What the animals want us to remember

1965 It’s around 1965, and I’m sitting on a cinderblock wall behind my childhood home. Mom has let me know that our white cat Snowy has crawled under the house, through the coal furnace room, and died. I’m about five years old, and this is the first time I’ve had to ponder death. After an initial concern that Snowy’s white fur is probably covered in coal dust and dirt, a bigger question begins to worry me. How, since she’s under the house, is her soul going to float up through the sky toward heaven? Surely, we need to get her out from under there so she can be free.

2023 There have been many cats and dogs in my life since then, and while my thoughts about the afterlife for our creature friends, and ourselves, have changed dramatically, the gut-wrenching grief of telling a beloved pet goodbye has not gotten easier. Yet, what becomes clearer, is that there is a time when all of us – dog, cat, man, and woman, have to be freed from our physical bodies.

Opel watches a storm roll toward Ocracoke, NC.

Last week, my husband and I did that for our dog Opel. Freed her from her tragically failing body. Our family got to move through life with her at our side for almost 14 years. After watching her struggle for some months, I was struck with a knowingness that she was hanging on to try to please me. She was trying to make things easier for me, like she always did. And it was my turn to make things easier for her.

2010

It’s an early evening at a small park in Raleigh, NC. My ten-year son Walker is playing city baseball and my husband is an assistant coach. About nine months earlier, we have had to euthanize our chocolate Lab, Seamus. I was traumatized by his absence, and had not felt ready to take on the physical, financial, or emotional costs of another dog. It was the longest I had been without a dog in my 51 years of life except for my time in college. That was about to change. I approach the hillside bleacher area, and there’s a young woman holding a small puppy on her shoulder. The woman is facing away from me. The dog’s face is looking toward me. The dog looks into my eyes and we lock gaze. My knees get weak and I feel light headed. I need to hold that puppy. She lets me.

I want this dog, but it’s her dog. She explains to me how her boyfriend (the coach of my son’s team) and herself rescued an entire litter of puppies from underneath a road sign, in a ditch, somewhere down east. They raised them all up, and kept their favorite, who they named Papi. My husband had to explain this is a nod to David Ortiz, aka Big Papi, as the coach was a Red Sox fan. Also note, the pronunciation I heard was “Poppy.”

Later that evening, being unable to stop thinking about ‘Poppy’ the puppy, and how she looked at me, I decide to write a letter to her human parents, expounding upon why I thought they might reconsider letting us adopt her. My reasons included the fact that I knew they had two other very big dogs, and that they were getting ready to move into a small apartment in Wilmington, NC as the coach had been offered a job. I explained that we had lost our family dog almost a year earlier and had been waiting for the right time and the right dog, both of which had clearly arrived!

They responded the next morning, saying they would bring the dog to Saturday morning’s baseball game and if we still felt strongly we could take her home.

That’s how Papi became Opel. We re-homed her and our son Walker renamed her.

Me holding Opel on her first trip to Kibler Valley, where she could run free along the Dan River. She visited there many times.

There’s so much more I could tell. Like how she would search out socks when anyone took them off, and place them around doorways. I suppose putting our scent around thresholds as a sort of protective measure. Creating boundaries.

There’s no safe boundary though when it comes to sharing part of your life’s journey with an animal. Your heart is going to get broken when you tell them goodbye. And yet. Isn’t that what we came here for? To allow ourselves to love and be loved, and experience both the joy and the heartache that’s in store when you are brave enough to do that.

Sixty years after I worried about Snowy being able to float up to heaven, I’ve come to believe that heaven is right here on earth. I’m not waiting for some afterlife to experience the divine. The divine is here. It lives in the connections between my human family and friends, between myself and the forest, between me and a dog. There is nothing purer than an animal who lives in the moment, in the here and now, and who loves unconditionally.

They keep trying to teach us that.

Opel traveled alot. Below you see her enjoying campfires, rivers, and apparently drinking a beer while nestling in the dunes on the Outer Banks. You can click any image to see it full screen.