Bones Would Rain from the Sky: Deepening Our Relationships with Dogs (40 page)

this puppy was the responsible thing to do. I
would, I bravely announced, love him till he
died, and until that day, offer him a full life.
On the surface, I was matter-of-fact,
pragmatic. After all, as I said repeatedly, the
truth is no one knows when the final moment will
arrive. Yet in my heart, these brave words fell
empty and hollow, floating on a sea of fears.
McKinley would nap, and I would find myself
anxiously watching his rib cage for movement. If
I heard him whimper in another room, my heart
would race, slowing only when I could assure myself that
he was fine. On the mornings I awoke before he
did, I sat up to see his body stretched out in the
corner of the bedroom. Was he alive? Had he died
in his sleep? Though I did not make a sound,
McKinley would raise his head as if woken by my
fears and look at me with sleepy eyes: "I am
still here."
"It's so hard to allow myself to fully love you, knowing
you will die so soon," I told him one afternoon as he
raced across the yard to me, full
of a puppy's seemingly eternal energy and joy.
He sat, staring at me, and in my head, I
clearly heard his reply. "But we all
die."
"Yes," I agreed, watching the dogs playing around
me, "but these other dogs won't die soon."
His answer came quickly, an arrow to my heart: "You
don't know that." With that, he turned away and went
on with the business of life.
In The Road Less Traveled,
Scott Peck wrote, "If we are unwilling
to fully face the fearsome presence of death on our
left shoulder, we deprive ourselves of its counsel
and cannot possibly live or love with clarity. When
we shy away from death, the ever changing nature of
things, we inevitably shy away from life."
One of my students had a wonderful young dog named
Clancy who developed a malignant mass
[oddly, on her left shoulder). Though
chemotherapy offered some slim hope, the veterinarian
warned my student that Clancy had perhaps only six
months left to live. He recommended avoiding
stress (which included, he felt, obedience school),
and suggested that Clancy be made as comfortable as
possible. Distraught, Anne told me she would not
be coming back to class; she planned to spend as much

time as possible at home with Clancy
until she died. About a month later, she called
again. Clancy was increasingly bored, and was
depressed when Monday night rolled around and no
one got ready to take her to training class. What
should she do?
I asked what Clancy's physical condition
was. Her answer neatly summed up canine
reality: "Obviously, no one told Clancy that
she has cancer and is going to die. She gets up every
day wagging her tail and does the best she can." And so
Clancy returned to class. Some nights, she
lay on the sidelines, unable to fully participate
but watching the class with great interest, her characteristic
grin letting us all know she was having a wonderful
time. On those nights, we included her in the down
stays- it was all she could do, but she did it well.
We would fuss over her, telling her she had the
finest down stay of any dog in class, and she
responded with a proud, thumping tail. Other
nights, Clancy was her old self and performed with
precision and style. Always, she entered the room with
joyful anticipation, willing to bring her best efforts
to the moment.
Whatever we may have managed to teach Clancy paled
in comparison to what she taught all who
knew her: Life is to be lived, one moment

at a time. Guided by death on her left shoulder and the
wisdom of a dog who was busy living, not dying,
Clancy's owner learned to treasure each day as it
unfolded. Though she worked to protect Clancy from
unnecessary stress, she no longer tried to protect
Clancy from all that made her life worth living.
the fence that fear built
It is natural to protect what you love. To a
certain degree, this natural protectiveness
functions to limit or minimize risk and is part of
our responsibility as dog owners, part of any
loving relationship. All of us would look askance at
someone who proclaimed that they loved their dog yet
let him run freely in traffic or failed
to provide veterinary care so disease and infection did
not take hold. To the extent that the protection we
offer is founded on caring for the well-being of our canine
charges, our protection is a good and healthy thing.
But at what point does protection become
hurtful in itself?
McKinley was about nine weeks old when I took

