Chapter 24

Call for Them One Morning and They’re Gone

Old dogs, they roam

You call for them one morning, and they’re gone

Days are lonely and nights are long

Wondering where they are and what went wrong

“Old Dogs”

Many Native American cultures speak of “a good death:” a death that is peaceful, timely, acceptable, and simply the next step in the journey.

No matter how death finds us, it comes easier to those it takes than it does to those it leaves behind. Because of that, most deaths come with some degree of built-in mitigation, a smoothing-over effect to make grief more palatable and acceptance more possible for those of us left behind. Like the bumpers at a bowling alley that keep a teetering ball out of the gutter, the beliefs we harbor about death keep us from drifting too far into the unknown and uncontrollable. Soothing thoughts can be the truth, or they can be lies. Either way, healing seems to depend on saying them and hearing them.

We need the old to die satisfied and the suffering to die relieved. We need soldiers to die heroes, loved ones to die remembered, and the passionate to die doing what they loved most.

There are but a few senseless occasions in which the concept of a good death has no place. One is the loss of a young child, and the other is a child’s loss of his or her first pet. In both cases, there is no soft landing or smoothing-over effect. Those deaths come with unforgiving truths, unfair timing, and undiluted heartbreak.

The death of a pet, especially a dog, is often a child’s introduction to the heartless concept of permanent loss. It’s true that a more unfortunate child could experience a worse initiation, like the death of a parent, sibling, or grandparent, but a dog represents a life that the child first cared for and felt a serious measure of responsibility about. And that’s where the destructive lack of a soft landing comes in.

Now, I will concede that the following point is flat wrong for some people and may even come across as horribly callous, though that is not my intent. But I believe that the loss of a dog carries a burden of despair not found as often in the death of other childhood pets. The loss of a dog seems more permanent, maybe simply because it’s harder for a parent to zip by the pet store on their way home from work and pick up the doppelgänger to the dead one. Let’s face it, you have a decent chance of pulling that move off with a goldfish or a hamster, but not a dog.

Even when the pet goldfish or oversized rat is not so easily replaceable, the goodbye ceremony seems more merciful than that of a dog. Standing over the toilet with your kid, holding Goldie the goldfish by the tail, and talking about what a great fish he was somehow allows your kid to move on, partly because he may need to use the toilet for its intended purpose, cutting short the ceremony. The same seems true of wrapping the deceased hamster in toilet paper and the one cloth napkin that doesn’t match the set anymore, laying it to rest in the bottom of a shoebox, and burying it in a hasty divot beneath the geraniums. It’s just different for a kid’s dog. Especially a kid’s first dog.

The front door was left open again, like it so often was, by me. It was only open a crack, hardly big enough to let the last vestiges of the early evening light stream through. The crack was big enough, however, for a long, pointy black nose to wedge it wider.

Barney, our oldest standard poodle, had a vagabond history and an independent streak a mile wide. He flaunted his checkered past of bolting through undisciplined doors and poorly fenced yards with pride. Barney loved to run, his ears blowing back in the wind. Like a certain little boy, he was selectively deaf to any attempts at control or redirection. He had run away so many times over the years that his ability to read a hubcap at fifty miles per hour or dodge a racing bumper seemed unmatched in canine history.

Chauncey, our one-year-old standard poodle pup, was less skilled in the fine arts of slipping in and out of busy streets and navigating the dangerous world at large. But when Barney turned that small crack in the front door into a life-sized portal of freedom, Chauncey seized the opportunity to learn from the master. Or maybe Chauncey just wanted to spend one on one time with the one he loved the most.

Together, they raced through the front yard and up Starmount Drive toward the fast and busy Meridian Road. They possessed purebred noses, especially for those spaces wild and hard to access, and something, maybe a squirrel or a cat, had caught their shared attention. They darted to the opposite side of the street and somewhere behind Joey Fearnside’s house, quickly disappearing into the saw grass glades beyond the magnolia trees.

Chauncey followed Barney through the soft, wet ground near the creek. I knew that area well; the boys and I had trudged through its swampy paths many times. The dogs had to have run past the series of log-and-bramble forts we so often defended against the Steges’s older brother, Mark, our playful nemesis in that part of the woods. They would have passed the long black water pipe traversing the higher part of the creek, the one we had shimmied across on hundreds of occasions. The dogs took the lower, muddier route across the creek and continued their journey away from Starmount. The wooded area was safe and uncrowded, but it was perilously close to far more challenging and unfriendly territories.

I reacted quickly, but I was still too late in discovering my mistake. With guilty panic, I jumped on my bike and gave chase up Starmount. I instinctively knew their route, but never got close enough to intervene. The sun was almost down, and the darkening woods had swallowed up any signs of my two black dogs. The trails through the glades were challenging on foot and nearly impossible for a ten-year-old on a street bike. I don’t know if it was common sense or a sixth sense that told me to turn my bike back onto Starmount and head toward Meridian Road, but I did just that. I don’t know why but I knew to head toward the busy street like I knew to blink or breathe. The feeling was unsettling.

