Fierce Love Fierce Grief

A behind the scenes testament to the enduring bonds we form with our animal companions and the lessons they teach us about love and loss

Hi and welcome:

In last weeks post, I track down my daughter to tell her the news that our dog is sick and possibly dying, a call I hate to make because all the tests aren’t in yet. It’s possible this could be a terrible mistake.

Maybe don’t send that text, I think. Maybe go see the dog for yourself.

It’s a splendid fall day as I drive across town. Blue sky. Leaves turning on the trees. That crispness of late summer kissing early autumn.

Rather than taking the dog for a long walk in the forest or throwing the ball at the park, I hurry up the steps of a cottage sided with faded wood shingles. This is the home of the city family that keeps Luna while I’m out on retreat and my daughter is at college. The perfect solution for busy people, or so I thought.

Knock, knock, knock.

The door opens and there stands the woman who loves Luna as much as anyone. She is a retired nurse with a sprawling extended family who all adore the dog, too. Her shoulders are slumped in defeat, her face gaunt.

“I can’t stop crying,” she says. “It’s devastating.”

We hug each other and it hits me that Luna isn’t there.

Before this diagnosis, that dog would have never waited inside the cottage. She would have knocked the retired nurse over to get to me, jumped up and run wild cyclone circles around me in an ecstatic demonstration of joy while I laughed and called “LunaLunaLuna,” and “puppypuppypuppy.” Last, Luna would have planted herself before me to look deeply into my eyes for a long moment as if to say, “It’s you. My beloved, Jennifer. You are back.”

Crossing into the entry, I hear a heavy thud from the living room and a moment later Luna lumbers up to me with her once bushy tail swaying loosely in a form of hello.

I drop to my knees and she drops, too, rests her head in my lap.

“My girl, my sweet girl,” I say.

I didn’t want another dog. Not ever. I told my daughter this over the years when she asked and tried to placate her with gerbils, a rabbit, a guinea pig but never a dog because I couldn’t do that again.

Carmel, my first dog, had been the love of my life. I bought her a few weeks after my brother committed suicide. He was twenty-three years old and suffered from profound depression. I had been twenty at the time, and in college, when I got the terrible news about the gun found next to his body.

After the funeral, I dropped out of college. Didn’t eat. Slept for days.

One day, about three months into this landslide of grief, I made my way to a pet store. A cocker-spaniel puppy, the runt of the litter, huddled in the corner of a huge crate looking forlorn.

Two hundred bucks later, she was mine.

That dog became a reason to get up and start living again. She was a slightly needy and neurotic companion and with her, I grew a career as a writer, divorced an abusive man, moved several times, married again, renovated a house and had a baby. She loved me and I adored her right back.

When I finally gave in and agreed to get my daughter a dog, it was mostly out of guilt. I had divorced her dad by then and was hip deep into therapy and writing in order to expose demons and shadows of the past. I felt I was being a pretty bad mother to this emerging young woman who wanted a companion of her own.

Since I knew I would have to take care of the dog because come on, my daughter was a social person and about to go into high school, I set one condition: The dog would also be a worker at my school, a therapy animal who could bring comfort to my students.

My daughter agreed and we found Luna through a network of breeders with the AKA.

Luna became a companion, a confidant, and a snuggler for my daughter. For me, she was an employee who required four hours of walking, grooming and tending each day. I was pretty matter-of-fact about her for a long while. After all, dogs die. Don’t get too close.

I fell fully in love the first time I took her to the beach and let her off the leash. Yipping in a strange, almost haunted way, Luna ran as if her life depended on it. Going. Going. Gone.

My daughter was worried sick but I understood the longing to break free and how all that vast emptiness was simply too much to resist.

We were kindred, Luna and I, I realized. That was it. I was a goner.

By Friday afternoon, the results of all tests are in and yes, it’s that metastatic cancer.

“Decisions have to be made,” the retired nurse told me on the phone. “I’ve scheduled the vet to come at ten tomorrow morning. I’m sorry to make you come all the way back to the city but it’s the most humane thing.”

I pack a bag and drive the two-hour trek over the mountains, sick in my stomach and sad in a way that cannot be touched or named. I eat an entire box of pumpkin cookies as if that will help.