him to the barn along with the other dogs for a
final night check on the horses. Curious about the
new puppy, one of the horses leaned over his stall
door to investigate. As I have done with every puppy,
I picked up McKinley to meet the horse.
Alarmed by the giant head breathing down on him, the
puppy's heart began to race, every beat registering in
my suddenly unsure hands. Why had I done that?
What if that was the momentary stress that killed him?
My fears about losing him surfaced in a huge
swell of doubt and confusion. Although the puppy calmed
down quickly, I did not. Watching him gallop
away to join the other dogs, I had to face a
difficult question. What constituted the "full life"
I had promised this dog?
It would have been much easier if his was a "manageable"
disease or defect, if by modifying his diet or
limiting his exercise or avoiding certain situations
I could limit the risks, prolong his life. But
McKinley was a question mark, with no more certainty of
when and where the bell would toll for him than for me.
While I wanted to protect him (and myself from the
pain of losing him), there was a fine line between the
reasonable precautions I would take with any puppy
and overprotecting McKinley. Knowing just where that fine
line lay was possible only if I was willing
to examine my own feelings and fears.
When I was nine or ten, my mother sometimes washed my
hair in the kitchen sink. Lying with my head safely
held in her hands, I could gaze up at my mother's
beautiful face. One day, looking very closely at
her nostrils, I began thinking that I would
recognize her face from any angle, anywhere, no
matter how old or wrinkled she got. Suddenly,
it hit me that the day would come when she would no longer
wash my hair, when I would no longer live with her,
and then-building to a horrifying realization-there would be
a time when she no longer shared the planet with me.
What if she died when I was not there? What if I
never got a chance to say good-bye? I could think of
nothing more awful than seeing her for the last time without
knowing it was, indeed, the last time. The fear those
thoughts created was palpable: My chest tightened; my
throat closed. To my mother's utter surprise, I
began sobbing uncontrollably.
Her first thought was that somehow she had burned me with too
hot water or gotten shampoo in my eyes.

While I could shake my head in answer
to her queries about water temperature or shampoo,
I was unable to answer her question, "Then why are you
crying?" My young vocabulary could not possibly
begin to explain the fear that gripped me. It was
nearly twenty years before I could explain that moment
to her.
To a certain degree, it used to be possible for me
to gauge the depth of my love for someone by the intensity
of the fear created in my contemplation of their death.
While this is not as true as it used to be, thanks
to lessons on living and dying that I've been offered
by many animals, the fear is still there. No one wants
to hurt; no one wants to experience loss. But I
also know that to cling sobbing as I did to my bewildered
mother is a waste of valuable time. I am well
acquainted with my fear of loss, andwiththe specific
physical feelings that it arouses in me. Finding that
fine line between reasonable caution and anxiously
clutching McKinley was not really difficult-I had
only to recognize fear.
For McKinley to have a full life meant that I had
to allow him to live. Any actions I took
to protect him had to spring from normal, reasonable
caution, not from my fear. With each choice I made
for him, I first
checked carefully for any hint of the wide-eyed
monster. My fear would have dictated never leaving him
unhappily barking in his crate, never disciplining his
actions, never raising my voice to him, never forcing
him to do anything he didn't want to do, never letting
him run after the big dogs or swim in the pool or
face scary situations or anything, anything at all
that might trigger the final moment. But in the end, I
would not have held off death. I would only have held
back life.
When I was a child, my mother appeared fearless. Now a
mother myself and much older, I understand that she was often
afraid, but to the best of her ability, she
privately wrestled with her fears for us, and only
rarely did we wonder at her urgent cautions or
worried glances. She taught her children reasonable
caution, but did not limit our lives because of her own
fears. She understood, and taught by daily
example, that a full life is not one described
by fear, but one of well-considered risks taken with
full enthusiasm and no regrets.
She found horses frightening and did not understand what
drove me to spend countless hours in their company.
At the first and last horse show of mine that she ever