By the time I reached Meridian Road and had turned left, hoping to intersect with my beloved dogs, the sun had completely forsaken us all. My last hope, like my dogs’ black fur, had faded into the darkness. It did not take long for the night to turn ominous. Pedaling down the side of that busy avenue and into the headlights of oncoming traffic, my worst fears came into view.

I skidded up to several cars that had pulled over to the side of the road and got off my bike, leaving it forgotten on the ground. I walked past a couple of nondescript cars and up to the passenger-side door of a long green-and wood-paneled station wagon where some stranger, an older man who seemed like a grandfather, stopped me from going any farther. “Boy, you don’t want to see this,” he cautioned.

I didn’t say anything; I just stared back at him, angry, but so afraid that he might be right. Had I understood the full meaning of the phrase, “Like hell, I don’t,” at the time, he would have gotten an incredulous earful from me. That phrase seemed to encapsulate exactly the way I felt in that moment.

The next thing I knew, I was leaning against the side of that green station wagon. A grizzled woman smoking a long cigarette spoke to me from the driver’s seat, in low, throaty tones. “Honey, I’m so sorry about your dog. I just didn’t see him. I wasn’t speeding. I just didn’t see him. He’s just black as tar, you know. Black as night, that’s what he is. Oh, don’t cry, sweetheart.”

She went on and on like that without any regard to how I was taking the news. I don’t know how she knew that the dead dog belonged to me. I suppose ten-year-old boys and dogs just go together. Besides, neither of us was supposed to be on such a busy street at night, so we must have belonged to each other.

Just then, Joey Fearnside’s father made his way up to the car, gently pushing the old man out of the way. He was holding Barney by the collar. Barney’s tail was wagging, and he was happy to see me. I was happy to see him, but in that moment, I knew what I had lost. Barney was there, but Chauncey was not. Somewhere farther back, beyond the blinding glare of headlights and the red glow of taillights, adults were standing around Chauncey. The station wagon had hit him as he followed Barney across the dark asphalt. I squinted and thought I saw him in the odd glow. There he was, lying as lifeless as I felt.

That chain-smoking woman had hit my dog! She was sorry, but I didn’t care. “Why would you do that? Don’t talk to me! You smell! I hate you!” I tearfully fired off every protest and verbal assault I could think of because that’s all I could do.

It seemed like Joey Fearnside’s dad had come out of nowhere to rescue Barney, and, in the end, he took it upon himself to collect Chauncey. He buried him behind his house, at the end of the saw grass glade, where the woods were dark, but peaceful, and far more forgiving than Meridian Road. I felt a bond with Mr. Fearnside that night, one I had not felt previously. And now, some forty years later, I still feel a deep appreciation for the caring role he played that terrible night.

I don’t know how I got home, as I don’t remember pedaling back under my own power. My parents were out that night, pulling into the drive after I had already gone to bed. They walked in the same door the dogs had run out of hours before, and, somehow, they already knew of the night’s disaster.

They woke me up to tell me what I already knew, but there’s something about your parents telling you unwanted news that makes it all the more real. I cried and protested to them, as I had to that low-toned, cigarette-smoking woman, but I could not convince them that it had all been a bad dream. They did their best to comfort me, but their words of solace were equally unconvincing.

Unable to turn back time or keep my eyes open much longer, I finally fell asleep. I slept peacefully and awoke a boy less innocent and much sadder than I had been twenty-four hours earlier. I cried again for Chauncey’s loss as I hugged Barney’s neck. With the death of my dog, I got my first taste of the balance between sorrow and thankfulness and the necessary art of moving on.

For the young and the old, grief always begins the same way: with the denial of the event and its effect. It’s a personal journey, but for all of us, denial finally gives way to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s other burdensome stages of grief, at the end of which, acceptance eventually awaits.

It took some time for me to stop seeing Chauncey in the hallway, in the backyard, and on my bed at night. I swore to myself that I would never leave a door or gate open again in my life. It was an understandable promise for me to make to myself, even if it was ridiculously impossible to keep.

In the decades that followed, I lost more dogs, irreplaceable people, and many, many other things. Surviving each loss seems to depend on nothing more than surviving the one before. With years of experience comes greater strength, less vulnerability, and a quiet confidence in facing that universal struggle. Time does not ease the longing, but it dulls the pain and eventually allows you to remember fondly without the gut-punch that used to lie and wait for you to crack a smile.

I have searched my memory for sad or negative experiences on Starmount, and for the time that I lived on that street, there was no sadness except for the death of my dog. For that, I am thankful.

I am a child at heart, but I am also an adult who is childless, except for my dogs. I’m a lucky soul to have been the doting parent or sibling to many dogs. Here’s to Moiken, Barney, Chauncey, Rocky, Cody, Montana, Grizzly, Cub, Winnie, Willie, and Dorothy.