Goodbye, and Thank You from the Bottom of my Heart

I wrote this on June 29th, the day I got home from visiting my dog in West Virginia.  I couldn't sleep, and needed to get this out...

I lack the words appropriate.  I’ve typed it out over and over, many times, and many ways, and nothing I can come up with does her justice.

She was my dog.  She was my friend.  She is dying.

My friend

I remember when I first met her.  She was a stray, found by a friend.  I went to go meet her, and wasn’t sure I wanted to take her.  She was a medium sized mutt, ugly dog.  I to this day have no idea what the ingredients were that made up her body, but I am 100% sure of the content of her character.

I remember I told my friend that I would have to think about it.  I made it half a block away before I had to pull over.  I could feel my heart hurting, hurting then much like it hurts now.  I was about to lose something, something important.  I knew it even then.

The nameless dog sat next to me as I drove home, unsure how I was going to convince my mother we had a dog now.  It was stupid, and irrational, and totally not what my crumbling family life needed at the time, but this dog, this mess of red hair and drool, sat next to me with her big dumb head out the window without a care in the world.  She’d look at me, her new human, and smile that odd dog smile that bordered ridiculous and adorable.

We were instant friends.

My mother, I remember, wasn’t terribly keen on bringing on the responsibility of dog ownership.  She was fighting her own battle with my father, largely behind the scenes, and to her credit, allowed me to keep the canine.  I think she knew.  I think my mother knew that her family was falling apart, and maybe her teenage son, having trouble figuring out how to be a man, needed someone who loved him unconditionally.  She was right.

I was working on a farm around this time, renovating an old farm house with my friend.  I would bring the dog out to that dusty house, and she would lay in the shade of the porch, waiting for me to get down from the roof.  I didn’t need to chain her up then, she, like me, was all too happy to have someone who cared about her.  The guys and I would take turns calling out names from the roof to see what she would respond to.

That’s how I met Brandy. 

Brandy was with me for some of the worst times of my young life.  The fights, my anger, the rage I carried with me for a long time.  When the world let me down, I knew she never would.  She would always be sleeping at the foot of my bed.  She would always run to me at the sound of my car horn for a drive around the block.  She’d lay down beside me while I watched TV or screwed around on line.  She was my companion for 3 years.  And then I had to go away.

I went to college, and couldn’t take her with me.  At the time, it was no big deal.  My father had recently left my mother, and it left our family fractured.  With just my mother and sister at home together, Brandy quickly became a glue of sorts for them.  Even though she seemed to be a burden at times, I know Brandy helped those two get through it.  She was that kind of dog.

Over the next few years, I moved around a lot, and often my mother would try and get me to take the dog off her hands.   It was a chore I had saddled her with, and while I wanted nothing more than my dog back with me, my life was in a constant state of upheaval.  I was moving every year, never sure where I would end up.  And I’ll be honest, I also didn’t want to have to deal with the dog while I was trying to go out drinking, or running around, or traveling.

This is one of my biggest regrets.

Because now, I will never get to make up that time.  Brandy spent more time with my mother and sister than she did with me, but in my eyes, she will always be my dog.  Just the thought of losing her in years past broke me down, unlike anything ever has in my life.  And now that I am faced with that reality, I am for lack of a better way to put it, full of regret.  And angry.  And sad, and every other emotion one can feel when faced with lose.  Especially a loss I never tried hard enough to avoid.

I wish I could go back, eat more allergy medication, stay in a home for more than a year, something, anything to get more time with her.  I can’t tell her these things, she wouldn’t understand.  Even if she could, would she believe me?

When my mother told me she was sick, and hadn’t eaten in a week, I knew it was the end.  I drove the 4 hours into the middle of the West Virginian heartland to be by her side.  When I got there, I’m not even sure she knew who I was.

My heart is heavy.

She's tired now, and not hungry anymore...

The worst part?  I never got time to grieve with her.  I had to leave too soon, and was surrounded by people whom, if I were to say the things I wanted to say to Brandy, would just assume mock me than understand the emotional baggage this damn dog has helped me carry for 13 years. 

My last words I spoke to her were, “You be a good girl.”  I rubbed her chin, looked into her eyes, and left.  I’ll never see her again.  And that sucks.  It really sucks.

Trying to come to terms with this has been tough.  It’s not like I’ve never lost anyone.  I’ve attended my fair share of funerals, but it’s something about the death of a pet, specifically a dog, that is so undeniably hearth wrenching. 

I think it’s because we don’t know if they understand how much we care for them.  In Brandy’s eyes, was I just a guy she knew for 3 years who then disappeared?  Did I abandon her?  Does she even consider herself my dog?  Or is she my sister’s?  Or, more accurately, my mother’s?  Did she harbor resentment towards me?  Did she even know who I was at the end of all this?  I’m sitting in a room typing my guts out, and to her, I might have just been the hand at the end of a leash taking her for a walk on a muggy West Virginian night. 

Those are the thoughts that keep me up.  That I failed her, someone who I have had nothing but love for since the very first time I saw her.  Who helped me more than any dog would ever know, and I’m still not able to quantify in words.  I look back over the last 13 years, 3 I spent with her, 10 I didn’t, and can only come to the conclusion that I wasn’t good enough for her.  She deserved better of me, but I was too selfish to realize that.

And that isn’t a good feeling.

I have a new dog now, for all intents, my wife’s dog.  And knowing now what I know about letting dogs know how much we need them, I encourage her every chance I get to love that dog, because before we know it, it will be 10 years down the line, and we’ll be having more sleepless nights as we try to convey to that dog how much we loved her. 

So why do we do this to ourselves?  Take an animal into our care with the understanding we’re going to outlive and bury them?  More importantly, why do we treat that choice like a chore, when these animals literally give us nothing but love in return for our, often lacking, efforts?

I think it’s because of that love, that unconditional love that dogs especially seem to be able to produce and instill in we poor pathetic humans.  We spend our entire lives thinking and trying to find ways to be loved, that we don’t see the obvious answer is just to give love, no matter what.  Dogs have this figured out, and Brandy was one of the best examples the species could ask for.

I want to be more like dogs.  I want to be more like Brandy.  I want to be better, to try and atone for how long I wasn’t very good.

I’m really going to miss my friend.

Goodbye.  You were a very good girl.