Grief

I know that it's hard for people who don't have animals, or who don't form deep family bonds with their animals, to understand the depth of grief somebody like me feels for somebody like Lola. And I feel a little silly talking about it, knowing that people who don't understand will be reading, assigning me into some category of the absurdly emotional or revoltingly self-indulgent or something.

I'm not in fact particularly emotional. I tend to react to most things pretty rationally. I'm not sentimental or maudlin or even much given to tears. If I'm self-indulgent, it's about catalogue shopping, not finding ways to make myself miserable. But I've cried for Lola every day since she died. And not just eyes-filling, tears-leaking crying, but embarrassing, out-loud sobbing. I literally cry for her, in the sense of calling her name out loud. It's not the kind of grieving I've ever done for anybody else, and I've lost people.

In part, I think, losing someone who was so much a part of the fabric of your daily life, someone you saw more times a day than you could count or were ever consciously aware of, makes you especially raw to the idea of death itself, the finality, the unbearable absence of someone who was so very present. And the fact that my relationship with her was so physical plays a part in that, too. Somehow the idea that I can't just reach out and touch her is especially hard to bear.

I wish so much that I believed I would see her again. I wish I believed in heaven, in a conscious afterlife of any kind for any of us, in which some eternal aspect of me could embrace some eternal aspect of her. I wish I believed that one day we could do whatever ghosts or angels do that's like scritching and wagging and kissing faces. But I don't. I don't believe it, and I can't make myself believe it.

The part of her that was her is gone, and gone forever. The part of her that was flesh is ashes. We picked them up today, in a plastic urn with her name on a slip of paper scotch-taped. "NGEFL," Andy and I said in unison, shaking our heads. So many things were Not Good Enough for Lola that we shortened the phrase to its initials long ago.

I can believe that there's a kind of ocean of souls from which we each come, to which we each return, and that it includes all of us, from the very simple to the very complex. This notion doesn't give me the kind of comfort that the hope of concrete, individual me someday being reunited with concrete, individual Lola would. But it's a kind of comfort, being able to hope that, bound together as I feel certain we are, we will someday, in some form, embrace again.

Goodbye, Good Girl

It is with the profoundest sadness I have to report that our basset hound Lola died yesterday morning.

She'd been battling lymphoma -- and beating it back with aplomb, I might add -- since February of 2008. She relapsed this past spring and had been responding well to her second round of treatment, but something simply went wrong after her last dose on Tuesday. Yesterday I had her back at the vet, and by this morning it was clear that this was a system failure, that whether it had to do with the chemo or the timing was just a coincidence, she was, as Andy put it, scritching at the door. The last kindness we could perform for her was to let her out gracefully.

She was a stubborn, grouchy, opinionated, loving, wonderful dog. When she was a youngster and loved playing fetch, she knew all her toys by name, and would get the one you asked for out of her toy box and bring it to you. When we brought her to Andy's folks' in Wisconsin, she used to lure their dogs outside with a toy and then double back by a different door to steal their marrow bones. The people at the dog hotel she stayed in in Philadelphia were convinced she was a famous retired showdog, and a junkie outside the 7-11 at the corner of 34th and Powelton once called her a symphony.

She had long, beautiful ears and a heart-shaped spot on her right front stump. She sang with soul and gusto. She was about as lovely and graceful and dignified as a basset hound can be. She would have turned nine in August.

She was our girl, and we loved her very much.

Dogs! Dogs! Dogs!

Ben has enjoyed paging through his big photo books (especially this one and this one) for a while now, but it's mostly been clear that his pleasure has had more to do with the hinge-motion of the pages than observing the pictures. But recently he's made the mental leap and is able to recognize that the images correspond to real-world objects and creatures.

At least, if they're dogs.

We have two basset hounds, Lola and Hugo, and as I mentioned here, I first noticed he'd acquired some receptive language when I named the dogs and he looked at them. He likes them both very much, and the feelings are decidedly mutual. So it's no surprise that they continue to open developmental doors for him.

