A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Read online

  I did not weep, and neither did Gerda. We would not distress her with our tears while she struggled to breathe. We prayed for strength, and strength was given.

  After half an hour, Trixie abruptly recovered. She began to breathe normally. I dared to hope the blood clot had not traveled after all.

  I asked Trix if she wanted to pee, for it was nearly the hour of her usual morning toilet. She responded at once, rising to all four paws. When she followed me from the bedroom, her tail was wagging.

  We rode the elevator down to the ground floor. Walking the long hallway to the terrace and the terrace to the lawn, Short Stuff put on a brave show at my side, pretending to be free of all distress. As soon as she had finished peeing, however, her legs went wobbly, and she had no strength. Nevertheless, she made her way shakily from the lawn to the covered terrace, to the couch that was arguably her favorite place on the property.

  This time she could not spring onto the furniture. I lifted her.

  We often sat there for an hour at a time. Trixie liked to watch the birds and the wind in the trees and the roses swaying on their stems, while I petted her and rubbed the oh-that’s-good spots behind her velvet ears. There were times she seemed willing to sit on that terrace for half the day, merely observing, marveling at the wondrous nature of all ordinary things.

  Gerda brought a bowl of water in case it might be wanted, and we sat on the couch, with Trixie between us, from five forty in the morning until one o’clock in the afternoon. Our golden girl was listless but neither in pain nor afraid. The first time I offered her food, she wanted none. But the second time, she ate a dish of kibble and a tablespoon of peanut butter.

  She wanted to be stroked and held, and to hear us tell her how good she was, how beautiful. Dogs come to love the human voice, which they strive all their lives to understand. In better days, when we sat in that same place, I made up silly songs about her, impromptu odes sung to some of my favorite doo-wop numbers. She grinned at me when I sang, and her tail thumped when she heard her name embedded in a melody.

  Now it was clear that she had ridden down in the elevator and had found the strength to walk to the terrace because this was where she wanted to be when the end came. We expected her to pass at any moment, but she held on for hours, raising her head from time to time to look out at this place she loved: the broad yard and the roses and the sky curving down to the sea.

  This was not only a Saturday, but also the first day of an unusually long Fourth of July holiday, and we worried that Trixie might have another seizure later in the afternoon or evening, when we wouldn’t be able easily to get help. If it was not her fate to die suddenly, we could not let her suffer a prolonged passing. Shortly after one o’clock, I called Newport Hills Animal Hospital, and discovered that both Bruce Whitaker and Bill Lyle were off for the weekend; another veterinarian was covering the office. When I shared our situation with the receptionist, she told me that Bruce was at a tennis game and that she could reach him.

  He called back within minutes. When I told him how Trixie had struggled for breath and described her current condition, he wanted to come to the house to see her rather than frighten her by having her brought to the office. Before one thirty, he arrived.

  Trixie raised her head, grinned, and twitched her tail when I led Bruce out of the game room, onto the terrace. She submitted to examination with her usual grace. Bruce said she would probably die in the night or on Sunday at the latest. Although she was currently in no pain, she was weak, with low blood pressure and perhaps with internal bleeding.

  “When it happens,” I asked, “will she be in pain?”

  “Possibly, yes,” Bruce said.

  “For a moment, for minutes, how long?”

  “There’s no way to know.”

  I asked him one more question that might have seemed odd to him, though he gave no indication that it was. “Will she cry out? Will she cry out in pain?”

  “She might, yes.”

  In her life, this stoic little dog had endured serious physical maladies followed by four surgeries and four recuperations, without a single whimper or protest of any kind. If she cried out in pain and fear, her cry would shred my heart, and Gerda’s. But it was not Gerda or me about whom I was concerned. I didn’t want this brave dog, this creature of such fortitude and fine heart, to hear her own cry as the last sound she knew of this Earth. In her final moments, I meant to help her be what she had been during her entire life: an embodiment of quiet courage, unbowed by suffering.

  Little more than half an hour later, at two o’clock Saturday afternoon, Bruce returned, carrying his medical kit. With him was a vet technician: David, who had advised me not to drive recklessly on my way to the specialty hospital eight days earlier, and who had said, “God is with her.”

  In my view, in the case of a human being, a natural death is death with dignity. Animals are innocents, however, and we serve as stewards of them, with the obligation to treat them with mercy.

  So there on her favorite couch, on the covered terrace, where she could breathe in all the good rich smells of grass and trees and roses, we opened for her the unseen gate, so that she could walk again not on her now weak legs but on the still strong legs of her spirit, walk beyond that gate, an innocent into a realm of innocence, home forever. As her mom cradled Trixie’s body and told her she was an angel, I held her sweet face in my hands and stared into her beautiful eyes, and as always she returned my gaze forthrightly. I told her that she was the sweetest dog in the world, that her mom and I were so proud of her, that we loved her as desperately as anyone might love his own child, that she was a gift from God, and she fell asleep not forever but just for the moment between the death of her body and the awakening of her spirit in the radiance of grace where she belonged.

