On New Year’s Day, Kathryn and I were rushing home, abruptly, from Taos, New Mexico. A friend had called to say Mookie, our sweet, even-tempered pit bull, was dying. We’d had him for almost 12 years. Both our family and friends really loved the old guy. And so, we hoped to save his life or, at the very least, to be there with him when he died. It’s a nine-and-a-half hour drive. Add a pit stop or two and it takes a long time. It was very nearly midnight when we made it to the house. Our dog was lying in the grass. His nose was cold, a good sign in itself, but so was the rest of his body. Not good. His eyes, though open, had that blank, leathery look we’ve all seen once or twice. The windows of the soul grow dim when there’s nobody home. We knelt there in the dark beside our dog and both just wept. The friend had kindly covered him with a large bathroom towel, atop which we added a small braided rug and an overturned wheel-barrow. We didn’t want Mookster to become some varmint’s midnight snack.
Next Day:
To dig the grave of someone dear, by hand, is always soothing in its way. We tidied up the hole, then took our friend (and, nearly, son), now in the wheelbarrow, from where he died to his new, final “home” beneath our courtyard’s big mesquite—his favorite spot. We laid him in his grave atop a brightly colored quilt, surrounded by the things he loved the most: his rubber king-sized Kong—(his life’s True Love)—and a pig-ear, a Milk-Bone, and other such stuff, thus making him some sort of Pit Bull Pharaoh, I suppose. Kathryn declined to be buried with him because she’s got appointments until 2016. To me it didn’t seem right to wait that long to bury Mook.
Wrapping him in the quilt, we proceeded to shovel soft earth over him, making sure to avoid lumps and rocks. Discomfort is probably low on the list of a typical corpse’s concerns. The scientific mind must guess cadavers have no such lists or complaints. Yet, nothing more distinctly shows the tangle of our souls with those we love than really wanting them to rest in peace. The rituals, the funerals, the viewings, vigils, wakes, and all the rest, which seem to honor and appease the dead, are clearly more to comfort those left standing on the shore. This time, that’s us.
We humans try and try to grok the boundary between us and them, where those we’ve loved or hated are concerned. The body, now an empty husk, so shockingly inert and void of life, is perhaps most bizarre in its lack. The being we once loved has ceased to be and won’t be back. And yet, as the shock of bereavement subsides, it’s very clear, to me, at least, that Richard or Elizabeth or Sandra Soll and Lil are still “living” within me, and largely unchanged by their deaths, evoking pangs, from time to time, of missing or regret—this latter requires almost all my New Age skills to have it be real sadness, not just guilt.
With Mookie put to bed this one last time, we banked up some soil around the new grave to form a shallow bowl, and then, in deference to the tree whose roots we’d cut and bruised, put the garden hose in it to trickle all night. Once more it creeps me out to know my pal reclines in freezing mud. Again I must remind myself that his compact and muscular, tuxedo-clad physique feels nothing now.
Our precious friend stays with us in the middle of the yard. Our precious friend lives with me in the middle of my heart, where he’ll evoke more love and pain and thanks; and then, I guess, as time goes by, will fade a bit, and then a little more, until he is a gentle presence, steady and serene, like a candle no longer perturbed by the wind or a rock that’s been tumbled and smoothed in a boisterous sea.