Good friends of ours suffered a terrible loss this week when their beloved dog was hit by a car and killed. They live on a highway on the edge of Racine, so this has always been a very real and frightening possibility – but knowing that still does not prepare you for the moment when such an awful thing actually happens. These are friends who have already been through a lot of other awful losses, which makes this all the more painful and unfortunate.
On top of it, losing a pet is one of those losses that not many people fully appreciate. You can tell someone that you just put your dog to sleep and they might look at you with a concerned expression and say “Aww, that’s too bad” but you know that they don’t really get it. Not unless they have been there themselves. It’s probably the same thing if someone has had their house broken into – or been forced to declare bankruptcy. You really have to have tasted it first hand to really know what sort of pain it represents. And if someone doesn’t own a dog and LOVE that dog, they do not begin to understand the pain which is experienced when that dog’s life comes to an end. . . and the especially awful pain which writer Arthur Gordon describes in his book A Touch of Wonder as “the emptiness of not knowing how much you love someone or something until they’re gone.”
The Bergs almost always owned a dog, although some were more precious to us than others. Our beagle Shadrack lived with us back in Colton, South Dakota- but we decided to give him away rather than have him come with us to Decorah, Iowa – and he ended up being killed in an accident on the farm where he went to live. (If I drove down that particular highway outside of Colton, I could probably still point out the farm where Shadrack was killed.) I am foggy about what dogs we owned first in Decorah, but I vividly remember our poodle named Taffy – high-strung and loud like so many poodles, but a pretty dog who was also really destructive. . . with a special interest in my mother’s shoes. Taffy was killed one afternoon right in front of our house when she ran into the street and got caught under the tires of a small truck. Tears were shed, for sure, but Taffy was not a beloved part of the family like some of our later dogs. Especially loved was our Pek-a-Poo Muffin (cute as a poodle but calm like a pekinese) who was with us for our first years in Atlantic. One summer when we went on vacation, we left Muffin with a farm family who belonged to our church . . . and I remember us driving to pick him up and my mom saying as soon as we pulled into the farmyard, “something’s wrong. Where’s Muffin?” And sure enough, Mrs. Ohms walked up to our car to deliver the devastating news that Muffin had been killed the day before – hit by a car. I remember all of us crying as we headed back to Atlantic – although I tried very hard not to. Only very recently have I stopped to think of how awful that experience had to be for Mrs. Ohms and of the heavy heart with which she gave us the news. That day more than thirty years ago, the only pain any of us was aware of was our own at having our beloved dog snatched away from us so cruelly.
It is less shocking but no less wrenching to lose a dog to old age and gradual physical decay. . . as Kathy and her family experienced with their beloved Ginger or as she and I experienced with our cocker spaniel, Luther, when we found ourselves compelled to put him to sleep. Author Mark Doty, in his marvelous book “Dog Years,” writes about how the death of our pets is for many people one of the most powerful and undeniable demonstrations that Life is Finite – that none of us lives forever – and that Death comes knocking whether we are ready for it or not.
He goes on to say; One of the unspoken truths of American life is how deeply people grieve over the animals who live and die with them, how real that emptiness is, how profound the silence is these creatures leave in their wake.
I started watching the Vice Presidential debate tonight on Tivo, but ended up turning it off because I couldn’t stop thinking about our friends Bob and Val and the death of their beloved Dakota . I found myself playing with Bobbi and Ellie and telling them over and over and over again “I love you,” as if they could understand what those words mean. What matters is that I know what they mean. And I do love them, a lot, and already find myself dreading the day – the distant day, I hope – when it comes times to let them go.
pictured: Kathy playing with Bobbi, the younger of our two Golden Retrievers.