Only a Dog
Don’t stop the clocks or silence any phones. Don’t cover mirrors or tear your clothes. Don’t plan parades or cancel school today. Everybody head on in to work. He was only a dog.
In some ways, I’ve been expecting this moment since I first held him in my arms and begged the breeder to give us this puppy, the boy whose back she had marked with purple and white fabric paint. My head knew he was going to be a handful, but the heart chooses on its own, doesn’t it?
I was fourteen when held my first dog, Chess, as he died. Like Comet, he taught me many things that only a dog can teach, and that one was a particularly hard lesson: that dragons live forever, but not so little boys, that as you age a fraction, your dog lives his whole life.
So when Comet passed the ages of every other dog we’ve shared our lives with, I steadied myself, but he kept going, passing fifteen.
And so, as only an old dog can, he taught me a new lesson: I already knew that you should spend every day with your dog as if it’s your last together, but I didn’t know you can have an embarrassing wealth of such days until I started looking down each time and saying, “if this is the last one, that’s OK,” and each time he said, “at least one more.”
I learned you can walk the woods so many times that the memories wash together the way the breeze stirs together the leaves you’ve disturbed with your steps, and you and your dog are young and old at the same time in all of them, steady like an old dog and free like a young one.
Only a dog could teach me that it’s a joy to carry him down the stairs each morning as a puppy, and fifteen years later, an honor to carry him down the stairs as an old man. Only a dog could teach me the particular gentleness of making sure all four paws are steady on the ground before letting go.
Only a dog could come on 99 sunrise hikes with me and still jump up for the hundredth, shaking the aches out of his old bones and saying “what are you waiting for?”
Only a dog could have taught me that preferring a sunny day is pretty arbitrary, and that muddy days and snowy days are just as full of potential if you know how to roll around and enjoy yourself.
A person could have caused the demise of not one but two phones in his life by making me jump in the water after him to make sure he was OK, but only a dog could make me laugh about it instead of being mad at myself.
And, as only a dog can, he loved everybody he met and let them love him with no reservation, no pretense, for no other reason than to share a moment and maybe gain a scratch behind the ears. At hospice bedsides, high school exams, nursing homes, brewery picnic tables, trailsides, and anywhere else that brown eyes and a coat the color of a shiny copper penny seemed needed, his gentle heart was big enough for the whole world.
But Andy and I, we were the luckiest of all, because that true heart held a special place for us.
Comet wasn’t a person, only a dog. Stop no traffic for him today. Declare no holiday. Erect no statue in the park. After all, statues are made of bronze or stone, and his would have to be gold.