Reflecting on the Loss of My Snoozer
How lucky we are to hurt so much. For so much of my life, I’ve found comfort and value in the balance of things. Understanding how much pain and loss can give value to love and joy, and that the alternative — an existence where the grief of Meadow’s passing registered little in my emotional balance would mean that her life carried little weight in my world. Instead, the weight of my grief and emotion over the past few days since saying goodbye is a reminder of the supersized impression she had carved out in my heart and soul.
Much like when my dad passed, it’s the little things that hurt the most. A thump as the house settles that I mistake for her stepping off the couch, a stray piece of kibble under my foot, a sadly empty thigh in need of her head to lay upon. It’s the little things that hurt the most. I go to bed and with Marcia out of town, think about how Meadow should be curled up at my feet, but instead I’m looking through photos of her on my phone grasping on to the memory of feeling her velvety ears, and how just two weeks ago, she was silently encouraging me to finish my first book in years by laying comfortably on my stomach as I read.
I’d also forgotten how much a significant loss can represent a delineation in time. How, especially in the immediate aftermath, every unfinished project in the house holds some sort of connection to a world where the one you lost is still present. “The last time I looked at that thing, Meadow was laying next to me.” “When I last played that video game, she was snoozing on her bed.” Everything is relative — but at least now I have the benefit of experience and knowing that with this grief, painful as it may be now, it will become easier with time.
Meadow came into my life in the opening chapters of its biggest and boldest volume yet. In December of 2011, I was two and a half years removed from the unexpected loss of my dad and six months into the bold adventure of moving to Milwaukee to start a life there. My search for a companion took some weeks, but on a Friday night in early December, I found myself at the Wisconsin Humane Society to meet Meadow, and it was love at first sight.
It’s hard to find the right words to describe how momentous this was for me. I’ve loved dogs my entire life. Our family always had one as I grew up, and the idea of a dog of my own had implanted itself in my head from an early age, impossible to shake loose. I’d decided out of fairness to myself and to my eventual furry friend that I wanted a lower energy dog that needed companionship more than rigidity, exercise and training — so pretty much myself in dog form.
In Meadow I found that, and so much more.
As those that had met her can attest, she radiated calm and through that cool, collected attitude — love. She was never a traditionally affectionate dog. She never once gave me a kiss, she was for so long so reluctant to snuggle in any form, and found her best comfort in simple proximity to her people.
She spent years happily sleeping in different parts of the house from me (something I admittedly was upset about initially) but she eventually found a spot she felt comfortable in with the threshold to my bedroom as if to guard me from any intruders who might come in through the night.
Once, in the summer of 2015, before I truly grasped and took control of my depression, when I had fallen into a seemingly bottomless pit and I truly began to consider what would go into taking my own life — it was this dog that pulled me out just enough to stop me from making that mistake.
As much as I’d love to say that she sensed my despair and caved to the stereotype of licking away my tears, that just wasn’t the case. Instead it was her measured calm and steady presence, content to just stare me down as if to say “I’m still here.” It was enough. It was what I needed.
Perhaps Meadow’s most significant life chapter came when I met my now wife, Marcia. Meadow’s docile demeanor and genial attitude towards…everyone remained steady with Marcia — but we did have one hurdle. Shortly after Marcia began spending the night, Meadow was increasingly prone to in-house accidents, conveniently located at the threshold to my bedroom, and only discovered once we woke up in the morning.
I am grateful, to say the least, that that phase was just that, and soon gave way to a love and affection between Marcia and Meadow that rivaled my own. Marcia didn’t grow up with dogs, and I have many a time remarked on the reality that I don’t think our relationship could have survived and thrived had she not become the doting dog-mom that she is. Her voices and interactions with Meadow soon rivaled mine, and Meadow, in her growing wisdom and age quickly decided that Marcia’s love was worthy of her affection in ways that were sometimes unexpected, but always welcome.
