My Dog: The Mild Mannered Millionaire
By: Sandra Slattery
Last week, I had to put my dog down. As in, I paid someone a lot of money to come and kill my dog. He’s gone. He’s dead. I try to ignore the surprising hollowness that he left, but that doesn’t work. Making the decision to put down a pet sucks. It’s not easy, but it is one that I can rest well having made. Well, when I can dry my tears enough to fall asleep anyway. I know that my friend is no longer suffering and for that I am grateful. The melancholy, however, is a different story. Through the sadness, I look back at a story of love, remembrance, and gratitude.
As I slowly dry my tears and quiet my feelings of wrenching anguish, I am left to limp towards the next part of my grief process: quietly accepting that my friend of 13 years is gone. He’s dead. My Bruce, the gentle beast. The animal that was too smart for his own damn good. The magnanimously selfless friend. The one that my mother-in-law dubbed “the mild mannered millionaire”.
My own spirituality ebbs and flows with the seasons, but with my Bruce I really feel that he had a soul. I know that every dog parent must feel this way, but I truly believe that my Bruce was special. He was sentient no doubt, but also an empath. Counselor Troi from Star Trek had nothing on Bruce. He had a way of just knowing when I was sad. Sometimes I would sit in a puddle of self-pity, only to have my elbow nudged by a slimy dog nose. He would insist that I pet him, which obviously I had to oblige. Obviously.
He would press his chin insistently on my leg, as if to try to physically squeeze away the sadness from my body. The tears would rain down my cheeks to land on my shirt, and I could often feel the weight of my emotions being poured out through my tear ducts. He would, in that moment, be singularly focused on comforting me. This dog. This selfless creature. For the most part, it worked. It’s hard to remain sad when you have this gentle beautiful dog staring right into the depths of your soul. I would talk to him about my problems, and I honestly think he understood me.
The last time that he ever stood up and walked without aid was to comfort me when I was slumped against the wall in teary defeat. He could barely hold himself up to pee, but he made the effort that night to walk to me. Walking a few feet was brutal on the three remaining legs he had, but he limped to me over ten feet on cold slippery tile to put his head on my lap one last time and comfort me; through the pain that he was enduring from the gigantic cancer that was growing on his leg. Even as he neared his own death, he thought only of others. He thought only to comfort me. He never cried out in his own pain. He never lashed out in anger. He was only ever gentle and selfless to the end.
That night, as I took in the magnitude of the selfless feat that I had just witnessed, the tears that I cried felt different. They were heavier, somehow. They hurt. Each drop that fell on my lap made me feel that much emptier inside. I felt that somehow, I did not deserve Bruce. I felt that I almost wasn’t good enough for his pure love. I stroked his smooth golden locks reminiscing all the times we had; the silly times, the good times. And then I was angry. Angry that fate could hand such a cruel end to Bruce. Angry that we had to slowly watch our friend fade away. Angry that dogs have such criminally short lives. And I cried. I cried bitter, ugly tears, the harsh LEDs and the cold tile floor matching the jumble of cold bitterness and anger and sadness inside of my heart.
As I look back upon his life, his passing moment, and that last time that he walked, I re-traumatize myself with pain and heartache. Even now, two weeks after I have said goodbye to my friend, I have to furrow my brows and harden my countenance to choke back the tears and the tightness in my throat as I write this reflection.
Even in his passing, Bruce taught me something about love; about empathy. He taught me about compassion. Bruce taught me that dogs can embody some of the purest forms of love. We humans, with our opposing thumbs and fancy electronic gadgets and higher brain functions, tend to delude ourselves into thinking that we are the ultimate expression of evolutionary greatness; but maybe we still have something to learn from these noble creatures.