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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONHow To Bury A Dog
HOLLY ANN HYDE is a writer and freelance journalist living in New Hope, Pennsylvania. She was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and is at work on both a novel, The Purified Heart, and a collection of short stories entitled The Power of Things Left Unsaid.
Being as it is,
What’s that?
In a waterdrop
Shaken from a duck’s beak:
An image of the moon.
— Dogen
I REMEMBER taking a tour once of a dog sitter’s home, an obligatory rite of inspection before turning my pet over to the care of this rather eccentric stranger. A bizarre and unwieldy relic, the house was clearly at odds with the sixties tract-style suburban neighborhood around it. It was a cavernous, nearly empty monstrosity built by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, and a painfully ungifted student at that. Past owners had allowed the house to fall into ruin, and Mina and Raul had acquired it at a bankruptcy auction. Here, the newly cohabiting couple lived with four dogs, three cats, and an albino parrot.
While I walked through a dark passageway to the bedroom, I barely missed being stabbed in the thigh by a large mahogany side table jutting hazardously out from the wall. Rows of Chinese boxes covered the table’s surface, all of them propped open, as if at attention. The boxes were lined with brazenly colored silks and had brass plates, etched with dates of birth and death, neatly nailed to the front panels. I was, I realized, looking at well-dusted, miniature sarcophagi for long-dead dogs with names like Max and Eddie and Nostradamus. Mina the dog sitter had carefully bleached the bone fragments that had not burnt to ash during cremation, so that they appeared as white as ivory — hundreds of oddly symmetrical chips stacked to overflowing, looking viciously teethlike, not like a dog’s bones at all. The totems reminded me of the absence of ritual in American life. Everything about these dressed-up dog coffins was a flagrant spinoff of some more truthful, authentic ritual, the meaning of which was now forgotten, the ritual itself perhaps even extinct, a shadow play of bereft gestures all that was left.
HOW TO BURY a dog, to make the decision to terminate life when life becomes too painful to watch, yet continues to look back at you, still able to smile and wag his tail at the smallest of amusements? I find myself taking a survey on what to do when your canine companion of ten years has the big C; when, despite his agony, he still begs for his morning walk, rushing outside to smell the wild grass along the road, limping, sometimes heroically dragging himself into the field, as if immortal.
A purebred English boxer, Harpo entered another dimension on our strolls, an olfactory world of irresistible and erotic scents: the neighbor’s dog in heat, a cat’s regurgitated fur ball, a rotting sandwich thrown carelessly behind a stone. These remains, either invisible or insignificant to my senses, were treasures to my dog, causing him to lift a leg and mark the surrounding poison sumac and nettle with his inaccurate stream of piss, failing to hit the target one morning because his front legs suddenly collapsed beneath him. Despite having to use his elbow joints as provisional paws, he continued his languorous investigation of that patch of earth, adapting to his physical handicap without flinching; sniffing and then swooning with pleasure from the scent of a pepperoni-pizza slice beneath an azalea bush; forgetting that his legs, his eyes, his bowels were slowly failing him.
“Shouldn’t I wait until he dies naturally?”
“No,” say the veterinarian, the friend, the checkout girl at the supermarket.
“They never really do just drop dead,” says the vet. “They seem to hold on until it becomes unbearable to watch.”
The thought of having to determine the right time of death for my beloved pet, the point at which his joy for life is outweighed by his diseased and deteriorating body, is overwhelming. On one of the many visits we make to the vet so Harpo can be injected with steroids, Yvonne, the veterinary assistant, slyly hands me a brochure on my way out. Her action is perfectly timed so that I don’t have a chance to look at the brochure and break down weeping once more before entering the street. A shamelessly born-again Christian, Yvonne told me this morning that Jesus would want me to let Harpo go, and “after all, Jesus is our director, isn’t he?” It isn’t until I get into the car that I see she has handed me an advertisement for a local pet cemetery. On the cover is a glossy photo of a handsome, graying couple tenderly pondering casket options: pine or mahogany, silk lining or dashing Scottish plaid.