This latest started with the basset hound calendar in the kitchen, which was the first image Ben got excited about, first grinning and then pointing and grinning, wanting to be taken closer so that he could smack at the image, possibly making sure there wasn't really a doggy behind it somewhere. Then he and I were paging through one of his picture books, and he pointed at a photo of a dog: "Dah!" This dog wasn't a basset hound. And then he pointed at a bear and a wolf and a cougar. So, ok, we haven't exactly narrowed down what a dog is, but bears and cougars aren't that far off, and wolves are just dogs whose ancestors -- rather shortsightedly -- resisted the appeal of human garbage heaps. Which of course makes me think about how I know a wolf from a bear from a dog, how infinitely complicated those distinctions are, what a miracle it is that my not-quite-year-old can do it, how essential this kind of detailed visual sorting must be to human evolutionary success.

And then the thing that really knocked me out: he pointed out the doggy in an illustrated book. And not a photorealistic illustration, rather a stylized one (in Dav Pilkey's The Paperboy). This dog isn't a basset hound, either, but it is a low-rider and a bit of a fatty, so similar. Still, how does the kid know? What markers of dogness do his real dogs share with this painting? In the time before photography, did it take longer for babies to recognize images? Do photographs create a kind of visual bridge between the real and the imagined?

When her first child was around Ben's age, my friend C. asked me for photos of Lola, who was a puppy at the time. (I believe I sent her prints -- decent images were probably too big to email eight years ago, and there was no such thing as Flickr.) She was making a doggy picture book for her son. I loved the idea, and loved that she wanted to include Lola. Last week, I made one for Ben, with photos of our dogs, dogs we know, and lots of dogs from the Dogs! Dogs! Dogs! pool at Flickr. (Scotch photo laminating sheets are awesome.)

He loves it.

Inside Dog Jail

Before Ben was even sitting up on his own, one of my biggest worries about a future milestone was how we were going to deal with the keeping the dogs out of his business while he was learning to crawl. The dogs, Hugo especially, are big Ben fans, and tended to, whenever opportunity presented itself, kiss him pretty much unceasingly. Luckily, Ben mostly didn't object to this, and as unsqueamish people and proponents of pets beefing up babies' immune systems, we didn't object, either.


But that was when Ben was mostly in our arms, able to be instantly swooped away from overwhelming dog interference at the first sign of his discomfort. I didn't want to jail the baby, so I figured we'd be facing months of jailing the dogs -- in the kitchen, behind gates, banished and unhappy, looking on and unable to participate.

What happened instead was this. We got a big plastic hinged gate and set it up in a play-pen shape with Ben's playmat and rugs for cushion, and lots of baby toys. The dogs would sit and gaze longingly at him, so that we got to calling inside the gate "outside dog jail" -- "dog jail" being, of course, the whole rest of the house. When the boy was first sitting up, he did some sitting in there, and a good bit of falling over. But he moved quickly from first being able to sit to being able to sit quite firmly and reliably, so that I wasn't as concerned that random canine incursions would knock him over and frighten him. So he started doing a lot of sitting inside dog jail, too (thus transforming it, of course, into something other than dog jail), and once that started, I came to learn through experience that while the dogs, especially Hugo, were eager to get up in his grill, they also love a lap on the sofa, and they'll mostly leave him alone so long as I'm willing to provide them with a warm body to curl up next to.

Now Ben is crawling and pulling up on furniture and even beginning to cruise, and contrary to my worries, the dogs didn't get in the way of his attaining these skills at all. But now that he's mobile, he's beginning to get into their business, up in their grills, and that's a whole new set of challenges and concerns.

The point of all of this is that it illustrates something I'm coming to understand about parenting. What you see as a challenge from the starting line tends to turn out not to be nearly so challenging, in part because once you've identified it, you've already started to solve it; and no sooner is the finish line in sight but you see that it's really the start of a whole new race.