You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness (11 page)

At the three-week countdown I started physically preparing: ramping up my gym schedule, shopping for new clothes, making hair appointments, figuring out which nail polish would say to people around the country, “I’m a writer you want to get to know better!” It was a lot like my wedding, except that I hoped, in the future, I’d have other books.

In truth, I was excited and happy and felt like for the first time in my life I was realizing myself. I loved my husband, my daughter, my work, and I was in love with a dog again, something I never thought would happen after Otto. With Beatrice I very consciously kept from getting too close to her. I didn’t want the heartbreak I had with losing Otto ever again. But Moses blindsided me. He slipped in through an unguarded entrance.

One evening, the dog walker came to pick up Bea and Moses while Violet was taking a bath. As she was playing with the bubbles, she told me she wanted Moses to go away forever and never come back. She had also told me this in the morning. I don’t know why but that day he was really getting in her craw. I was used to her insistence.

It wasn’t much later when I heard first the house phone and then the cell phone ring. I answered and it was the dog walker and she was upset but I was having difficulty understanding her. I finally heard that Moses had gotten out of his harness.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“In the lobby with Bea,” she said. “He ran out the front door before the doorman could shut it. Some men went after him.”

I whipped Violet out of the bath and threw clothes on her and we ran down to the lobby. I told the dog walker to take Violet up to the apartment and I’d go look for him. Violet was too upset, though, and she wanted to go. As we were leaving the building, my next-door neighbor and close friend Margaret was coming in and when I told her about Moses, she dropped her bags and went to look with us. It was twilight, and the doorman had seen him go east, so that’s the way we went. We got a block away and I realized it was just impossible to try to look for Moses at Violet’s pace, so Margaret took Violet back to her apartment. I tried to call the city to see if anyone had reported him, but I couldn’t get through, so I called my mother and asked her to keep trying to call the city, and then I called Paul and left a message on his cell phone. I phoned Mattie, who was out to dinner. She said, “He’ll come back.”

I walked and called his name, thinking of where he could have gone. I was worried that someone had grabbed him, someone not nice. We were always hearing about people who used small dogs as bait for training pit bulls to fight. I had to stop thinking of that. I worried that he’d gone into Central Park, which was now falling into darkness. I even tried to talk to him telepathically. I felt like I should’ve been able to figure out where he had gone, but my mind was blank, except for thinking about Moses being afraid. I thought about his eyes and how it felt to hold him and how terribly much I had let myself love him. If he was lost forever, I thought I might go crazy. I felt horrendous anguish and guilt for not having replaced the stupid harness when the dog walker first noticed he could get out of it.

I decided to walk back toward my apartment and go west, look in the park by our apartment building and then head toward Riverside. I walked and looked between buildings and called his name, my voice starting to break. When I got up to my building, a group of guys who worked there and people I didn’t know were talking about where they’d looked and who had seen him go. I said I was going to try the other park. It was probably a hundred feet from the door to Broadway, where there are two wide lanes of traffic going north and two going south separated by a median. I looked across Broadway and saw him. I saw his eyes shining and he saw me. I yelled for him to stay, but he didn’t. He came toward me and into an oncoming SUV. The rest of what happened operated on some other level of my consciousness, because when that car hit Moses, my thinking stopped and it was all feeling. He lay in the street in a pool of blood, not moving. Before another car could hit him I ran out and picked him up. I could still feel his heart beating, but he had been hit head-on. I was kissing him and crying and neighbors whom I’d never spoken to ran with me up to a vet two blocks away. My mind was replaying and replaying the events of the evening. I wanted to go back so badly and change what had happened that I almost felt I could. When we got to the vet, I was covered in blood and tears. They took Moses into the emergency room, and I sat with these two kind strangers.

“Maybe they can do something,” the woman said.

I begged and pleaded with God. Paul called and he couldn’t understand what I was saying, and I just told him to come to where I was. A few seconds later the vet came in and said he would not be able to save him, that he’d been hit in the head and it would be better to let him go. I needed to give him permission. He asked me if I wanted to go in and say good-bye, but I had done that when I carried him. I knew he’d had some breath in him, and the last image he’d been conscious of was seeing me across the street and I just tried to stay with that. Paul came in and I told him Moses was gone. We both cried and gathered our things. The neighbors left and we walked home together in pieces.

Unlike when Otto had died, I was now a parent of a small child and I couldn’t let myself totally fall apart. When we came home, Violet was still at Margaret’s. Margaret came over and without saying a word hugged me and cried. A few minutes later Paul came in with Violet, who did not know what had happened.

“Did you find him, Mom?”

I said no at first, thinking it would be easier for her to think of him as having “run away” than having been killed. And she went into a panic. Of course it had to have been the day she demanded he go away that this happened, and now she thought she had driven him off and she wanted to know why I had stopped looking for him. So I told her that he had gone to heaven, a place she was somewhat familiar with. Paul’s parents were in heaven, and his uncle had recently moved there.