  XXIII

  “in my end is my beginning”

  LOVE AND LOSS are inextricably entwined because we are mortal and can know love only under the condition that what we love will inevitably be lost. That afternoon on the terrace, Gerda and I felt hammered by our loss, and broken.

  Bruce Whitaker, whose work had brought him to many such moments, wept with us, as did David, who said, “She was such a very special dog.” Later David would write us to say, in part, “Trixie had a special place in my heart. Normally, I am able to maintain a certain amount of detachment. In her case, this was simply not possible for me.”

  Together, Bruce and David wrapped Trixie in a blanket, and David carried her to the SUV in which they had arrived. Arms around each other, Gerda and I followed them through the downstairs and into the garage, where our golden girl’s tail slipped from the folds of the blanket and trailed behind her, as if her spirit lingered just long enough to arrange this final farewell.

  We could have buried Trixie on our property, but we didn’t want to leave her remains there if the day ever came when we lived elsewhere. Her ashes will be with us wherever we might go. The pet cemetery that would conduct the cremation remained closed through Wednesday, for the long Fourth of July holiday. Bruce would keep her in his freezer until Thursday morning.

  In the house once more, Gerda and I were lost. We didn’t seem to belong there anymore. Every room was familiar yet as different as a room in someone else’s house. We did not know what to do, did not want to do anything, but could not sit idle because, in idleness, the ever-pressing grief became crushing, suffocating.

  Then Gerda was so shaken by the sight of one of Trixie’s dog beds that she wanted to collect them all—many of them new—from every room, strip off the covers, wash and dry them, and put the beds away in a storeroom until they could be offered to employees and friends who had dogs. We gathered up the plush toys, as well, scores of them, because they were no longer merely toys but also needles in the heart.

  All our lives, work had been our refuge and redemption. Now only work could prevent despair from overwhelming us.

  I called Mike and Mary Lou Delaney, Linda, and only a few other people who knew Trixie best,
who had spent much time with her and who thought of her as something more than a dog, though a dog itself is a glorious thing to be. I couldn’t bear to call many people, because each time that I told the story of her death, I broke down as I had never done before. Gerda could speak to no one about it for days, to no one but me, and as so often in our lives together, we were for each other the rock that gave us footing.

  We took comfort in the knowledge that God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.

  THE PET CEMETERY covered a considerable tract of land. Most of the hundreds upon hundreds of granite markers were decorated with real or artificial flowers, flags, dog toys, and balloons. Judging by these displays, this place was more frequently visited than any burial ground where human beings were interred.

  The crematorium was in a garagelike structure behind the main building in which business and services were conducted. We were led there to see the body Thursday morning, because we wanted to be certain that Trixie’s remains did not go into the fire with others.

  During the half-hour drive from home, we steeled ourselves for the likelihood that this moment would be grotesque. After all, the body had been frozen since Saturday, had been brought here only this morning; it could not have fully thawed.

  Instead of a grisly sight, we came upon a scene of stark truth and beauty. The crematorium was a plain rough space: dark rafters, chipped concrete floor, intricacies of shadows in the corners, hard light falling through the open door and directly upon the cremator, reality as Andrew Wyeth might have captured it in a painting. The cremator was a solid brute of iron and concrete, old and scarred by years of use, and the air smelled of a purifying heat. On a wheeled cart was a pallet, and on the pallet lay the body of our girl. Before the body was frozen, Bruce Whitaker or David had been so kind as to position it so that Trixie appeared merely to be sleeping, curled with her head resting on her paws. Her eyes were closed, her face serene. Her fur was cool and soft to the touch.

  “She was so beautiful,” Gerda said, “so beautiful,” and in fact it seemed that this golden girl was more beautiful than I remembered, that only five days could steal from memory some of the full glory that was this dog.

  During the first half of the 150-minute cremation, Gerda and I sat side by side on a couch in the waiting area of the mortuary. We paged again and again through Life Is Good, Trixie’s first book, which contained so many photographs of her. In the cremation vigil, this was a way to celebrate her life.

  Thereafter, we walked the cemetery, where the headstones were carved with expressions of love, devotion, and gratitude. In those grave markers were enough stories to keep a novelist in material for a lifetime.

  We took the ashes home in a bronze urn and put the urn on the fireplace mantel in our bedroom, where it has ever since remained.

  Some will say, “She was only a dog.”

  Yes, she was a dog, but not only a dog. I am a man, but not only a man. Sentiment is not sentimentality, common sense is not common ignorance, and intuition is not superstition. Living with a recognition of the spiritual dimension of the world not only ensures a happier life but also a more honest intellectual life than if we allow no room for wonder and refuse to acknowledge the mystery of existence.

  NEVER IN MY career had I suffered writer’s block until we lost Trixie. I sat at the keyboard day after day, in the middle of The Darkest Evening of the Year, a story full of golden retrievers, and could not advance the manuscript by a single word.

