dog years

(for Bloomsbury):

I hate to copy off of tony, but apparently we have more in common than making Lord of the Rings jokes while backpacking…

My dog was my best friend when I was growing up. Maybe that sounds a little sad, or a little strange, but as a kid with years of experience with depression and social anxiety, I couldn’t have had a better friend. Your dog doesn’t judge you, she just looks at you with big, liquid brown eyes that say “Yes, you might sometimes be a fuck-up, but I forgive you if you just scratch behind my ears”. In this way, dogs are more honest and less hypocritical than most people; that’s why they make good friends, I think.

My dog, Chewby (named by my brother when he was four or five), was a fluffball - half minature collie, half chow chow - she basically had all the poofiness of a chow but the face of a collie. If I had a digital picture, I’d post it. actually, I might be able to pull one off my old 8mm videos at my apartment…if I can, i’ll put it up later.

I forget how old I was when we got her, but she died in 2003 and I think she was about twelve years old, so that would mean I was about ten when my parents brougt her home…which seems about right.

I don’t remember her coming home for the first time, but I definitely remember her leaving twelve years later. She had had a thyroid problem for years, her metabolism was completely shot, and my mom had been shaving her fur every few weeks for years because she simply couldn’t vent her body heat correctly anymore. She was miserable for a very long time and so eventually my parents made the decision to put her to sleep. I had been living fifty miles away, at college, for the previous four years, but I came home often enough to be somewhat familiar with the situation. I had known the decision was coming eventually, but I didn’t have the reaction I’d expected: the furious denial of reality everyone goes through on crime dramas on TV.

I drove home as fast as I could after getting the call, and as soon after seeing her, any doubt about putting her to sleep was put to rest. She looked terrible; much worse that I could ever remember her looking, and though the endpoint of her health problems wasn’t definite, I immediately felt bad for ever thinking that I could have wished such misery on her just for the selfish reason of having her around for another year or two.

I remember going to the vet, half-consumed with trying to keep my mom occupied on anything other than what we were about to do, and half-consumed with thinking about how Chewby herself was the only one who didn’t know what was about to happen to her. It was an odd thing to dwell on, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wished that there was some way we could have made her understand. Not out of guilt, or anything, but just out of fairness, equity.

All the way to the vet, I sat in the folded-down backseat in my parents’ truck with Chewby, and when we got there the two of them went ahead to “check in”; I wouldn’t actually be going into the office with them (because there simply wasn’t room for four people in the office where the procedure was going to be performed), so it suddenly hit me as the car doors slammed that this was the last time I’d ever see my dog. I don’t remember much. I just remember crying a lot, I remember telling her that I loved her (and simultaneously feeling sad and awkward about this…who says “I love you” to a dog?), and I remember the look in her tired eyes…the look that said she knew something was wrong. It was a look I’d grown accustomed to recognizing. After all we’d been through together, she could recognize my sorrow as easily as she could recognize the word “cookie” or the rattle of the dog food bag. The moment was over far too soon, I cleaned myself up respectably enough (it’s not really permitted to show emotion in our family) before my parents came back to the car, and then I sat in the middle of the parking lot for what was probably about 30 minutes before they came out again, of course by this time completely composed after just watching a member of our family die in front of them (and I was as well; I don’t mean that as an indictment). Then we drove off. It was hardly ever spoken of again between us. I wasn’t told that she was being buried in my grandparents’ backyard until after it happened (purposefully or not, I don’t know).

I did the best thing I could think of to deal with it. I went to a meeting about the publishing of a local zine run by my then-girlfriend, sat through the entire thing like a zombie, and then had a completely melodramatic breakdown in front of her after everyone else had left. She was an absolute fucking sweetheart, and dealt with it okay. Then I, too, began to not think much about it.

Throughout the entire time Chewby was alive, though, I thought regularly about how much I cared about a dog (compared to how much I cared about most people) and how odd that seemed, logically. I could account for a bit of it at least by assuming that I had become attached as a child - children often develop really intense emotional bonds with strange animals/things/etc. when they’re growing up. That only partially explained it, though.

A lot of people view childhood as idyllic, and mine certainly had its idyllic moments. But there were enough staged “idyllic” moments, enough “smile and pretend” moments, that I eventually began to distrust the real ones as well. I can pretty honestly say that I didn’t experience much in the way of actual, healthy happiness until about age seventeen or eighteen. Most of the time before that, happiness was just a temporary cure, a way to avoid unhappiness.

What I wanted was some honesty, and there’s nothing more honest than a dog. Even cats have agendas, but dogs? Unlikely.

When the dog was “bad”, which she often was, she’d get locked in the basement. When I was bad, I’d get sent to my room, but I’d go to the basement instead. I used to talk to my dog for hours, trying to sort out my problems…in a way I suppose any of you who read my blog or who have been on the receiving end of one of my six-hour conversing sessions have these experiences to thank. I learned through these times to sit down and figure out my problems, to face them, to find a way to not feel bad for the simple fact that there was something “wrong” with me as opposed to letting them get out of control and grow. Without that skill, I can say without a trace of irony or melodrama that I probably wouldn’t be here today.

For a variety of reasons, at least some almost certainly my fault, I never felt I could talk to my parents. My dad was usually too busy paying the bills to have time for anything else, and my mom was too busy loving her children and being the keeping our lives “perfect” to deal with anything that couldn’t easily be fixed by food, money, or something else pulled from the ether.

So, once again for a lot of reasons, I never found talking to them productive. It actually usually seemed like I ended up scaring them a little when I tried. So I stopped trying. I could sometimes talk to my brother, but a five-year age gap makes a much bigger difference in experience when you’re fifteen than it does when you’re twenty-seven, and so there was only so much we had in common. I didn’t have much in the way of friends, largely through my own faults, and the friends I did have were more interested largely in playing wiffle ball when we were ten (I thought too much, even as a kid) and in avoiding their problems through drug and alcohol use when we were older. There were two or three people I’m sure I could have talked to, in retrospect, but I was pretty convinced that I was “crazy”, and I didn’t honestly want to let anyone other than the dog in on the secret, because she couldn’t judge and she couldn’t tell.

By the time my parents started having marital problems, thus ensuring that the two people who would have ideally been the most helpful at assisting me were already busy taking potshots at each other instead, it was a pretty regular occurence for me to spend a few hours here and there feeling sorry for myself, telling my problems to my dog, and petting her until I was done crying. It was good. It helped. I can’t help but think now that the relationship was a little one-sided.

It was strange, though, feeling not only as much or more love for a dog than I did for people…not to mention more trust. Again, this was admittedly partly because of my own hangups, but that doesn’t change how I felt.

Maybe pets cause these sorts of responses because they are non-judgmental, because the behaviors we are allowed to act out around them are from a much wider range than those we are around all but the most understanding and forgiving people. Maybe the love we feel for them stems not from the fact that they are capable of sharing our experiences and vice versa - hard to manage with something that doesn’t talk - but from the fact that they are capable of taking us as we are…something that we often have a lot of trouble even doing ourselves.

While my instinctual reaction to this post was to feel awkward for admitting these feelings and experiences, I really don’t think that’s reasonable. I had a friend who helped me navigate the troubled waters of growing up in a less-than-perfect incarnation of the American Dream. She helped me to make sense of my own depression and tendency to distrust people. At that time, there wasn’t a person alive who could have done that. And so the fact that she wasn’t a person shouldn’t change things at all.