Back home, I pull out The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sögyal Rinpoche, and open it to the chapter devoted to euthanasia. According to Rinpoche, even the fanatical right-wing Buddhist sects, with their strict taboos against terminating any life — even an insect’s — sanctify the compassionate “encouragement” of the soul’s release from a disease-ravaged body. The danger lies, Rinpoche says, in taking action too soon and thus perpetuating negative karma. The trick is to identify the moment at which the body is no longer able to serve the mind, the possibility for achieving Buddha consciousness or enlightenment being the only reason that we have come here in the first place.
I once believed in this concept — or, at least, the idea of it helped to fend off those fearful waves of existential panic that have haunted me since my teens, usually brought on when the comfortable line between meaning and absurdity mysteriously disappears. After I had a near-death experience at sixteen (mixture of alcohol and quaaludes), it seemed absolutely crucial to find a religion, a cultural appendage through which to funnel my macabre fascination with death. Mormonism, the religion I’d grown up with in Salt Lake City, was forever closed to me because my parents had been excommunicated — the penalty for getting divorced after having been married in the Temple.
Growing up, my five siblings and I had been allowed to keep pets of all kinds: an Amazon parrot, a woolly monkey, an iguana that disappeared into the lemon orchards behind our home in Santa Barbara, California, a boa constrictor, guinea pigs, a blind rabbit, and an array of stray dogs and cats. But my mother, a glamorous Sophia Loren look-alike, suffered from severe manic depression and had a habit of giving our pets away without warning. This bestowed upon all six of us a life-long condition the school psychologists termed “attachment disorder.”
In my early teens, I failed to embrace Unitarianism, my mother’s chosen path, after the minister caught me French-kissing his twenty-two-year-old son. At nineteen, I got a loan from Bank of America and ran off to India to study Hinduism at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh. From there I took a train to visit Mother Teresa’s Hospital for the Dying and Destitute in Calcutta, where I was depressed and horrified by the brutality and waste of deep-seated poverty. Violently ill with amoebic dysentery, I decided to do my soul-searching closer to home.
I returned to Berkeley and sought out a Tibetan lama for meditation instruction, but lost my virginity to him instead. Even worse, I got pregnant. My distraught brother-in-law paid for the abortion, as the lama was forbidden to marry. In the eyes of strict Tibetan Buddhists, I had committed a heinous sin by having an abortion and had accrued God-knows-how-many reincarnations in which to burn off my bad karma. In the end, I decided to bypass religion altogether and become a poet. Many years later, after a heartbreaking divorce, I declared myself agnostic and found that animal companionship provided the most comfort and solace in my sometimes bewildering spiritual life.
I ACQUIRED Harpo at seven months, sight unseen, from a breeder who was devastated to find that this beautiful boxer specimen had a fatal genetic flaw: a set of testicles that would not descend. His ears and tail had already been cut for show and were bound in tape when I picked him up. When I had him examined, the vet railed against the ear and tail bobbing, calling it a “barbaric practice” that should be banned. I wondered what I had gotten myself into and imagined ducking stones thrown by fulminating animal-rights activists as Harpo and I strolled down Solano Avenue in Berkeley on our daily walks.
Nevertheless, I saw to it that Harpo was properly socialized at the Point, a dog park where hundreds of faithful owners let their canine pals casually mix and play with their own kind. The park jutted out into the San Francisco Bay and was divided in half by a narrow channel whose waters were continuously filled with four-legged swimmers retrieving frisbees or tennis balls or limp and gnawed pieces of rope. Everyone observed an unspoken code of animal civility: all breeds were welcome, but not dogs who lunged at strangers or picked fights at random. If an animal or its human companion got too aggressive, a large group of aging Berkeleyites would swiftly surround them and insist that they leave. The ex-hippies obviously relished their new role as undercover dog police.
Sundays at the Point looked like a brilliant Seurat painting. The subculture of dog owners and their pets created a multicultural panorama unlike any other I have seen. Wealthy owners with thoroughbreds mixed happily with children from the local housing project playing with their prize pit bulls or mutts; judges and lawyers compared shepherd breeds with gangbangers wearing colors of red or blue. When conversation arose between owners, however, it was always about the breed or age or name of one’s pet.
Almost never did anyone ask, “What’s your name?” The experience taught me just how hesitant people can be to form bonds with their own kind, how afraid of random intimacy. Unlike our animal companions, who voraciously slobber over the new dog on the block, we stand on the sidelines in bashful silence, vicariously indulging in our dogs’ sexually charged curiosity.
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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