  An acquaintance, offering condolences for our loss, admitted that she was embarrassed because she had grieved more for a dog of her own than for family and friends she lost to death. I told her that she had nothing about which to be embarrassed. No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give of themselves to another as a dog gives of itself. I also suspect that we cherish dogs because their unblemished souls make us wish—consciously or unconsciously—that we were as innocent as they are, and make us yearn for a place where innocence is universal and where the meanness, the betrayals, and the cruelties of this world are unknown.

  Saturday afternoon, at the end of the third week of my writer’s block, as two o’clock approached, neither Gerda nor I could bear to be apart or to engage in any mundane task. As we’d done the previous two Saturdays, during the hour that Trixie had passed, we walked together, hand in hand, around these two and a half acres that our girl loved, visiting her favorite places. Three weeks to the minute after Trixie died, as we were walking the larger lawn, a brilliant golden butterfly swooped down from a pepper tree. This was no butterfly like any we had seen before; nor have we seen it since. Big, bigger than my hand when I spread my fingers, it was bright gold, not yellow. The butterfly flew around our heads three or four times, brushing our faces, our hair, as no butterfly had ever done before. Swooping back up past the pepper tree, it vanished into the sky. Gerda, who is the most levelheaded person I have ever known, said at once, “Was that Trixie?” and without hesitation, I said, “Yeah. It was.” We didn’t say another word about the experience until later, near bedtime, when we discussed the incredible thickness of the butterfly’s wings, which were too thick to be aerodynamic. Gerda remembered them as being “almost edged in a neon rope,” and to me, they had appeared to be like stained glass with a leaded edge.

  No landscaper who works here has ever before or since seen such a butterfly, nor have we. It danced about our heads at the very minute Trixie had died three weeks earlier. Skeptics will wince, but I will always believe our girl wanted us to know that the intensity of our grief wasn’t appropriate, that she was safe and happy. After sharing this story on my Web site, I received hundreds of letters from readers who, after losing beloved dogs, experienced uncanny events that were quite different from ours but that seemed to be intended to tell them that the spirits of their dogs lived on.

  FOR EIGHT MONTHS after losing our girl, we could not find the courage to have another dog. Finally, I told Linda Valliant, the current director of CCI’s Southwest Chapter, that we would be ready in two months if they had a release dog that needed a home. Once you have had a wonderful dog, a life without one is a life diminished.

  In May 2008, more than ten months after Trixie left us, Linda brought another female golden retriever to us. Her name then was Arianna; her name now is Anna Koontz. Linda didn’t know it at the time, but when a few weeks later she gathered the adoption papers on Anna, she discovered that our new girl is the great-niece of our Trixie. Anna’s personality is different from Trixie’s, but the wonder is the same.

  After Trixie’s death, Judi Pierson, formerly of CCI, told me that the way by which the magical girl had come to us seemed to have the kiss of destiny to it. When I told Judi, in 1998, that we were at last ready to accept a release dog, she had said there were a number of mooshy ones available. She was going on a two-week vacation and would have our dog for us the day after she returned.

  As she left on her vacation, she tasked others with reviewing all the available dogs and selecting from them the best of the lot. In mid-vacation, she learned that a strange thing had happened. Most often, if there are numerous release dogs available at the same time, finding the right homes for them in the CCI family can take a couple months or longer. In this instance, all dogs were placed almost within a weekend, and none remained available.

  Having promised us a dog, Judi cut short her vacation, without telling us, and set out to comb through the organization in search of an animal that might have been overlooked. She discovered that Trixie was never certified for release and was still recuperating after she should have
healed. Julia Shular, with whom Trixie was then living, had been considering using her as therapy dog in visits to hospitals and nursing homes.

  If all the available dogs had not abruptly been placed in record time, if Judi had simply asked us to wait another couple of months instead of tracking down Trixie, we would have received another dog. That would have been wonderful, too, but it would not have been the same, and another dog might not have wrought in us the changes that Trixie effected.

  Trixie was our destiny. And if we had asked for another dog sooner or delayed another month, we would not have received Anna, Trixie’s great-niece. Do you detect some wonder and mystery in that? We do.

  THIS WORLD IS infinitely layered and mysterious. Every day of our lives, we see far more than we can comprehend, and because the failure to comprehend disquiets us, we lie to ourselves about what we see. We want a simple world, but we live in one that is magnificently complex. Rather than acknowledge the exquisite roundness of creation, we take it in thin slices, and we view each slice through tinted, distorting lenses that further diminish its beauty and obscure truths that await recognition. Complexity implies meaning, and we are afraid of meaning.

  The life of a seamstress is no smaller than the life of a queen, the life of a child with Down syndrome no less filled with promise than the life of a philosopher, because the only significant measure of your life is the positive effect you have on others, either by conscious acts of will or by unconscious example. Every smallest act of kindness—even just words of hope when they are needed, the remembrance of a birthday, the compliment that engenders a smile—has the potential to change the recipient’s life.