Deep down, dogs are poetic: attuned to the numinous and the mysterious

All through the week, our
old dog Pepper became more and more ill with the lymphoma that had been
diagnosed a month before. By mid-week she was gasping for breath and her heart
was beating frantically. At about 2:00 a.m. on Thursday morning, my
wife Beth and I made the decision to go to the emergency clinic to have Pepper
put to sleep. We woke our teenage sons: Aaron, the younger one, wanted to come
with us. Ryan, our eldest, preferred to stay home with his nine-year-old sister
Rudi, who we’d let sleep. We thought she’d be too upset.

Pepper was my old friend, and I felt sad.
At the same time, I thought of all the humans I knew who had suffered and were
suffering, and felt lucky that it was the dog and not my wife or children who
had become ill. I didn’t cry until Aaron started to cry, holding the dog and
whispering to her, consoling her as the vet found a vein and then stuck the
needle in.

We carried Pepper home in a large
coffin-like cardboard box that the clinic provided, and stowed her downstairs
until we could bury her in the backyard. In the morning, Rudi asked why Pepper
had had to die in the night without her. “I should have been there. I could
have helped her not to be so scared.”

The next day it rained until suppertime.
Then Ryan and I went out back with a shovel and dug a hole. Afterwards, Aaron
and Rudi went out to enlarge the hole. They wanted to make sure that everything
was exactly right.

Before we took Pepper outside, Beth opened
the box to let Rudi see Pepper for the last time. Together, they spoke to her
and patted her. They told her how they would miss her. That they loved her.
They told her what a good dog she had been.

When I am dying, it would be comforting to
be told that I had been the human equivalent of a good dog. Loving,
compassionate, faithful, understanding, dignified, but also goofy, curious,
fun, protective, a friend. Let’s leave out obedience. Pepper never placed much
value on obedience. She was more like a cat, winding her life around the family
based on her own priorities and concerns—which, happily, included each of us.

We carried Pepper out to the hole and
lowered her in. Then—as is done in Jewish burials—we took turns placing
spadefuls of earth on top of her. There is that sound of the earth falling on
top of the coffin, or in this case, the dog.

All that day, I wanted to write a poem for
the funeral, something that would speak for us and make sacred this scene: my
family gathered around the grave of this sort-of member of the family. At the
same time, the impulse to write a poem and to invoke pet-loss solemnity seemed
ridiculous.

I had written a funeral poem for a pet
only once before, when Aaron was five and dealing with the loss of his
goldfish. “Dad, you’re a writer. And you play music. Please do something,” he
pleaded. So I wrote a poem—a blessing, really—for his fish, Sharky. Then we
all stood in the backyard while I read the poem and played something elegiac
on, of all things, a baritone saxophone.

Soon after, my grandfather died and we
gathered again in nearly the same spot to plant a fruit tree in his memory. We
told the kids that the tree would grow “grandpa peaches” for years to come. My
grandfather was always amazed that he’d lived long enough to have
great-grandchildren. And he marvelled at that idea, that since he’d known his
own grandfather, he’d therefore known six generations of his family, on three
continents, with birthdates spanning 150 years.

In the Jewish
tradition, mourners gather at the grave a year after the ­funeral and “unveil”
the headstone. Until then, the grave has no stone. At the unveiling for my
grandmother, I read a story that I’d written in memory of her. It was one of
the few times when I felt that my writing spoke for others about something
important, and didn’t call attention to itself. It performed a function, it was
“useful” at the ritual moment.

A few days before Pepper died, my
father-in-law came over to say goodbye to her. He is a big man but he got down
on the floor so that he could speak softly to her. Pepper was barely conscious.
He told her that for all these years she had had a job in our family and she
had done it well. Her job, he said, was to love us and to be our friend.

Beth had brought Pepper home from the
breeder’s a week before Ryan’s third-and-a-half birthday, an occasion we were
celebrating in order to make him feel special on the milestone of his little
brother’s first birthday. The breeder was eccentric—when she fed bottled milk
to her puppies, she did it topless, she told us, because she wanted her dogs to
experience the warmth and security of “fur on skin” contact—but she had lovely
dogs, and she had just called to say she had a puppy that was particularly
gentle and sensitive. The perfect puppy for our family, she said. Beth and Ryan
went to her home “just to look” at the puppy, but I knew that they would return
with a dog. Ryan named her Pepper because he knew that his mother had had a dog
named Pepper when she was a girl. “You must still miss him,” he said to her,
and he was right.

I searched for something appropriate to
read at Pepper’s funeral, wishing that I could speak as earnestly and
unself-consciously as my father-in-law. The closest thing I found was Mark
Strand’s wonderful “Five Dogs” sequence, from his collection
has some beautiful dog-centric writing in it: “And I
stood in the midnight valley, watching the great starfields / Flash and flower
in the wished-for reaches of heaven. / That’s when I, the dog they call Spot,
began to sing.” Despite much evidence to the contrary, I’d always had a sense
that deep down, dogs are poetic, that they are attuned to the mysterious and
the numinous. And though Strand’s poem reflects this beautifully, it wasn’t
quite personal enough for our ceremony and so instead, we just shared our
memories of Pepper. I remembered Ryan at age four sitting beside Pepper,
reading her stories. And all those walks. In midwinter, in the dark of the
woods at night, endless hours along the Bruce Trail and through the Royal
Botanical Gardens, wandering, both dog and human, lost in our own thoughts.

Not that Pepper was always thoughtful.
Yes, she demonstrated extraordinary patience as the kids dressed her up,
attached her to wagons, tucked her into their beds, tried to ride her or made
her wear silly hats and sunglasses. And yes, she would wait patiently outside a
store when I went in to shop. But she had issues with other animals. Our
lovely, quiet dog was what our family called “a killer poodle.” She’d slipped
her leash a few times and gone on rampages, barking and charging at other dogs.
Once she’d killed a groundhog in front of a busload of Japanese tourists at the
Lilac Dell at the botanical gardens. On
some level, it delighted me that she was instinctive and inscrutable, a family
member from another species, reminding us how difficult—and how easy—communication can be. I think of Rudi, curled up with Pepper on the couch,
talking and talking about what con­cerned them most.

I’m sad about the loss of Pepper, but this sadness
isn’t only about losing our dog. I am also reminded that we have lost those
times in the life of our family. My boys aren’t three and five any more, using
plates as the steering wheels of imaginary airplanes. My daughter isn’t a
gurgling infant discovering her toes. It’s almost ten years later, and though I
delight in what my children are now, I have lost what they were, except to
memory.