Bones Would Rain from the Sky: Deepening Our Relationships with Dogs (41 page)

loved above all else, became a
private matter between us, Bear and me. I would
toss the ball a short distance on level ground,
and with determination, he would shuffle after it. Even at his
advanced age, his delight in having captured the
ball was tremendous. Grayed muzzle gripping the
prize, he would wobble back to me, eyes aglitter
in anticipation of the next throw. In those moments, the
sadly real image of an old dog playing a
favorite game faded, giving way to the more
familiar, remembered image of a younger Bear, a
dog who could fly through the air to snatch balls in
midflight.
It may have been just a mistake or the habit of
years that prompted me one day to toss the ball, as
I so often had, high into the air. And it may have also
been only habit that triggered Bear's gallant
effort to leap for the ball, a canine Nureyev against
the sky. I can still see his eyes brightly fixed on the
ball's trajectory, his mouth opening in preparation,
his entire being projected up and away from gravity's
pull. For a split second, he was airborne and
young again. Then he crumpled in the grass, shocked and
embarrassed that his hind legs had failed him. Although
I could apologize to him for my mistake, I
had no suitable apology for what time's passing had
done to his body.
I had often wondered if, like myself, animals felt
little of the aging process, so gradually sinister, so
insidious yet ruthless in its quiet work. Marking
yet another year's passage, did they too feel
no different, no older? Did they bear the knowledge,
experience and wisdom of their years as I bore
mine-a strange overlay on the child within me, the child who
never truly disappeared? were their images of themselves
blended as mine were for me, a blur of young and old,
past and present, and running through it all, a constancy
that I think must be the eternity of spirit? Watching Bear
send his mind soaring after that tennis ball, I knew
that for him as well as for me, some part of him was forever
young, capable of anything. As he struggled to right himself
in the grass, I saw the surprise in his eyes, as
if he too had been unable-or unwilling-to see
himself as an old dog who would fly through the sky no
more. I never again threw his ball high against the
clouds; he never again leaped to meet it. Looking through
my tears, I sadly brought into focus the reality of
Bear, my old dog.
One of the most difficult aspects of caring for a very

sick or old dog is keeping clear the
images our hearts would prefer to blur. My friend
Ginny's dog Annie was a proud German
Shepherd who had always disdained coddling or
assistance. Now ancient, the end was written in
Annie's eyes, which had begun to glow with the oddly
youthful look animals sometimes have as they begin the
process of disconnecting from this life, this physical
body. Annie was preparing Ginny for the departure that
was not too far away, and Ginny knew it. Still, one
night, Ginny and I knelt next to the old dog,
hoping to offer some beneficent touch, some assistance for the
wasted body. Annie's paws were cold; her
circulation had begun to limit its rounds, saving its
precious energy for her vital organs.
"Give her a blanket," I suggested. Ginny
protested, saying Annie would never accept such
coddling, had always rejected such luxury no matter
how wet her coat or cold the night. Still, she
gathered a blanket and we draped it around
Annie's frail form, leaving only her beautiful
head exposed. With a brief, apologetic glance
at us, the dog who had spent a lifetime needing no
assistance snuggled into the blanket, accepting the
warmth her old body needed. Ginny, who spends
countless hours helping other people with their dogs, was
devastated.
"How could I have missed that? Why didn't I think
to give her a blanket? How could I be so stupid
about my own dog?" Ginny had not been careless or
uncaring. In every moment of her life, Annie had
created a powerful image of who she was. It was
hard to shift a lifetime's focus and clearly see
the newer, less-welcome image of Annie as a
rapidly aging dog who needed help. Ginny's
heart, and Annie herself, clung stubbornly to the more
familiar view of Annie as strong, capable,
independent.
Two dogs and a funeral
In our house, it is a rare year that does not
include death. With so many animals of varying life
span and age, it is almost inevitable that by each
year's end, we have had to say good-bye to one or more
friends. Looking forward as we do to Christmas, our
favorite of all holidays, we wonder silently
and aloud who will be there with us for the celebration. Because
death is such a constant in my life, it was not a
surprise when a friend called to tearfully inform me that

