I thought all pit bulls were enraged and homicidal. In that first view of Molly, an introduction as cue-thunder ominous as a horror movie clip, she was a shadowy, bulky figure who seemed bigger than Judith. All that was missing was the chewed-off human hand clomped between her massive jaws.
Yet as I fell in love with the owner, I began to get comfortable with the dog. Judith and I were by then living side by side in adjacent units of a bungalow in Venice Beach. On nights when I came home before Judith and puttered around my apartment, I assumed that the barking next door was the dogs’ standard response to hearing a human nearby. When I walked over to let them out, Molly bounded up to me with intense excitement, doing a crazed butt-wiggling dance of celebration, whining with happiness, batting her long head against my thighs. I figured she was doing what any dog did when released from human-less confinement, but Judith chastised me for keeping Molly waiting and making her so unhappy. “She’s barking because she wants to be with you,” she explained.
Suddenly I had a dog. Every morning, Molly would ask to be let out of Judith’s place. Judith would let her out. Molly would then walk around the back of the bungalow and come knocking on my door. Once admitted, she’d trot right up into an armchair she’d claimed as hers on one of her first visits. From there, she surveyed the domain or stared at me adoringly.
I was her dutiful bitch in no time.
A Few Things that Bonding with a Dog Introduces You To:
The local trees and greenery — sidewalks, and the lawns.
The number of objects that might be edible.
The pleasures of sitting in the sun, among them the ability to suspend time.
Every other dog in existence. As well as the world of foolhardy squirrels.
MOLLY HAD RAISED JUDITH’S CATS — two orphaned brother-and-sister kittens — from birth, saving their tiny lives with her faux-mom ministrations, so why should it have been surprising that she would adopt me? She used to hold down the Bean and then his sister, Flower, while she thoroughly licked their nether regions clean, the cats yowling protests, Molly impervious, so I could imagine her thought process in sizing me up: Thinks he doesn’t need a dog, does he? I’ll set ’em straight.
Having never experienced dog devotion, I was flummoxed when this gentle, kindhearted babe of an animal made her claim on me. Molly was all about the tribe — on the trail, she’d be lead dog, but she’d periodically run back to make sure you were coming along, and if you got up from a city gathering to go to the bathroom, she’d shepherd you both ways — but this was different. If Judith and I were walking Thomas and Molly, and I had to leave the group for any reason, she’d use her hind legs like superbrakes, refusing to walk onward.
By now the very notion of Molly wanting to harm any living thing seemed far-fetched, about as likely as her taking up the saxophone. But one time I did see her become genuinely vicious for an instant. A drunk whose tats and attitude suggested some acquaintance with gang life stopped by our restaurant patio table to admire Molly. Quiet and stoic as usual, she endured his pets and praises until he lurched too close to me to make a point. With an ugly growl, she leapt at him — just close enough to scare the lights out of us both and to let me know that she would, in fact, rip someone’s throat to protect her man.
Why was it, how was it, that this muscle-headed beast looked to me first, followed me from room to room, and whimpered until I returned to the herd? The dog heart wants what it wants, but what was it in me that Molly wanted?
Possible Qualities That Might Make Me Lovable to a Dog:
I’ve noticed that humans are often subliminally drawn to mates who resemble them in some way. The union of one couple I know announces: we’re in love with this nose. Was Molly of the aquiline snout attracted to mine?
It couldn’t have been my sense of humor, or my being so well read. The famous people I knew? Irrelevant. She wasn’t into me for my convertible alone, cool as it was.
The cynic in me thought: adaptive behavior — I was simply a secondary provider (next to Judith, I was a pushover in terms of treat indulgence) and thus required extra attention. Thing was, Molly had literally and figuratively gone over to my side, so there had to be some intuitive attraction to the me-ness of me operative here. She might’ve liked my smell. Judith argues that I have a calmer nature than hers, and so Molly took to me in relief. This kind of love is like an eye of God, though. I felt that what she cleaved to was the best of me, even if I didn’t quite know what that was.
I did know how to stroke her, in a certain way, on the very softest hair of her brow. This was my method of love transmission, which I know she welcomed. One night as I sat talking to Judith, I was stroking Molly’s chest with one hand. When I stopped the absent petting and started to rise, she put her paw on my chest, forbidding my exit. The message was clear as she gazed into my eyes: Don’t stop.
For days afterward, “She’s giving me the paw!” was my delighted cry. After a while, this became routine: whenever I petted or stroked her, her paw demanded more.
IT STARTED ON A CAMPING TRIP, with a cough from Molly late one night so loud it woke the couple in a neighboring tent. The cough took, and it led to increasingly prolonged fits. I brought her to our vet, thinking we’d get her medicine or a minor procedure. I was summoned to an office with surprising urgency, where the doctor stood contemplating an X-ray as though she were the first on the scene of a car wreck. An insidiously clever tumor had wrapped itself around one of Molly’s lungs and her aorta, classically inoperable. Really, what we were looking at was a matter of time.
