Dogs Know How to Live — and How to Let Go
It was the look she gave me with that one wizened eye of hers as she hunched precariously over her water bowl. It was the look that said she couldn’t do this anymore.
It was a pleading look of utter, final exhaustion. “It’s time. I can’t tell her. You have to tell her. She won’t listen to me,” the look said.
Mia wasn’t my dog. Well, not at first. A Pekingese-Chihuahua cross, she’d been my wife Sarah’s dog for many years before I appeared in their lives. The day I met Mia in August of 2008, Sarah had driven up to Portsmouth, where I lived and worked at the time, to introduce me to her. Sarah and I had been dating only a short time, but she’d made it clear: she and Mia were a package deal. And if Mia didn’t like me? No deal.
Mia didn’t take to me on our first meeting. She was initially suspicious, and then indifferent to me when she got an initial glimpse of me through Sarah’s car window. But that changed pretty quickly, much to my relief.
We had taken Mia to a park by the Piscataqua river after picking up some lunch to go. We found a picnic bench and engaged in small talk while Mia sniffed around under the table. And then it happened — the magic moment that sealed the deal for all three of us. I accidentally knocked my sandwich box — still full of potato chips — on the ground. Mia looked up at me in amazement with her single brown eye. (She’d lost an eye in an unfortunate play-date accident a couple of years earlier.) Then, upon surmising that I wasn’t going to pick up the chips or say “no,” she dove in and cleaned up the glorious, crispy mess.
“Potato chips in dirt — my favorite!” She seemed to say with appreciative glances at me while she consumed the mud-glazed morsels and we humans laughed.
Mia sat on my lap on the drive back to my apartment. And that was it. I now officially belonged to her pack as far as she was concerned.
The next time Sarah brought Mia with her, I insisted on going to the beach in Rye, where dogs were allowed to run free in the evening. I don’t think I’d ever seen a dog fly until that day. The look in her face said “Why have you been hiding this unbelievable place from me?” Sarah had never taken her to the seaside before.
Over the next few years, as my relationship with Sarah grew and deepened, so did my connection with Mia. Her excitement whenever we saw each other spoke of unmitigated joy. It was especially so whenever I went to visit Sarah at her apartment. It became a habit for me to sneak up to the living room window and make my sudden appearance, which would precipitate a whirling tornado of blond fur that bounced up and down the couch.
Sarah and I bought a house together in 2011 and got married soon after. Mia approved. She even accepted the arrival of my cat Queen Mary, whom I brought down to the house from my Portsmouth apartment the week before I moved in.
We took “Mia the One-Eyed Wonderdog” on many hikes, despite the arthritis that was beginning to gnaw away at her strength. I took to calling her “Adventure Dog” and snapping photos of her in laughably heroic poses, perched atop boulders and cliff sides as she surveyed the surroundings with her one big eye. She loved every minute of it, even when she became so stiff that we had to carry her back over miles of trails.
But the final trail Mia journeyed on was long and painful. Her polyarthritis worsened. She developed cardiomyopathy, then Cushing’s Syndrome. We bought a pill organizer to keep track of all her medications, and the vet visits came nonstop. She grew thin and started losing her fur. She wore a little fleece sweater festooned with peace signs day and night to stay warm. Mary Queen of Cats took to snuggling with her on the couch.
And yet, arthritis and a bad heart couldn’t keep her from climbing the staircase leading to my home office to demonstrate the herculean lengths to which she would go to earn a piece of my lunchtime pizza. Climbing Mount Everest for a snack, we called it.
During her final winter, she couldn’t walk outside at all anymore. We would bundle her in a puffy red jacket and plunk her down in the snow. She would stand there looking at us like a grumpy one-eyed caterpillar, do her business, and wait to be picked back up.
The snoring and dog farts that used to annoy me endlessly late at night became reassuring signs that she was still with us.
But on that last night seven years ago, when she stood trembling over her water bowl, she couldn’t even drink. She tried but her tongue wouldn’t quite work right. That was when she gave me the look. The look she couldn’t give Sarah, because she seemed to know that Sarah wouldn’t accept it.
Everyone at the veterinary clinic she’d gone to for all of her thirteen years knew her well. She was irrepressible and could be feisty and even ornery. They loved her almost as much as we did. They wanted us to leave the room, but we insisted on staying, holding her, talking to her until the end.
And then she was gone.
Sarah was a flood of tears as we left. I tried half-heartedly to be the stoic. I managed to drive about half a mile before I had to pull over for the tears blinding me. When I think on it now, years later, my heart still feels the weight of that crushing grief.
We ask ourselves as a dog-loving society: Why does losing a beloved dog hurt so much? Why does it feel no less painful — and indeed, sometimes feel more painful — than losing a close friend or dear relative? Psychologists tell us that it’s because they are in our lives every day. That they love us selflessly. That they may even symbolize a child, close companion, or dear friend. I tend to think that with their exuberant and oh-so-short lifespan, they remind us of our own mortality. Perhaps in a profound way, they remind us to enjoy every potato chip (with or without extra dirt) while we can, because before we know it, our time to give someone else The Look will come.
Perhaps all of those postulates are true. But what does it matter? What matters is the loving bond that once existed, and is now lost except in memory. It has been said that the depth of one’s grief is also the height of one’s praise. Perhaps that’s why even after many years, we can look back, and with a smile, whisper to the ether: “What a good, good dog.”
Thirteen years ago, I met a pair of wonderful girls. I fell in love with them both. One of them just happened to have four legs and one eye. Letting go of Mia was no less gut-wrenching than saying goodbye to parents, siblings, and beloved friends — both human and canine — has been over the years.
She was beautiful.