My daughter calls the cottage and over FaceTime, says final goodbyes to Luna I wasn’t there to hear because I was driving, but the retired nurse sends a text to say that my daughter is so poised, and graceful and mature. “What a lovely woman she’s becoming.”

When I pull into the city, it’s sunset and I’m on the phone with Luna’s breeder asking questions about the line of dogs Luna comes from and how they died. The father (a bird dog) died a few months earlier of old age. The mother (a show dog) died a year earlier of an infection that went into her bladder. They were 11 and 13. There is no cancer in this line. Certainly not this kind of cancer, the breeder tells me and promises to get us a pup if we want one to replace Luna. No charge.

A dog dies of cancer in under ten years, you get a new one. Guaranteed. Such a strange clause in our original contract. Such a strange world.

I settle into my former husband’s place for the night, make arrangements to be at the cottage at nine the next morning. My daughter wants to be on the phone when I go over. While we’ve both said our final goodbyes, it feels right to be with Luna at the end.

With Carmel it was congestive heart failure. When she was fifteen years old, she struggled to breathe, and I knew we would have to take her to the vet to put her down. Soon.

I lowered Carmel into her basket where she liked to sleep next to the radiator. On my knees, I covered her up with a blanket and petted her silky soft head.

“Sweetheart, don’t make me do this,” I said. “If you are going, please go. I don’t want some stranger to take your life.”

Carmel looked at me for a long time, chocolate-brown eyes glazed gray with cataracts, then lowered her snout to the edge of her basket and went to sleep.

The next morning, we found her dead in the bathroom.

Friday, September 29th is a day to honor the angels as well as the harvest full moon.

As I climb into the bed where my son used to sleep as a boy in the house of my former husband, I open the travel scripture to a random page in search of solace:

A voice says, “Cry.” And I said, “What shall I cry?” All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower in the field. The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blow upon it. Surely the people is grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. ~ Isaiah 40, 6-8

“Please take her before the morning,” I ask whatever angels might be hovering near. “Please don’t let a stranger end her life.”

An hour later, the seizures start. Two hours later, Luna dies.

On the phone my daughter says she isn’t wholly surprised. “She was going fast, Mom,” she says.

“If I knew the prayers would have worked, I would have prayed that she had a total recovery,” I say.

“Oh Mom,” my daughter says. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“Yeah,” I say, wondering how it does work.

This is how it goes: We pray, we hope, we ask questions, we run, and we turn around and come back, and we do things that will end up breaking our hearts, like buying dogs for daughters in hopes of assuaging our own guilt and alleviating the loneliness of being a teenage girl struggling to become a woman. We make choices. Some good. Some terrible. We love even when we try not to love and we are blessed over and over again in ways we can hardly measure to include being given, for a time, these creatures cultivated to be our companions. Loyal angels with four paws who come and then go, too soon. 🐾🐾

Thank you for indulging this ridiculously long post. Before I wrap it, I want to again thank everyone who sent kind wishes and shared stories of pet loss.

This wonderful email came in from a woman (who knew about Luna’s passing). It was so kind and good and inspiring I wanted to share:

Your loss, so immediate—one day Luna is with you in her unquestionable love and the next day she is gone—is heartbreaking. Some of what I wrote [in my first comment on last week’s post] is left hanging in the air. Feed her steak. Let her lick whipped cream off your fingers. Let her lounge on the furniture anytime she wants were written with the hope you would have more time with her. You were robbed of that special, excruciating time to say goodbye. Our dogs touch our soul and take a piece of our heart when they leave. Your loss brings up memories my own of Tico, Zoe, and Kore, our furries from the last 20 years. My heart is full right now with Blue who filled the hole left by Kore. But the grief is there buried with the love and trust we received and lost. Luna is now your teacher for letting go, screaming at the universe and shedding tears new and old (the ones we keep buried so deep that only the loss of the unconditional love of a dog can release). Be tender. Be fierce in your grief. ~ Lori

I like that: “Be fierce in your grief.”

Thank you, Lori. Thank you. I’ll try.

~ Jennifer, 🐕