Molly prided herself in her vigilant alertness, so she hated the canine Vicodin that suppressed her cough. Even when the medicine was embedded in her favorite foods, she’d outsmart us, getting the food down and spitting out the pill. The drugs gave her respite, but she’d fight the effects. Refusing to lie down, she’d sit up beside the couch and slowly, slowly, tilt, like a junkie on the nod, until she hung at a forty-five-degree angle over the floor. Then she’d finally let me guide her into a supine position.
One day Molly was out in the garden and, in a reprise of her old enthusiasm, began to dig furiously by the steps. After a moment of it, her cough kicked in and she stopped, gazing up at me with a mixture of bewilderment and pain that ripped right at my heart. “Why is this happening?” she was asking, and worse, “Why can’t you make it stop?” I led her back inside and stroked the soft fur on her chest until she quieted down.
Judith was out of town one night when Molly got caught in a fit that would not quit. She was gasping for breath. I alerted the hospital, which was twenty minutes away even with no traffic, and drove at demon speed, Molly wheezing in the back seat while I prayed to no God I’d ever paged before. When we got there, she was too weak to climb from the car, so I carried her to the elevator, stumbling, horrified to see her pee on the floor — a shocking breach of dignity that upped my alarm. As soon as the doors opened upstairs, I was yelling like a character in a bad TV movie, “This dog needs oxygen!”
The interns hurried over to take her from me. I paced for a few awful minutes until one emerged to tell me she was tented and breathing normally. It had been no false alarm: another few minutes, and Molly would’ve been gone.
I’D BEEN UNUSUALLY FORTUNATE for many years: since losing my grandparents decades earlier, death hadn’t come this close.
We had planned a weekend trip to the mountains for Molly to enjoy. But it was bitter cold, the town was inordinately busy with tourists, and Molly’s now-constant wheezing was frightening small children. “What’s wrong with that dog?” a little girl asked her concerned mother as they passed us on the street. When we got back to the cabin we’d rented for the weekend, Molly lay on the bed with a baleful look on her face that was unmistakable. Judith had been saying for some time now that Molly would let us know. We made the necessary call and cut the trip short.
Back home, we invited Molly to lie in bed alongside us. I wrapped myself around her warm girth and nuzzled her like a fellow dog. We try to inhale the ones who are leaving. We’re holding on to what’s been revealed to be a transitory thing. Molly was by then deeply involved with the simple task of continuing to breathe, and her gaze had dulled. She no longer brightened when I sat down beside her.
Judith grilled her a steak for her last dinner. Molly ate it with care and concentration. The next morning, when the doctor came, we took her for a last short walk, and she made a rare show of animation. It was as if she sensed what the stranger’s visit signified. She, too, was postponing the inevitable. She seemed to be greeting and saying good-bye to the sun, grass, and wind.
The doctor explained a series of injections. We stroked her as the first needle went in, kissed her brow as the sedative seeped through her bloodstream. This was the prep for the second injection’s lethal chemical, but Molly had stopped breathing, her eyes closed. The doctor was surprised to confirm that she was already gone. Her heart had been doing hard, hard work. It must’ve been such relief to at last let go.
Judith and I cried then, supporting each other like a suddenly elderly couple. There was an emptiness in the house that had never been there before. We hurried to put away the things of hers that now were merely things.
AND LESS THAN A YEAR LATER, when I had to cope with my father’s passing, I realized there was something familiar in it, that I was deeper into the heart of a dark country whose territory was not entirely unknown. If a person who’s trying to process a beloved parent’s demise is so much raw human meat, you could say that I’d already been tenderized. Molly did this for me. She left me this brute knowledge as a kind of parting gift.
Her bones and ashes sit in a wooden box atop the bookshelves by my bed, but this is only totem and fetish, a shaker flung by a shaman toward the relentless infinity of sky. The bones aren’t Molly, just as what’s in the box that arrived for my mother, some days after his cremation, is decidedly not my dad. Where we go is the one thing that we can’t know, but I like to think spirit moves on. A new kind of conversation evokes it in each newly precious day. And memory…
THE SHRUB SHAKES, as if there’s an isolated earthquake in our garden. Little clods of earth shoot out from behind it, and I can see a blur of light brown fur beyond the green. Molly’s digging. I step out onto the front stoop to get a better look. She’s gotten down to the depths of this hole, her white chest hair flecked with the darker dirt, paws a rhythmic blur. She backs up to assess her work, panting, circles the hole amidst the weeds, and then settles herself into it with unmistakable satisfaction, hind legs tucked beneath her, front legs crossed. Body in the shade, head in the sun, she turns her face to me, teeth glinting, tongue dripping, dark eyes serene. She smiles at me, and rests her chin on her paws. Guarding the gates to heaven.