I AM IN PAIN. It is the growing sickness that travels alongside grief. In anticipating Harpo’s end, I am robbing the present of all of its quiet tenderness. Sympathetic friends have warned me that they have seen more people with a history of alcohol abuse, like myself, pick up a drink over a dying pet than over a dead relative.

At a morning gathering with colleagues, I break into a seemingly endless spell of weeping and disclose that I am delaying the inevitable: that I must “put my dog down.” After the meeting is adjourned, a stranger walks up to me and gives me a gentle embrace, readily comparing my imminent loss to the loss of his son. I am thankful, yet stunned. He goes on to say how his present dog, a golden Lab, has everyone in his household “wrapped around his little paw” and that, in some unconscious fashion, the retriever has managed to place himself at the very center of the family’s emotional life, at times facilitating intimate exchanges between its members — a role played in dogless households by newborn babies or sick children.

It is a privilege to be able to honor an animal with full soul regalia, as a being so precious to me and so filled with unconditional love that on occasion he outshines even my closest friends and family — including myself — who inevitably fall short when called on to show unselfish sympathy or compassion or kindness on demand. For ten years Harpo has been a constant loving presence in my life. Unencumbered by all-too-human hidden agendas, he freely expresses his voracious lust for life and adoration of both the world and his keeper.

I say that to care deeply for an animal is a privilege because I have walked the streets of cities that look like an apocalypse: Calcutta, for instance, where human life appears so cheap that a man can be left out atop garbage and — still alive — be partially eaten by rats, and yet be utterly ignored by passersby. No one stops to do anything for him, I think because no one has the privilege of caring in a place where mere survival can occupy the whole of one’s existence. When poverty is so deep that one may starve to death, what of a dog?

It would be easy to believe that consciousness comes to us when we are fed and housed and cared for by our culture; that privilege propels us toward a more inclusive emotional life; that even amid the shallow barbarism of modern-day capitalism, we are still sublimely moving toward a compassion that fully embraces and cherishes life in all of its forms.

Yet reality tells a different story, one of complex contradictions. I witnessed that same man carried to Mother Teresa’s hospital, where he was cared for by Indian Brahmin-class nuns, who washed his feet the way the Apostles did Jesus’. Meanwhile the wealthy Catholic Church, in 1976, was still undecided over whether to support such a mission. Buddhism taught me that extremes of any kind, whether of excess and greed or of desolation and bone-aching poverty, breed brutality and callousness. The vision of inclusion that America — or an Indian hospital for the dying, for that matter — holds out to us may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves.

ONE MORNING I take Harpo to the field near my house for a walk, and instead he collapses onto his haunches in the high grass. I, too, fall down and weep. He pants away, licks my face, and continues to push onward, oblivious to the fact that something isn’t right with him: stumbling and weaving, as if punch-drunk, between tufts of poison oak and weeds; happily leaving his scent every twenty feet or so; rapaciously smelling every tree trunk and bush. He is an example of joyous and unabashed acceptance of all that is. In humans, this level of acceptance is found only in saints or idiot misfits. Could it be that we have turned Darwinian evolution on its head, that animals are the more evolved species? If so, when does one’s attachment to an animal stop being seen as strange, warped, or simply neurotic?

A friend drops by and watches me cry from concern and lack of sleep. Harpo has been on steroids for three weeks, and I have faithfully let him out three or four times each night — anything to extend his beautiful presence in my life. I want just one more week, or perhaps two, or possibly a whole month in which my attention is totally committed to his care in honor of the gift he has given me. I have asked friends who are also dog lovers to drop by and give me their diagnoses of Harpo’s condition, in an attempt to spread the responsibility for determining the time of his death. I am a coward.

One friend is clearly troubled by my emotional state. Unable to offer quiet solace, he instead launches into a list of countries that eat dogs and cats for dinner. He points out that I eat meat, so how far am I going to go with this grief thing? “I mean, really; get a grip!”

I look at him in disbelief, wanting to wring his tie-wrapped neck. Instead I say, “That information is not helpful.” He is a cat person, and I have a theory about cat people: more often than not, they are afraid to express or be in the presence of powerful emotions. Nothing like a flea-infested, mud-sprayed hound jumping up onto your new silk dress and licking your perfectly made-up face to bring you back to basics.

If there has ever been a better example of unconditional love than Harpo’s, I have rarely seen it — and I have met Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama and have been witness to an occasional devoted spouse wiping the backside of an incapacitated husband or wife as though it were a sacrament. All in all, Harpo resides right up there with the best of them, teaching me to seek simple pleasures, to pay attention to the smallest actions, and to give comfort and empathy without words getting in the way: just raw, unadulterated presence, Zen mindfulness at its best.