attended, she was greatly alarmed when my
borrowed mount tried to deposit me
(unsuccessfully) on the ground. But she did not
limit my horse activities. She knew that this
passion was part of what made me who I was; that
mattered far more to her than her own fears. The fine
balance she struck as a parent is the same one we
must find with our dogs-protecting them without preventing
them from being who they are, without limiting the fullness of
their lives. This is a difficult balance to find.
Years ago, my good friend Judy had a dog who was
dying of kidney failure. All tests showed that
nothing more could be done for this dog; it was time to put her
to sleep before the kidney failure caused her a
tremendously painful death. Knowing there were only a
few hours left before the situation became
uncomfortable and then miserable for the dog, Judy
decided that if Dawn must die, she would not do so in
a hospital cage. Instead, she would bring her to my
farm, a place they both loved, and a veterinarian
friend of mine would put her to sleep there.
At the animal hospital, the attending
veterinarian gave Judy a stern warning that while
Dawn looked fine at the moment, taking the dog out
of the hospital would worsen her condition in a few
hours. To Judy,
bombs would rain from the sky
this seemed almost laughable. Why should Dawn's life
end after nothing but a few more hours of sitting in a
hospital when it might also be called to a halt after
a last chance to walk in the sunshine? How long, she
demanded to know, would it be before Dawn began to suffer in
any way? The vet shrugged. "Perhaps three to four
hours at most. She'll get weak and begin vomiting
at first. Then it will go much more quickly."
Facing death square-on, it seemed clear to Judy
that Dawn should be granted the complete fullness of
what remained of her life. "Give me my dog,"
she said.
At the farm, Dawn and Judy wandered happily in
the sunshine, played a little ball, waded in the
stream. For the first time in the weeks since Dawn had
become ill, they both truly enjoyed life together in
the way they always had. It was a well-considered
risk, this final gift of a few more moments of joy.
Dawn never did grow weak as the vet had warned would
happen. Perhaps the pure pleasure of those hours
sustained her in ways medicine never could. Perhaps
Judy's timing was simply the impeccable timing of
love. Still comfortable in her body, Dawn was eased

with a gentle hand to her death in Judy's
arms, a tennis ball still soggy from play at her
side.
in a heartbeat
When it came to McKinley, I wished I had as
clear a timetable as Judy had with Dawn. A part of
me wanted for the world to pause until we had marked his
last day, so that I might not miss even a moment of
his life. Above all else, I wanted
to accomplish this: to be able to look into his eyes when
the end came and know that I had not limited his life
or taken his time with me for granted. But trying
to live each of an animal's days in a heightened
intensity of awareness, in a sort of death watch, is
neither possible nor balanced. In waiting for the dreaded
moment, I would exhaust myself, deprive others I
love of attention and time, and most of all, miss
what that animal's life was really about. So I
tried to live as McKinley did-in the moment, one
heartbeat at a time.
But it was precisely a heartbeat that reminded me
constantly of what was to come. Whether curled beside me
on the couch, leaping up to
deliver one of his special hugs or
draped across me in bed, I could not miss the
abnormal rhythm of McKinley's heart beneath my
hands or held close against my cheek. His
heartbeat was like an enchanted seashell that, when put
to my ear, whispered of both death and life. Even
without a defective heart that beats telltale under
our hands, there are other rhythms that also whisper to us,
try though we might to ignore them. They are to be
found in the gradual slowing of an old dog's
trot, in the dimming, blued eyes of a friend somehow
grown ancient without our agreement or awareness. Like
photos superimposed, it is hard to distinguish between the
old dog before us and the young dog he once was.
In the year between his fourteenth birthday and his death just
five weeks shy of his fifteenth year,
McKinley's grandfather Bear became increasingly
feeble. Watching his legs begin to fail him was
difficult; his mind and spirit were still strong. Though no
longer able to outrun the younger dogs, he could still exert
sufficient authority to force any dog near him
to relinquish the ball. I was unwilling to have him
jostled by healthier, younger dogs or watch his
frustration when they kept themselves and the ball outside his
range of influence. So playing ball, a game he