Now my little girl was so hurt and crying and crying. She said she was sorry, and if she was sorry, could he come back? Paul and I told her that it was an accident and none of it had anything to do with her. She lay down on our bed weeping until she fell asleep.

I e-mailed Joy and told her. She posted on the message board:

THE RAINBOW BRIDGE
refers to a poem:

We lit the candle, knowing that if there was a heaven for dogs, Moses would be there before too long.

LESSON SEVEN

How to Mourn the Loss of a Friend

As of this writing, my lifetime dog count is seventeen family dogs. Ten during the eighteen years I lived with my parents, and seven dogs with my own family. Seventeen, of which thirteen are gone. Unfortunately “the end” is part of every dog story, and if you have dogs, you have to reconcile with that unless your personal ethics and bank account permit cloning.

When Misty, our standard poodle, died, I was in fourth grade. I made her a wooden grave marker out of a scrap from my father’s toolshed, and adorned it with markings from a ballpoint pen. I walked to the woods where she was buried, a place no one ever went to, and there I found the clearing where my dad told me he had buried her. At least I thought that’s where it was, and at any rate I dropped the grave marker there and ran really fast back to the house. I didn’t want any poodle ghosts after me.

In the fall of seventh grade our great mastiff, Lioness, started having difficulty managing the stairs and then walking at all. Mastiffs are prone to hip dysplasia. I was leaving for school in the morning, following my brothers out the front door, and I turned back and looked at my mom’s face. She was crying. On the bus I began to realize that Lioness was at her end, that it was likely going to be her very last day, and that I had not had a chance to say good-bye. When I got to school, I was sobbing and was brought to the guidance counselor, who called my mom. She picked me up and we were both crying. She told me they would be putting Lioness down later that day. I went into the house and found Lioness in her spot, her tail still, not the usual
thump-thump
when we went toward her. I lay down on her and I cried and cried and said good-bye and told her I loved her. I went with my mother to the vet in Pound Ridge where our kind and WASPy veterinarian greeted us in madras pants and a starched white polo. He came out to the car and lifted the rear door of the SUV, where Lioness, prone on a chaise longue cushion, waited. I thought about the time we were at the vet and my mother was laughing so hard she was wiping the tears off her face with her sleeve because the country club vet was treating a white husky named Honky. Now my mother was gulping and biting the inside of her mouth and looking off into the distance, trying not to let the tears flow. Lioness looked briefly at the vet, laid her head down, and closed her eyes. My mother covered her with an Indian print bedspread and closed the door quietly and we drove her home. Sometime later my dad did the job of burying her, driving her to the graveyard behind the tennis court. I don’t remember thinking about it after that day.

When my beloved Otto died, I had the time and the space to grieve the way I wanted. I was pregnant, I wasn’t working, and I was flagrantly hormonal, so I felt perfectly comfortable walking down the street weeping.

With Moses, I was in a different stage of my life altogether. Though I’d had Otto for seven years and Moses for only three months, Moses had gotten under my skin. In a brief time, he’d become a dog of my heart. But it was just a few weeks before I was going to leave on a book tour, and with a small child in school, I didn’t have the luxury of letting it all hang out. I remembered years before asking Paul’s mother about how she managed the death of her husband at age forty, suddenly becoming a widow and single mother of four boys. She’d said, “Honestly, I would’ve liked to crawl under the covers and stay there, but for my kids’ sake, I couldn’t afford to.” She pushed her feelings down and went to work. In no way would I ever compare the loss of a husband and father of your children with the loss of Moses, but I wanted to know how it was possible to cope with a death when you’re not at liberty to grieve the way you’d like. So like Paul’s mother, I compartmentalized. I had my sadness, but I kept it separate.

As sorry for myself as I felt, my greatest concern was for Violet. The day after Moses’s death, she started to say he was just lost. We paid very close attention to her. She would say he was in an accident, and then later, that she hoped we would find him soon. Some days she’d be angry with me for losing him and then ask if we could go back out and look for him. One night as we were going to bed she got herself dressed in her clothes again and wanted to head out and find him. She said she knew where he was.

There was, as there always is, a lot going on in our lives, and plenty of potential distractions for Violet. We focused on Beatrice, telling Violet that Bea needed us to take care of her. But if our apartment door opened and Bea went into the hall, Violet would start screaming. It was a while before she stopped thinking that Beatrice was in danger of going to heaven any second she was out of sight. I knew that kids don’t take in what they can’t handle, but it was months before Violet finally accepted that Moses was gone. Several months later, she told a friend that he’d gone to live with a new family who had a house and grass.

I was consumed by the vision of Moses’s accident. It played on a loop in my brain. Every time I left my apartment building and saw that spot where he’d been hit, I felt distraught and nauseated. I could be shopping, or e-mailing, or working out at the gym and I’d see Moses coming and the car and I’d wince and try to shake the images out of my head. Or I’d press my palms against my eyes as if the picture was “out there” instead of in my brain.