Abby, Zoe, Marlo!
Some reflections on anticipating loss
We are a family of dog owners, dog obsessers; we have three dogs, two golden doodles and a mutt named Marlo; we are all quarantining together, my parents, my boyfriend, and me, with the three dogs, in a fairly large house on the outskirts of Baltimore during the pandemic of 2020-2021. We the humans are alternately bored and grateful to be safe, restless and despairing at the state of the world. We spend a lot of time talking about food, and TV; we invent regiments to follow and then guiltily discard them. We read the paper. Some of us run miles in the morning and some of us bike at noon. Mostly, though, we talk about the dogs.
We coddle them, and whisper their names; we stroke their noses and peer into their eyes, wanting so desperately to know what they are thinking. We talk about them. We talked as them, in funny cartoon voices; we catch their glances, reproachful, from the window, and find ourselves apologizing.
“Abby, Zoe, Marlo!” my mother calls at dinnertime, and from front hall they’ll trot, always in reverse order: Marlo at the front, close to drooling, his grin a crocodile's grin; Zoe, the cutest and most aggressive of the three, with her bright black button eyes and adorable oversized paws; and last of all Abby, who grows more regal by the day, and stands last because she is a lady, not a glutton.
This is what we say. The truth is that Abby is last because it is so very hard to get her hind legs to behave.
Abby is our elder stateswoman, fourteen years old this past December. She is the tallest, the heaviest of the dogs, with a noble brow; my mother loves to tell how the poodle who sired Abby was a big beast of a poodle, with a broad and deep chest. She is mild, despite her size, and friendly. To hug she pushes her whole body against your thighs.
Four or five years ago, on a cold January morning, Abby went tearing from the front door in pursuit of the fox. Out she went, braying, and hit a patch of black ice that sent her sprawling, back legs flying, yelping so high my mom said it pierced her heart. Since then her back legs haven’t worked so well; she’s mostly, as my sister says, front-wheel drive.
To help we give her tiny white pills, half for breakfast and half for dinner. My mom confides in low tones that eventually the pills will destroy her liver. The calculation, I suppose, is better fewer years, rather than many lousy years where she can only totter around. Now, once you get her to the puppy playground, she romps and romps. Even at home she’ll turn abruptly frisky and, panting like a dump truck, run at you with her head lowered.
Still, we can’t stop time from doing its work. With every year, she sleeps more and more, gets up less, stands in the hall confusedly barking while the other dogs whirl around to the back door to greet my returning mother; with every year the specter of her eventual absence looms closer.
In the summer, we ate dinner on the back porch while Zoe and Marlo trotted back and forth, “on patrol,” studying the sidewalk below. It gave me a funny feeling, seeing them together. As if we are practicing having two dogs. I told myself it didn’t feel too strange to have only two dogs ambling about. See? I thought. Normal.
It made me think of how my grandfather stopped coming to Thanksgiving several years before he died, saying he was too old to make the trip down. We missed him, but we got used to having Thanksgiving without him, too, knowing he was just a hundred miles up 95. And then, when he was no longer a hundred miles up the highway, when he was nowhere at all, we were already practiced in holidays without him. In this way the old habituate us to their absence before they permanently say goodbye. They help us to practice living without them.
Pets, too, help us practice. We love them dearly; we love them knowing they will leave us first. As for them, they know nothing at all of time. It is all just an endless chain of days, distinguishable by smells and shifting light; as their limbs weaken they register a heartbreaking surprise, and then they adjust and adapt, dozing on the rug while the two younger dogs gambol below on the porch.
When I was in college, I led trips for the first-year outdoor orientation program. In our handbook, towards the back, there were some philosophical musings on that age-old question: why venture into the wilderness at all? What was the point of leaving comfortable beds and running water behind?
Mostly, there were the usual platitudes about simplicity and nature. But one paragraph has stayed with me. I’m paraphrasing here, from a distance of fifteen odd-years, but it said something like Why give up comforts, why learn to do without? Because eventually we all have to give up more than we think we can stand. The wilderness trains us, in some real but subtle way, for other kinds of loss.
For those of us privileged to have food and housing security during the pandemic, for those of us lucky enough to be healthy and employed, life can still feel like a lot of “doing without.” Days are small. Muted. As we round the corner into 2021, still without hugs or weddings or restaurants or parties, I’ve been trying to think about the pandemic as a camping trip: it’s easy to spend all your time missing what you used to have; it’s harder, but better, to appreciate all the advantages of a slower life. I’ve been enjoying reading on the couch most afternoons, and walking in the woods by our house. Asking my parents more about their childhood, learning more family lore. Especially, though, I’ve been enjoying time with the dogs. In the mornings, now, when I lean over to give Abby a pet, she stretches out her front paw and rests it on my knee, as if to say: don’t go yet. Linger a little. We’ve still got time.