Doghouse Confessional: A Life Lesson from an Unassuming Mutt

Elias wasn’t a handsome dog. His awkward air was fitting of his uncommon dog name. He’d been named by his previous owner who had no interest in keeping him, even though they’d spent nearly a decade together since Elias was a newborn pup too young really to be responsibly separated from his mother.

The former owner’s name had been Ricky, and it was clear to me even as a child that Elias was just one of the things about which Ricky was probably neglectful. Ricky’s family had long owned the house my mom and my new stepfather were about to buy from them, and the family had allowed Ricky to stay in it for years. I don’t know the circumstances under which he had been asked to leave, but I know they weren’t completely amicable, and I know they resulted in Elias staying behind.

In no time, Elias became my constant companion and my best friend. We shared a love born of need and understanding. He greedily accepted the hours of activity and attention a bored young boy has to offer when he doesn’t live in walking distance of anything but the woods and a small, overstocked pond. Elias’s frequent visits and races through the field grass broke up my long days and helped me feel less alone.

The years before I met Elias had been chaotic. In the months following my parents’ divorce, my mother had shuffled my sister and I between the homes of various relatives who were kind enough to let us stay until the burden of an exhausted woman and her two elementary school children became too much for them to abide.

I’d seen her crying many times in my first few years, but I’d never caught her sitting up nights smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table until after the three of us had left my father. When she started regularly seeing the man who would eventually become my stepfather, her behavior normalized a little, her expressions softened again, and I was able to sleep without trying to hear and smell the signs of her worries through the bedroom door.

Life with Elias promised an amount of normalcy. My family settled into the house, and I eventually called my stepfather “Dad” for the first time. I made friends at school, and every now and then my parents would take me to a friend’s house for the afternoon or allow me to join a sports team.

For the most part, though, I spent afternoons after school and long summer days with Elias. He was at least part Australian shepherd and relatively slight of build. He had a lot of long, thick hair that probably would have been beautiful if it had ever been brushed. Elias and I eagerly accepted each other as we were, though — unkempt, unwashed, and unworried when we allowed the warmth of the summer sun to wash away the reality of our circumstances.

Elias lived outside as dogs more often did back then. He had a small wooden doghouse that he fit into comfortably, even with a few inches of straw on the floor and at the sides. On warmer days, I’d coax him out of it and climb in myself so that I could see what it felt like to him to live in there.

I took his dinner out to him every night. We mixed his dog food with hot water (and occasionally some table scraps) that created a bit of gravy in his dented metal bowl. It was during those many cold trips to deliver his dinner that I decided I’d never keep a dog outside. Elias never barked or whined, but his meek nature only made his unassuming life seem more heartbreaking to me.

Our small farm was Elias’s home, and we often let him roam it freely during the day. No one needed to be with him, and we weren’t even always sure where he went or where he was. He always returned in the evening for dinner, though, and he frequently came to check on me if I was out fishing or playing in the fields.

He came straight to me the day he got hurt. He’d somehow gotten tangled up in some rusty barbed wire that presumably had been attached to an old fence post downed in the woods for decades. He must have struggled with it for quite awhile, because by the time he found me, it was wound around him so tightly and so many times that my stepfather determined he could not be successfully extricated.

The barbs and strands of the wire had bitten so deeply into his flesh in places that it wasn’t even possible to determine the exact pattern of the tangles. The shocking amount of blood seemed to color and clump every inch of his fur and made it even more hopeless to sift through it to the mess of flesh and wire underneath.

It’s possible that Elias could have survived with the proper emergency medical attention. I was young enough, though, not to question my stepfather when he told me there was no hope. It didn’t even occur to me that the deciding factor could have been a monetary cost that would have been especially prohibitive to a family that couldn’t properly afford groceries or Christmas presents.

My stepfather was already turning back toward the house when he told me he was going to get the gun. He was not particularly warm or comforting, but elected instead to display firm resolve regarding his course of action. I didn’t try to argue with or dissuade him; I simply stopped him when he returned, thumbing a shell into the chamber as he approached

He didn’t ask for an explanation when I insisted that I be the one to put Elias down. He simply told me that the best thing we can sometimes do for someone we love is to be the one who’s there with them at the end. It didn’t stop me from sobbing with Elias’s bloody head in my lap for awhile before I could summon the courage to give him the peace he needed, but it did make it easier to later spend those final moments with some others that I’ve loved in the years since.