You Look Like Your Dog Just Died
Marion Winik
Thérèse Schwartze
On Friday, September 18th, my darling Beau — Beau Heinie Beau, Hein-Pooch, Beau-linsky, Bitty-Hom-Poo-Chem, Poochadeen Mateen, Mon Peauché, more recently and who knows why, Pumpala (Pum Pum Pum) — a nearly sixteen-year-old black-and-tan miniature dachshund, left me for good, at 10:30 am. I have repeated the insane nicknames above so often they seem like actual words to me, and only when I try to spell them do I realize how far over the edge I have gone.
Beau had been a very old dog for a very long time. Years ago almost all the tan in his black-and-tan coat turned white -- we matched in this way. His eyes were cloudy with cataracts; a vet told me in 2018 he probably couldn't see much of anything anymore, though you couldn't tell by the way he got around the house and yard. How well he could hear was open to debate since he had never paid any attention to verbal commands. (This recently inspired my daughter Jane to claim that Beau was 'not a good dog.' Oh, Jane. You infidel.)
One of his back legs never worked right: he had always had a rolling, lopsided gait. By last summer, things had gotten to the point that before our annual two weeks at Dewey Beach, I bought the dog equivalent of a Baby Bjorn. We loved that thing.
June 2020.
I had planned a fall trip to Dewey Beach, "our place," to celebrate Beau's 16th birthday this month. Now I will go without him. I can't imagine it. Jane is coming, my sweet sons are showing up from afar and Hayes will bring his own young dachshund for me to hold on my lap, but like everything else in my life right now, the beach will have a hole in it, a hole the shape of my constant companion.
It was at the beach one summer that I had an argument with a friend about dragging Beau around with me everywhere, letting him lick my face and eat from my fork at the dinner table. She said my relationship with Beau was — I'm trying to remember her exact word — unhealthy? abnormal? perverted? I'm pretty sure it was perverted.
Believe me, I did not care. Beau was the sweetest and most loyal of my husbands and lasted the longest.
How does this happen? How does a person become so attached to a creature from another species? Maybe we are simply reflecting the quality of their attachment to us, their wordless trust, their unconditional love. The deeper and stronger the bond, the greater the fear that goes along with it. My next-door neighbor told me that she loved her mini-pin so much, she whispered every day into his neck, "Don’t leave me, promise you won’t leave me."
I knew the fear very well, but at the same time I was in denial. Beau had been so old for so long, and seemed so perfectly happy about it (an old dog whose people are in lockdown -- an old dog schlepped down to the creek every day in a dog sling -- an old dog eating enchiladas and pistachio nuts) I was lulled into feeling safe.
Some years back I saw on the internet that a skeletal dachshund named Rocky had lived to be 25. I repeated this comforting factoid a couple million times, imagining we might break the record. But it was not to be. As I see it now, Beau waited for me to have my knee operation in July, lay beside me on the couch for eight weeks of recovery, and he surely would have stayed forever if he could. He was like an old tradesman who would never retire if someone didn't take his truck away. They took his truck away.
*
As little as a week before Beau died, I still thought everything was fine. He had been on heart medication for years, more recently I had wiped up a few puddles of pee, and he sometimes slept so long and deeply I looked to see if his chest was moving, but I had no inkling how little time we had left. What may have been a symptom of his illness I took for a normal sign of old age. Gradually, over a long while, he had gotten pickier about eating, often leaving his kibble in the bowl, so when he got even pickier, I thought it was more of the same. I tried letting him share the cat's food, I bought fancier and fancier dog food -- freeze-dried "Surf and Turf," "Wild Weenies," "Little Lamb Bites" -- and finally I just offered people food instead.
Until the last week of his life, he would at least think about sharing anything I was putting in my mouth. He would look up, reflexively, as if to ask for a bite, but when I presented it, he turned away. No brie? No smoked salmon? What? The week before he died he only took one lick from a dish of vanilla ice cream. I should have known then. I'm afraid he had the intestinal infection that killed him for much longer than a week.
