by Chip Mosher THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT DEATH that renders the rest of us -- those left behind -- haplessly incoherent. I remember not having that exact thought but rather feeling the not-so-subtle resonance of it, to the bone, a week ago. It was the middle of the night. I was on the bathroom floor, in underwear, arms wrapped around my lifeless dog. A black Lab.
My cat of 19 years, Mr. Henry Miller, sat nearby on the toilet seat, smoking a cigarette and staring down at this odd dance of death -- a naked old man with his dead dog.
"Is she gone?" the cat asked.
"Yes," I said.
"I thought so," he said.
"How did you know?" I asked.
"Because," the cat said, "she stopped breathing two hours ago. You've been bawling, wailing and begging her to come back all that time."
She was beautiful. Yet she never had a name. Fourteen years ago, I was having lunch at downtown's seediest casino. Someone apparently had abandoned her in the casino's parking lot. Following repeated, futile attempts to find her owner, hotel security finally called Animal Control. As I was walking to my car, a security officer asked if I'd like a dog to take home. I laughed. I already had a dog, I'd said, and I'm a one-dog kinda guy. Coincidentally, the dog at home was also a black Lab, 13 years old and slowing down with age. She'd been thrown into my life 10 years before, not long after a car accident, caused by a drunk driver, put me on my back for several years. It took most of that decade to regain normalcy in my life. One of those long, dark decades of the soul. But I had a Florence Nightingale to nurse me through it -- this female black Lab named Ninotchka, the greatest living entity of any species I'd ever encountered anywhere.
Thus, I suppose it was the black Lab thing. When the Animal Control truck turned a corner into the seedy casino parking lot, I looked down at the squat, heavyset, orphaned canine. Instead of simply wagging a tail for my attention, she desperately wagged her whole, formidable booty, as if sensing her predicament. Next thing I knew I was taking her home in the old Honda Civic.
"No names," I said while driving. "We'll find you a home. I'll call you Puppus. Which isn't a name. Because you won't be staying long. I'm a one dog kinda guy."
How little I knew.
The first thing she did when I brought her home was take a tennis ball she found on the floor to my aging dog in a corner across the room.
The second thing she did was chew up eight hardback books from the library, costing me a couple hundred bucks. As I was rolling up a newspaper to deliver the newspaper-on-butt routine, she rolled over and peed straight up, five feet into the air. To let me know that language, rather than torture, should work just fine for any lesson she might need to learn. After that, she never chewed up another thing.
Born to retrieve, Puppus could chase down a tennis ball like Willie Mays, catching it on the fly running away from me. In water, she was as graceful as Esther Williams or Mark Spitz, and could swim the length of a pool underwater. Every night for 14 years she crawled up and hogged most of the bed, to show her over-sized love for me, for bringing her home years ago.
At the age of 13 I lost my own family. All I remember from those bleak, distant days is a tableau of alcohol-induced violence. I had a dog then. But, in a brutal process, she was taken from me (my Rosebud?). I never saw her again. I was sent to a place resembling William Golding's
Lord of the Flies. Psychopathic kids ran the asylum. Two children committed suicide there. Adults were never around. Hence, I, too, became a kind of orphan.
So all these years later -- and for the best 14 years of my life -- Puppus gave me as much of a home as I ever gave her. And, in the end, she had many names I came to know well. Love. Compassion. Devotion. Charity. Faith. The best names of all.
I miss you, girl. More than I can say. Mr. Miller does too.
Reprinted with permission from <a href="
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Photo <a href="
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With permission from <a href="
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