I know that, underneath it all, people are thinking, It’s a dog, after all; just a dog. But my own emotional truth leads me to the conclusion that if I cannot allow myself to grieve appropriately for a companion who saw me through divorce, the deaths of friends and family, alcohol abuse and a consequent suicidal depression, homelessness, cross-country moves, and recovery from a life-threatening illness, then I am in serious spiritual trouble. However tragic, the truth is that this magnificent sentient being gave me a reason to get up and go outside on days when, after my divorce, I thought I could not bear the feel of sun on my skin, and he must be honored accordingly. So I remain accountable and attentive to Harpo and his end-of-life needs in the same way I have been for dying friends, the two of us engaged in a pact of simple survival and occasional rapture.

Honoring the dead through ritual brings us to a place of humility in the face of things not yet understood. It’s an experience that unleashes a sublime terror inside us, as well as a need to wipe out the idea of mortality and replace it with the “clear, open gaze of the animal,” of which the poet Rilke wrote so eloquently in his Duino Elegies. To honor the life of an animal as a sentient being means to fight against a majority of cultures in which even human life is unabashedly cheap. The first slip toward such barbarism is not tolerance of those things that clearly should not be tolerated — torture, incest, murder, war — but the insidious daily numbing to subtle violence: a callous word while navigating traffic, my inability to interact with the sad-eyed girl who serves me coffee at the 7-Eleven and whose heart may be breaking. Turning away from a brutal path begins, for me, with an unreserved willingness to be present for those people closest to me, and for the random stranger in need who crosses my path, and, finally, for a dog.

I RUN into my neighbor Cindy, after weeks of cleaning up the piss and feces of my magnificent yet fatally sick beast, carefully massaging his now bony and flabby musculature, feeding him dog bones, roasted chicken, and ice cream to satisfy a monstrous appetite created by the life-extending steroids. She holds me in an embrace of silent lovingkindness, giving me the space to begin to let go.

Walking with me in the early morning, Harpo squints, eyes no longer able to filter out the sun’s intensity. He is letting go of his senses one at a time. A friend drops by to be with Harpo and me and says, “I think he is hanging on only to comfort you.” The thought helps me to admit that the drug regimen is no longer working. I will allow Harpo to take his leave.

The following morning, Yvonne telephones to prep me for the final vet visit, reassuring me that “God would want you to do this for him.” I call an acquaintance to reschedule a work meeting and explain that I have to put my dog down. He responds with his own sick-dog tale, telling me that his Lab is being given chemotherapy treatments twice a week. I am stricken with guilt and wonder if I have tried everything possible to give Harpo the chance to continue his life. But I cannot bear his suffering anymore. I place him in the backseat, his favorite blanket wrapped about him, and we cross the Delaware — the river we have lived by, swum in, and boated on for the past two years — on our way to the vet’s office. Yvonne has assured me that there will be no one in the waiting room; she has scheduled us during a lull in appointments so that we can quietly say goodbye.

How to do this? I am acutely aware that Harpo hesitates to get out of the car, and I do not want him to smell the fear that has suddenly gripped me. We are escorted into a room, where I carefully spread the blanket out on the floor and lie down beside him. And, like the confused ex-Mormon Buddhist that I am, I gently hold his head while chanting a mantra in his ear. The veterinarian administering the lethal injection tells me simply to say, “I love you.”

I lose track of time and have to be pried loose from Harpo’s cold and rigid body. Sobbing, I tell Yvonne that I want him to remain wrapped in the blanket so as not to have the black plastic bag touching his fur. She tells me she will return the blanket with the ashes, and I cry out, “No, I want him left in it, even when he is laid inside the fire.” She has heard stranger requests. I stumble outside, weeping uncontrollably. I see an Episcopal Church across the street, another brand of Christianity I recently tried on for size. The building is locked. I remember my childhood, when the churches were always open, before uncivilized theft and vandalism became the norm.

Yvonne gave me two options: an inexpensive group cremation, or a pricier individual one. Driving back across the river, I panic and question my decision to cremate Harpo solo and have the ashes returned to me for ritual burial. The doubt persists, an almost hysterical thought that, since he loved other dogs so much, perhaps the kindest thing would have been to have him burnt in a group cremation and laid to rest commingling with other dogs’ ashes. My uncertainty is the result of a dog owner’s guilt at having stripped her pet of his pack-animal instincts and forced him to identify and bond almost exclusively with humans. I have regressed to a grieving and confused state, perhaps even lapsed into temporary madness. That faithless, in-between space I experienced when I was young opens up inside my soul once more.

LATER, THE GRIEF forces me to look backward rather than be in the present — in the serene, empty space left to me by the departed. It is precisely this turning back, the unrelenting need to remember, reevaluate, and even enhance the past, that disturbs me. Is it simply fear that makes me look back, or is a creative revisioning of the past necessary in order to propel me forward despite the loss? The present, a Zen master once told me, is the only true reality. There is no value in the attempt to salvage lost insights by looking perpetually behind us. Rather, the value or truth lies just here, right now, in the present: a sublime state free from both fear and expectation. If we are willing to allow ourselves to detach from thoughts that chronically pull us backward and forward, we just might achieve that enlightened state of mind, that clear, open gaze of the animal.

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