she had just put Blaze to sleep. This
thirteen-year-old Golden Retriever had been
her first dog, and she did not know what to do, nor how
to handle the situation with her other Golden, Kelly.
After talking for a bit, she decided she wanted
to bury Blaze in the backyard. Knowing that she was
recovering from giving birth just a few weeks earlier
and that her husband was away on a business trip, I
agreed to dig the grave.
If there was ever a suitable outlet for grief, it is
this: the backbreaking, mind-numbing work of digging a
large dog's grave, especially in the rocky
ledges of western New Jersey where I then lived.
At first, you begin with somber purpose, mindful of
little but the sadness of your task. Tears spill
readily as you work. The digging is easy at first, and
as you shovel, you cry and talk and remember, and you
even laugh a little. Then the dirt becomes rock, and
cursing quietly under your breath, you pound away at
the stone that eventually shatters under your determination.
You begin to feel the effort now in your back and
shoulders, and it gets harder to talk. You no longer
speak in whole sentences; instead,
you merely grunt in sympathetic agreement as the
person who is not digging continues
to reminisce and weep. (there is an unspoken
rule that the dog's owner need not dig unless they
choose to; it is understood that their grief is
sufficient work for the moment.) What had been
moderate-sized stones grow into boulders the size of
small foreign cars. Yet when you wrestle these lost
pieces of Stonehenge loose from the earth's grasp,
you are shocked to see that the hole you have dug is
barely as deep as your shin; you need a hole that will
reach to your hips. Surely, your aching body
protests, surely we are halfway to China by now.
As you stand resting on the shovel to catch your breath, you
realize also that the carefully sized grave has
somehow changed shape, narrowing as it deepens so that
perhaps only a Chihuahua could be laid to rest in the
space you've cleared. With a groan, you begin
to enlarge the hole on all sides (thinking for only
a fleeting moment of how tightly you might curl a
dead dog to save some space; practicality is
breaking through the heavy clouds of sadness and punching a
few holes in this responsibility to treat a
lifeless body kindly). And it goes on like this for quite
some time. By the time you are done, you are numb, a
state of being that is oddly welcome in this sad

moment.
Eventually, the grave was ready. Not far away, in
quiet repose under a blanket, Blaze's body
lay in the back of my friend's car. It is time for the
next step. "What do you do when one of your dogs
dies?" my friend asked. I explained how we bring
the other dogs to the body, how they respectfully
gather around and how they sit watching as we bury our
friend, attentive until the last shovel of dirt
has been lovingly, tearfully tamped into place.
She thought this over for a few moments and decided that this
was a good way to handle this-after all, Blaze had
raised Kelly from a young pup. She headed off
to get Kelly for the funeral.
In the wild scrabble of Kelly's feet on the
garage floor, I had my first inkling that there might
be many ways for dogs to act in the presence of death.
Foolishly, I assigned Kelly's enthusiastic
gallop toward the car to her joy at seeing me. After
all, I told myself, the poor dear had no way of
knowing that her friend Blaze was dead since when she last
saw her a few hours ago, Blaze was ill but
alive. Kelly greeted me with enthusiasm, and I
tried to calm her a bit as I returned her
hello. My friend asked, "Do we show her
Blaze's body now?" Nodding, I opened
the back of
the car and invited Kelly to put her feet up on the
tailgate so she could sniff and understand what had
happened. Never a dog to do things halfway,
Kelly responded by leaping into the back of the car,
merrily bouncing on her dead friend as if this were a new
but oddly uncomfortable cushion under the tactfully
draped blanket. Even as I heard my friend gasp
in horror, I was already calling Kelly out of the
vehicle, grateful that she responded quickly
by sailing out as gleefully as she had leaped in.
Eyes wide, my friend wailed, "I thought you said
dogs were respectful of the dead!"
Bewildered myself, I hastily explained that in
Kelly's excitement she had probably not
noticed anything and just thought she was going for a ride.
Before my friend could see through the flimsiness of my
answer, I continued in my very best dog trainer's
voice, the one filled with confident assurance that
students will follow my instructions: "Now is a good
time to use all that training Kelly has. Why
don't you put her on a down stay near the grave