When I look at pictures of Meadow from the past few months, it’s clearer now than it was before how much she had aged. Her dotted snout turned almost impossibly white, with clear streaks of white coloring throughout the rest of her coat.
Her physical age had finally caught up to her soul in the past twelve months, giving way to a bevy of at-home adjustments and routine tweaks. She became easily spooked at the simplest of sounds. A soda can opening, a plate clinking on the counter, a clap. I should confess that we used the last trigger to our advantage in response to another change in habit — she became a bedroom dog. Meadow found a few spots on our second floor bedroom that she deemed as safe spaces, and a thundering clap served as sufficient cue to her to come downstairs if we needed to let her out, feed her, or you know…just see her.
It’d be easy to expound on what this represented on the whole. My old girl was getting older, and seemingly faster. She was slower, sleepier (didn’t really think this was possible), deafer, blinder and less social in her final months. In hindsight, this is all…sad. But there was a part of this change — no doubt emblematic of her mental aging — that Marcia and I were thoroughly happy to embrace…the cuddlier side of Meadow.
Meadow was, for most of our time together, a most reluctant snuggler. She’d let you manually maneuver her body onto your lap, or chest, or stomach, or whatever snuggle you desired, settle for a few seconds and then nonchalantly excuse herself after dishing out far more than her daily quota of physical connection. No kisses, no nuzzles, just whatever you’d manipulated her into for the bare minimum of time until she felt unencumbered enough to skedaddle.
As much as I didn’t enjoy this, it was undeniably part of her charm. She was a non-dog person’s dog and I saw many “I don’t see the point of a dog” people succumb to this affable charm. Always content to be present and in near proximity to people but no more demanding than an occasional pet or scratch (if you were so inclined), Meadow was decidedly low demand.
This changed the summer before she passed. Suddenly, with no real warning, Meadow became a snuggler (at least with Marcia and I). She loved to sleep in bed with us. She was happy, no, insistent on planting herself on the couch in between us — she wanted to be by her people. And, for a few months, we happily obliged her new desire to summit Marcia as she laid on the couch, to immobilize us in bed by laying on our legs and to just be with us, as connected as ever.
Years ago, I discovered a piece that writer Gene Weingarten published in the Washington Post. I think I found it in a Reddit thread, or something similar — I bookmarked it, shared it, and have revisited it so much that I asked the Post to republish it in their new format since it would share better.
I knew that when Meadow’s time came, I would want to come back to this piece and find comfort in the words. And I have, multiple times in the past week. So I want to leave a few of them here that strike me most profound at this moment — though I encourage a full read of this as well.
Kafka wrote that the meaning of life is that it ends. He meant that our lives are shaped and shaded by the existential terror of knowing that all is finite. This anxiety informs poetry, literature, the monuments we build, the wars we wage, the ways we love and hate and procreate — all of it. Kafka was talking, of course, about people. Among animals, only humans are said to be self-aware enough to comprehend the passage of time and the grim truth of mortality. How then, to explain old Harry at the edge of that park, gray and lame, just days from the end, experiencing what can only be called wistfulness and nostalgia? I have lived with eight dogs, watched six of them grow old and infirm with grace and dignity, and die with what seemed to be acceptance. I have seen old dogs grieve at the loss of their friends. I have come to believe that as they age, dogs comprehend the passage of time, and, if not the inevitability of death, certainly the relentlessness of the onset of their frailties. They understand that what’s gone is gone.
What dogs do not have is an abstract sense of fear, or a feeling of injustice or entitlement. They do not see themselves, as we do, as tragic heroes, battling ceaselessly against the merciless onslaught of time. Unlike us, old dogs lack the audacity to mythologize their lives. You’ve got to love them for that.
— Excerpt from Something About Harry: Gene Weingarten on Why Old Dogs Are the Best Dogs by Gene Weingarten
I miss you, sweet ladybug. What a wonderful time we had together.
