Old Dogs & The Wellspring Of Love

Writing My Way Through Another Loss

The Earth holds bones, so many bones. It’s a big old grave we’re fumbling around on together.

In marriage and friendship, we carve invisible spaces beside us in time. These spaces are for travelers we collect along the way of our lives. They have souls that last beyond their beating hearts. We have to believe this to keep our sanity, but can’t you feel it, too? When you wake up in the darkness of night, and some terror seizes you, what gives you comfort?

Have you ever felt comfort and safety together at the same time?

These spaces for others we carve inside ourselves are the inverse of cemeteries. We dig these graves for the living while we are alive, but these sacred spaces are kept by the dead, and the dead keep them tight.

Carl Taylor, my grandfather.

I was seven when my grandfather died. He was the whole world to me. Everything good in existence was wrapped up in my image of that man as a very young child. He was a bit of a shit for most of his life, but what good he had, he poured it into me, and I have kept it tight all these years.

We keep things tight on both sides.

I didn’t even know he was sick. He wasn’t around for a while, and then he was gone. My family chose to keep his illness from me because they didn’t want to see the light go out in my eyes when I learned that nothing lasts on this cold planet. Not even the sunbeam that warms it will last forever.

But I learned the lesson of loss anyway. We each inevitably do and preferably young because it deepens the experience of living in the only moment that matters which is right now.

I stared down at my Pa-Pa’s body laid out in the coffin. It wasn’t his face smiling back at me from that long box; it was a shell. I could feel that.

As a young boy, I was playing in his small Midwestern backyard when I first encountered a locust shell. He taught me all about molting and moving on. I think about that lesson now, remembering how I pulled back from the casket when my Mom leaned us in to give Pa-Pa one last kiss.

My Mom held my little face between her warm palms and asked me, “Juicy, you know that your Pa-Pa would never hurt you, right?” I did. And with courage only delivered through the love of a Mother, I leaned in and kissed his cold dead cheek.

These long goodbyes activate the spaces we’ve carved for others inside ourselves. This activation transfers ownership of our spaces to the dead once they cross over the temporary barrier separating all that is from all that has come before us.

This is me intellectualizing to avoid my feelings. I write stories. It’s my first defense against strong emotion.

It’s either art or war, another thing my grandfathers taught me.

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One of my favorite activities with Big Lou was to read on our porch with the windows open and the Ohio breeze blowing through, rustling the pages. He was a constant and mostly quiet companion, content with napping in the safe presence of the humans who loved him.

I don’t want to avoid my feelings. On the contrary, I want to feel my feelings until they are done with me and dissolve. Every feeling has a beginning, a middle, and an end. My feelings are part of me, but they should not control me. I learned this lesson from Mister Rogers when I was three, but it’s taken almost fifty years to apply it to my life and happiness.

Disappointingly, it turns out that our lives are temporary conditions. However, the upside of this is that we sometimes get to choose the music that plays in the background of the scenes we create together in these shared moments like this one between a writer and his treasured reader.

---

We had to put our Boxer dog through what we’re all now calling End Of Life Treatment. He was healthy to our eyes and ears until suddenly he wasn’t. We hadn’t read the signs of his body’s distress. We fell asleep on the watch because we forgot that time had moved on. That’s easy to do when you’re in love with your family, each and all.

Big Lou was getting old, white in the face, and his trotting, long-legged gallop had certainly slowed over time. But he was our Lou Dog, as strong and loyal as a titan of the universe.

The vet said, “Invasive tumor of the GI tract, likely lymphoma.” The dog stumbled out last week and looked utterly fucked up, like he’d had a stroke. We babied him, took him to the vet, and got an expensive blood screen with some diagnoses. They’d need to do an ultrasound to determine more.

Science provides information but comes at a cost, often more than money can value.

All this information didn’t leave us with many options and little time. A steroid shot might buy Lou weeks, but this creature lying around like he was in a depressive funk had no quality of life. He couldn’t get up to use the bathroom or eat. Two nights ago, he shit blood in the yard more than a few times, drawing the coyotes from their hunt in the field to a possible fresh kill in the low-cut green space near where the blustering humans dwell.

So it goes.

