Life is so busy right now, and my head feels like it is a kicked-over box full of kittens running everywhere and clawing everything. In the midst of it all—Covidworld and political insanity and the loss of relationships and all of us going just a little bit crazy—I have been thinking a lot about grief and mourning. If I can get my thoughts ordered enough to finish the blahg post that has been kicking my teeth in for weeks now, hopefully you’ll understand why. In the meantime, something I wrote ten years ago came to mind that I decided to share.
Dogs, man. We just don’t deserve them.
Moshe was our family dog, a mellow, playful, and slightly strange member of our family. We got him from the pound in the spring of 2000, but we didn’t so much pick him as he picked Austin. His name is the Hebrew form of “Moses,” which seemed appropriate for a dog who resembled a burning bush. My mom called him her redheaded grandson, and he had a unique place in our family.
Moshe really was like one of our kids, and was young at heart for most of his 11 years with us. It became a Saturday morning tradition for the kids to slather peanut butter onto pancakes I had burned during one of my ADD moments and feed them to Moshe. Another tradition was the annual Moshe Molt. Every spring he shed his winter coat, and I took to calling him “Chernobyl” because for the better part of two months his hair would come out in random clumps all over his body. It looked horrible, and you could brush and brush and brush and still not make it go much faster. Some days it looked like he had exploded all over the back yard.
You didn’t take him for a walk; he took YOU for a walk. He wasn’t a barker, so if he acted up it usually meant that there were deer out in the field or students toilet papering our house (or, in one memorable case, a badger in our back yard). He was usually gentle with the kids (though, like all little boys, he could get a bit hyper), and was always happy to sit quietly next to you on the porch or in the yard and enjoy a quiet Star sunset. If we were inside, he was often content to curl up by the back door and nap or watch the world go by.
He had a strange obsession with rocks. Moshe loved it when we would toss them into the canal which runs alongside our yard. He would chase them in flight right up to the fence where he would watch them splash down; he and Austin could do that for hours. Moshe drove me crazy by dragging rocks into the yard to play with and chew on.
He was also obsessed with his tail. He figured out that we thought it was funny when he chased his tail. It became his standard way of greeting us, or his way of catching our eye if he thought we weren’t paying enough attention to him.
That all started to change last fall; his energy fell way off, and he started wheezing and coughing. He slept a lot more. Things seemed to stabilize over the winter, but when we took him for a walk about a month ago he was so exhausted that we nearly had to load him into the kids’ wagon to get him back home. That’s when we started pondering the unponderable. A decision was clearly coming, and I was having the hardest time facing it.
I think he knew, though. April 30, 2011 was a beautiful, sunny Saturday. I was puttering around the back yard, and I spent some time with Moshe doing the things we always did. I didn’t get any pancakes made that day, but I fed him a leftover ham bone which he paraded around the yard for awhile before finally eating while I wasn’t looking. I threw some rocks into the canal and spent some time brushing out his winter coat. Then, as I left to mow the front yard, I saw him amble slowly towards the back porch.
That’s where I found him about half an hour later, lying in his usual spot by the back door. But there was something about the way he was laying there that didn’t look right, and he didn’t react at all as I got closer. Even before I got down to check him I knew. It was about the saddest thing I have ever seen, but really everything about it was just right. I couldn’t have asked for a better last day with him.
It seems strange to mourn a dog. This isn’t of the magnitude of losing a parent, or losing a child. We’re not talking about the death of a human. But a dog makes himself a part of your family, and makes his home in your heart and your memories, in such a unique way. I think about all the things that have happened in our family while Moshe was a part of it. He literally grew up with Austin; they were roughly the same age and both came to us within a few months of each other. When we brought both Jodie and Erin home from the hospital, Moshe was here. Whenever we got home from anywhere, one of the first things we saw was Moshe greeting us, tail waving in his characteristic helicopter motion, from his kennel in the garage.
He was a constant, and suddenly he’s gone. The back yard seems so empty; all traces of him, from tufts of his fur to his pawprints in the mud, are disappearing with alarming speed. Moshe’s departure is a reminder of how fragile life can be, how temporary the things that we take for granted really are.
I didn’t really set out to write a eulogy or get all philosophical; sometimes the words just come. When you get down to it, Moshe was a great friend. I loved his weirdness; I appreciated his calm and his loyalty. He cracked me up. If all dogs really do go to heaven, seeing him again is going to make me that much happier when I get there.
Until then, I am really going to miss him.
May 2, 2011
The Friday Blahg 