while we move Blaze?" Numbly, my
friend walked off with Kelly, leaving me looking in
amazement at the paw- prints still visible on the
blanket over Blaze. As I reached in, I
whispered an apology to the dead dog. "Who knew
Golden Retrievers didn't take funerals as
seriously as German Shepherds do?"
At last, Blaze lay in the grave, her body
arranged with care so that she looked comfortably
asleep. As we gazed down at this fine old dog,
we cried a little more and said a few prayers. "Let
me finish this now," I gently suggested, but my friend
reached out to stop me. "Wait," she said. "There is
something missing. Blaze always loved her tennis
balls, and I'd like to bury one with her." She began
to cry again but struggled to speak through her sobs. "That
way, I'll be sure that she's playing ball up in
heaven.8This started my tears again, and I just waved a
hand toward the house, indicating that she should go find a
tennis ball.
Through all this, Kelly had quietly lain near us.
Tired of crying, I called Kelly to me, playing
with her a little as we waited for my friend to return. I
saw Kelly's eyes brighten when she saw the tennis
ball in her owner's hand, but I quickly discouraged her
interest with a quiet "Leave it." With a
small sigh of regret, Kelly sat down at the
grave's edge, watching as my friend lovingly placed
the bright new ball near Blaze's muzzle.
Brushing dirt from her hands and jeans, my friend took
a deep, ragged breath as
she looked down at her old friend's body. Turning
to give her a hug, I caught a movement out of the
corner of my eye. It was Kelly, leaping into the
grave. In perfect unison, my friend and I
exclaimed in shocked tones, "Kellyff8There was no
guilt or shame in the dog as she stood on
Blaze's body, tail madly wagging,
triumphantly holding the ball in her mouth. Her
message was crystal clear and contained a goofy
wisdom we both understood: Life goes on, so
why waste a perfectly good tennis ball?
remembering the way home
After a lifetime with animals, I believe that
animals are aware of and understand death. Though some may
choose to interpret an animal's quiet acceptance
of another's death as evidence there is no awareness,
there is another interpretation that better fits what
I have experienced. Animals accept death for what

it is-a natural process that none of us
may escape. I believe that animals have a deep
connection to the eternal rhythms of spirit and the universe,
a connection that we have as well, but ours is
corrupted with complex overlays of knowledge, fear and
civilization that draw us ever further from the natural
tides of life and death.
There are those who point to the animal's lack of fear
in the presence of dying and death as proof that animals
have no awareness of death. It has long seemed to me
an odd and telling supposition that an awareness of
death must equal a fear of death. This is not to say that
animals do not die fearfully-they sometimes do, as do
we. This is not to say that they readily give up their
hold on life. Just as we do, animals struggle,
sometimes mightily, to hang on to life. I have held
many animals as they fought, sometimes successfully,
sometimes in vain, the battle that we all eventually
must lose. But I have also seen animals welcome
death without fear. Because I was there, riding the moments
down the homestretch to the final heartbeat at the
wire, I can say that I have seen the awareness in their
eyes.
John's first dog, a Golden named Macintosh,
had spent his entire life unable to even look at
any needle. Though a brave dog in so
many ways, when the vet prepared a routine vaccine
or approached to take a little blood for a test,
Mac would always look away, his head turned and his
eyes closed until the procedure was complete.
He was fourteen years old when a tumor on his
spleen ruptured. Though we were unaware of this
particular tumor, we had been fighting another
cancerous growth for several months and had known for quite a
while that Mac's time with us was growing short. When he
collapsed that last day, we were not sure why, but it was
clear that Mac was tired of fighting. Unwilling
to surrender hope, we rushed him to the veterinarian,
but as Mac's eyes had already told us, the
prognosis was not good. We stood agonizing over the
choices that lay before us: Put Mac through difficult
surgery with only a very slim chance he would survive
the surgery, or let him go quietly without further
pain or struggle. Looking back at this good dog's
life, gazing into his eyes with a question no one wants
to ask, we knew he had already given us all that he
had to give. As the veterinarian prepared the needle,
we held Mac in our arms, nodding mutely when the