The sudden death of our beloved dog helps me re-appreciate the personal value of media
Because of the remarkable technology we enjoy, we have so many of Snyph’s moments saved in digital form.
I stepped out of the shower, and was surprised to see my partner Phoebe standing in the hallway. I didn’t know she had come home, and she had an anguished look on her face.
“I think Snyph is dead.” She said, her voice breaking.
She had gotten a call from a friend who said she thought our dog had been hit by a car on the highway down the road from our house. I immediately realized I hadn’t seen our 12-year-old Jack Russell terrier in the last half hour. We both went outside and called for her. Our puppy was nowhere to be seen.
Although Snyph has been totally free-range for the past six years, she is nearly always within view as soon as we call her, often lounging in the sun on the warm blacktop of our driveway. We have an acre-sized yard in the semi-rural boonies of upstate New York, and she has run free on our land without exception as long as we’ve lived here. Snyph was not known to have ever gone as far as the two-lane highway a tenth of a mile away—not a major road by any means, but one on which the cars and trucks barrel along at 70 MPH.
The friend on the phone had said the dog was “definitely not living,” and she described the markings as being the same as our jack. She also used the word “gruesome.” With Snyph missing and the dire phone call in our minds, we felt fairly certain that our canine companion of so many years had indeed perished.
That’s a pretty odd thing to feel so sure about, and it was sad to think that someone had done this and either not noticed or not stopped to do anything about it.
Another good friend of ours came by to get the dog off the shoulder of the highway, and to put her into a burial box for us. Both Phoebe and I were hoping to avoid the grim scene if we could.
As we waited, I got into my phone and looked through the last pictures I had taken of our precious pup. It had been about two weeks previous, but there was a number of pics I took one evening while lying in the grass on my back. She had been sitting right next to me, looking over me while taking in the sounds of the neighborhood. It was a still, late-summer evening, and I was able to take a number of shots while closely appreciating the detail of her beauty. Our modern camera-phones make it easy to capture such moments without taking away too much from the experience. This ease of use is one of my favorite things about phoneography.
But even with media creation so incredibly streamlined, looking back, I wish I had done more. Although I’m a big believer in the value of recording personal moments and the way in which that process can enrich our lives, there are plenty of times that I opt for keeping the phone in my pocket. Sometimes the moment should just be the moment.
Having said that, now that my dog is gone, there are certain things I wish I had gotten that I never managed to get.
Snyph had the most hilarious way of howling when the trains would come by and blow their horns. As the kids like to say, it was the cutest thing ever. I told myself so many times that I needed to get it on video, but for some reason I always put it off. Perhaps I felt I needed to make a big production of it to get it just right. Was I more concerned with creating the perfect cute-dog viral video than preserving an endearing moment of the heart?
Also, Snyph had been trained since a puppy to sit up on her back legs. “Stick’em up!” we’d command, and point two fingers at her like a gun. Then we’d say, “BANG!” and she would fall over onto her back and play dead until we told her okay.
I never captured that either. These moments were such a joy for everyone to behold that it feels like a huge loss that they’re now gone, except for in our memories.
During our reminiscing, I found myself thinking back to my last afternoon with her, and it was a good one. I fixed the lawnmower, and she was all excited to see the evil machine once again, apparently an arch-nemesis in her little dog mind. Then she chased a cat down the fence-line. And then she was trotting next to me as I mowed the grass by the driveway. Finally, she sun-bathed in the garden while I worked on draining the pool. I suppose I could have captured any of those moments with my phone, but it never occurred to me.
We always think there will be plenty of time.
Later that evening we sat with the kids and told stories about Snyph: how we rescued her from a puppy-mill of a pet store when she was only months old, how she was the only Jack Russell with spots out of 30-some other dogs, and how she seemed to stand out for us in a solemn and calm way when all the other puppies were so spazzy. In the retelling of these tales, there were tears and laughter. And then, when a train came by, we all howled at it in memoriam.
After the kids feel asleep, Phoebe and I shared photos of our friend who had so suddenly perished. If it wasn’t for Instagram and our mad obsession with phoneography, would we have ever captured and posted so much? I can only say that I’m thankful that we did.
Because of the remarkable technology we enjoy, we have so many of Snyph’s moments saved in digital form. I’m certain that we will be discovering more memories that are buried away in hard drives and digital photo albums and hashtags. All the while we were writing Snyph’s story, and we hardly even realized we were doing it.
Snyph lived an incredibly full life. She swam in the ocean, and climbed 8,000-ft peaks. She ran unfettered on the beach, and hiked beneath waterfalls. She traveled thousands of miles across the U.S. She played ball and stick and soccer and Frisbee tirelessly, and she will be missed very much by us all.
I know we will be thankful for a long time to come because we have so many little pieces of media to remember her by, and so maybe next time I feel like leaving the phone in my pocket, I will get it out anyway and shoot for a moment. There are so many stories to tell, and we only have so much time to tell them.
© 2013 by Matteo Wyllyamz