---

We held his service at home. The vet came, and we gathered around him, my wife, my children, and the other dogs. The vet gave him a shot with a combination of sedatives and pain medicine. He blinked and fell into a deep rest, finally catching the long nap he’d been chasing late for his whole life. He was alive but felt no pain and knew nothing happening around him.

We placed our hands on his old, tired, damaged body. I squeezed and pulled on his ears a few last times. We didn’t have his ears Boxer-cropped because it’s cruel, and his ears made him more handsome if that was even possible.

This dog wasn’t just a dog. Lou was a protector, a shield. I believe that animals bless us with their presence in this world. Animals can be protected and cared for, ignored and industrialized like crops, or treated with cruelty. I work to choose the first option of kindness and cohabitation. I know I could do more, but I’m a petty man who runs from problems that sacrifice my comfort. And I’ve always invested too much affection in my pets and toys. And when one dies and the other breaks, it’s usually been a trauma for me.

When confronted with the imminent loss of someone I love, I become Walter Kronkite, reporting news of pending demise. I repeat things like, “This could be the last time you pet him.”

Or “This could be the last time we wake up and see his face.”

Or, “This could be the last time I’ll let all our dogs out at night,” with my flashlight and yelling voice, ready to drive off the coyotes looking for their meal.

I repeat this shit until everyone around me starts walking away. That’s when I know I’ve gone too far. It is a good measure of one’s worth to others by noting how often people walk away from you when you speak. The goal is to aim for that never to happen.

I’m in my head again, trying to work on a problem like death that could be solved with the right tangential equation.

Some emotions feel too big to hold inside.

How can we cope with the joy and pain of being alive?

Wherever his spirit has gone, I hope Big Lou feels light, fast, and young again.

Being alive means being aware of myself entirely at this moment. What feelings am I experiencing now? Feelings are temporary, they aren’t all of us, just a part of us. I am not angry right now. I am a being experiencing anger at this moment, and soon I will be experiencing sadness, and then loss, and then acceptance. I am a being that feels all of this pain right now, but I am more than that pain because I also feel gratitude.

When we feel the loss of someone after they pass away, crying tears of sadness for the time we will not share with them, we bless those sacred spaces that we’ve carved for them inside ourselves. Those inverse graves become wellsprings of love that turn into acts of kindness. And there is no greater honor than passing that love to others in how we behave.

I’ve felt the light surrounding us all since I was first able to feel anything as the smallest child, long before I kissed my dead grandfather on the cheek in his coffin. It was probably too much imagination spent playing Star Wars, but I have gathered some great friends and family together over the years who have poured their love into me and allowed me to do the same for them.

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The last night Big Lou was alive, I crept out to say goodbye to him. I’d said goodbye to him a hundred times over the last week. But this time was the time. I said things I’ll never repeat because they are embarrassing and sentimental, but they were honest. They came from a little boy who knew his grandfather would never harm him, but he still pulled back from the casket because he was small and afraid of what it means that things you love can end.

That last kiss is the killer.

For Lou, in a moment of resignation and sorrow, I wiped all the tears from my face and anointed his pointy head and those wonderful ears. It has to mean something when one creature massages its tears into the skin and hair of another that suffers. That act has to account for something in this world, some spell of protection for us all. A prayer to the broken gods to please protect my child.

These desperate pleas are almost always followed by silence because that’s where faith is either born or aborted.

Perhaps I’m just a sentimental, sappy human at heart, still the little boy playing with his toys long after they broke because they had become my friends. But also, perhaps sharing our tears with the suffering creatures we encounter is the whole point of this ridiculous thing called life. If we can do that once and mean it with everything in our soul, perhaps it just might make this painful journey worth it, with all of its laughter and loss.

If we can walk through our traumas together while they happen, without dragging our chains along with us through time, we can become lighter and freer. Maybe even happier people.

Energy is neither created nor destroyed. Whether we call it spirit or soul, or energy, we are powerful beings inside ourselves. Our capacity to mine kindness from the wellspring of our love for others is a superpower, a counterbalance to the forces of darkness that would see the balance of our universe teeter into chaos.

Wherever the energy that powered my sweet dog went, some simulation of heaven in his mind or mine, we are together, embracing through the sacred spaces we carved for each other during the time we spent together in this life.

I hope I meet my friend Lou Dog again. We had some good times, him and me.

THE JB MINTON NEWSLETTER

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