If I had figured any of this out, if I had realized he was not just old but sick, I would have taken him to the vet earlier, and perhaps they would have tried to save him. He would have stayed overnight -- he had only once slept overnight in a kennel -- he would have had IV fluids and other treatments, and he would have died anyway, according to the vet that miserable Friday. His heart was way, way out of warranty; the vet could barely hear it. As it was, we had those last three days together, days and nights, because he couldn't sleep, and I couldn't either. By the time we went to the vet, I pretty much knew it was over. He looked just like Rocky.
The last food he ate was a few bites of cut-up rotisserie chicken, warm from the Giant, bought just for him. I was so thrilled, I took a picture. That was Tuesday. He did not take another bite of food or sip of water. I tried to wet his mouth. And of course there were accidents. I changed the bedsheets a couple of times. Thursday night we slept on the floor, on towels.
Beau was peaceful that Friday morning, resting against my chest. It was the first and only time we ever pulled into the parking lot of the vet that he didn't react with horror, squirming and paddling his big paws like a duck trying to swim backwards. If he even knew where we were, he did not protest. Jane was driving. She had insisted on coming with me since she, if not I, was sure about what would happen when we got there. She took the last pictures of us. Despite all the sibling rivalry, she loved him too. (After reading the previous sentence, Jane wondered how Beau could have been both my husband and my son. All part of the perversion, I guess.)
The minute they started letting dogs on planes, I got Beau his own yellow carrier with the Southwest Airlines logo. It fit right under the seat. You could unzip it a little to share your peanuts, though you weren't supposed to take the dog out while you were in the air. He visited New Orleans, Austin, Boston and Miami. Each time, there was the funny thing at the baggage claim.
Beau loved people, friends and strangers alike, uniformed or not, of all races and creeds, as much as any dog ever has. He remembered anyone he'd ever met, even after months or years. He greeted, or at least tried to greet, every human he encountered, sniffing their ankles, wagging his tail, and peering up at them from his vantage point six inches off the floor. He took this seriously; it was his job. Thus he was truly confounded by the airport baggage claim -- a veritable forest of legs. He actually looked stressed out. And then he started trying to do it, to connect with every single person there. Doggedly.
One caveat must be mentioned. He had a problem with small children, particularly curly-headed toddlers. On our visits to Discount Dachshunds of Dillsburg back in 2004, from whence Beau came, I noticed the breeder's little daughter delightedly swooping down on the litter of puppies, sticking her stubby fingers into their faces. I blame her. For it cannot be denied that he nipped more than a few children's cheeks and noses, including all three of my neighbor Pam's boys, both of my sister's sons, and one time a little girl whose mother demanded rabies paperwork and threatened to have him taken away.
It took me a little too long but I wised up eventually, whipping him into my arms when we got anywhere near someone in the target demographic. I would say he hasn't done it in years but actually the last time he saw my 24-year-old nephew, he gave him a little nip for old times' sake.
I always thought that after Beau died, I would not get another dog. I would apply to Yaddo and MacDowell and all the writers' colonies that don't allow pets, and I would visit Thailand and Vietnam, I'd do all the things I haven't done due to motherhood and dog motherhood the past 35 years. But I found I didn't care about writers' colonies anymore: my house is a writer's colony. No one was going to Southeast Asia, at least for a while. And though my sister suggested that the hole in my life could possibly fit a person, I felt pretty sure I would rather have a puppy than a boyfriend.
A couple years ago, I started a project of interviewing my neighbors about their pets. After listening to several people narrate the epic saga of their generations of Australian shepherds or labs or mini-pins or rescue mutts, I realized I had been seeking, and getting, lessons in loss. In how much it hurts, and how you get through it. In every story of many dogs, some great, some not as great, there was always a dog that was the greatest by far -- the dog who was The One.
I just had mine.
Marion Winik
University of Baltimore professor Marion Winik is the author of First Comes Love, The Big Book of the Dead and many other books.