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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONHow To Bury A Dog
HOLLY ANN HYDE is a writer and freelance journalist living in New Hope, Pennsylvania. She was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and is at work on both a novel, The Purified Heart, and a collection of short stories entitled The Power of Things Left Unsaid.
Being as it is,
What’s that?
In a waterdrop
Shaken from a duck’s beak:
An image of the moon.
— Dogen
I REMEMBER taking a tour once of a dog sitter’s home, an obligatory rite of inspection before turning my pet over to the care of this rather eccentric stranger. A bizarre and unwieldy relic, the house was clearly at odds with the sixties tract-style suburban neighborhood around it. It was a cavernous, nearly empty monstrosity built by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, and a painfully ungifted student at that. Past owners had allowed the house to fall into ruin, and Mina and Raul had acquired it at a bankruptcy auction. Here, the newly cohabiting couple lived with four dogs, three cats, and an albino parrot.
While I walked through a dark passageway to the bedroom, I barely missed being stabbed in the thigh by a large mahogany side table jutting hazardously out from the wall. Rows of Chinese boxes covered the table’s surface, all of them propped open, as if at attention. The boxes were lined with brazenly colored silks and had brass plates, etched with dates of birth and death, neatly nailed to the front panels. I was, I realized, looking at well-dusted, miniature sarcophagi for long-dead dogs with names like Max and Eddie and Nostradamus. Mina the dog sitter had carefully bleached the bone fragments that had not burnt to ash during cremation, so that they appeared as white as ivory — hundreds of oddly symmetrical chips stacked to overflowing, looking viciously teethlike, not like a dog’s bones at all. The totems reminded me of the absence of ritual in American life. Everything about these dressed-up dog coffins was a flagrant spinoff of some more truthful, authentic ritual, the meaning of which was now forgotten, the ritual itself perhaps even extinct, a shadow play of bereft gestures all that was left.
HOW TO BURY a dog, to make the decision to terminate life when life becomes too painful to watch, yet continues to look back at you, still able to smile and wag his tail at the smallest of amusements? I find myself taking a survey on what to do when your canine companion of ten years has the big C; when, despite his agony, he still begs for his morning walk, rushing outside to smell the wild grass along the road, limping, sometimes heroically dragging himself into the field, as if immortal.
A purebred English boxer, Harpo entered another dimension on our strolls, an olfactory world of irresistible and erotic scents: the neighbor’s dog in heat, a cat’s regurgitated fur ball, a rotting sandwich thrown carelessly behind a stone. These remains, either invisible or insignificant to my senses, were treasures to my dog, causing him to lift a leg and mark the surrounding poison sumac and nettle with his inaccurate stream of piss, failing to hit the target one morning because his front legs suddenly collapsed beneath him. Despite having to use his elbow joints as provisional paws, he continued his languorous investigation of that patch of earth, adapting to his physical handicap without flinching; sniffing and then swooning with pleasure from the scent of a pepperoni-pizza slice beneath an azalea bush; forgetting that his legs, his eyes, his bowels were slowly failing him.
“Shouldn’t I wait until he dies naturally?”
“No,” say the veterinarian, the friend, the checkout girl at the supermarket.
“They never really do just drop dead,” says the vet. “They seem to hold on until it becomes unbearable to watch.”
The thought of having to determine the right time of death for my beloved pet, the point at which his joy for life is outweighed by his diseased and deteriorating body, is overwhelming. On one of the many visits we make to the vet so Harpo can be injected with steroids, Yvonne, the veterinary assistant, slyly hands me a brochure on my way out. Her action is perfectly timed so that I don’t have a chance to look at the brochure and break down weeping once more before entering the street. A shamelessly born-again Christian, Yvonne told me this morning that Jesus would want me to let Harpo go, and “after all, Jesus is our director, isn’t he?” It isn’t until I get into the car that I see she has handed me an advertisement for a local pet cemetery. On the cover is a glossy photo of a handsome, graying couple tenderly pondering casket options: pine or mahogany, silk lining or dashing Scottish plaid.
Back home, I pull out The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sögyal Rinpoche, and open it to the chapter devoted to euthanasia. According to Rinpoche, even the fanatical right-wing Buddhist sects, with their strict taboos against terminating any life — even an insect’s — sanctify the compassionate “encouragement” of the soul’s release from a disease-ravaged body. The danger lies, Rinpoche says, in taking action too soon and thus perpetuating negative karma. The trick is to identify the moment at which the body is no longer able to serve the mind, the possibility for achieving Buddha consciousness or enlightenment being the only reason that we have come here in the first place.
I once believed in this concept — or, at least, the idea of it helped to fend off those fearful waves of existential panic that have haunted me since my teens, usually brought on when the comfortable line between meaning and absurdity mysteriously disappears. After I had a near-death experience at sixteen (mixture of alcohol and quaaludes), it seemed absolutely crucial to find a religion, a cultural appendage through which to funnel my macabre fascination with death. Mormonism, the religion I’d grown up with in Salt Lake City, was forever closed to me because my parents had been excommunicated — the penalty for getting divorced after having been married in the Temple.
Growing up, my five siblings and I had been allowed to keep pets of all kinds: an Amazon parrot, a woolly monkey, an iguana that disappeared into the lemon orchards behind our home in Santa Barbara, California, a boa constrictor, guinea pigs, a blind rabbit, and an array of stray dogs and cats. But my mother, a glamorous Sophia Loren look-alike, suffered from severe manic depression and had a habit of giving our pets away without warning. This bestowed upon all six of us a life-long condition the school psychologists termed “attachment disorder.”
In my early teens, I failed to embrace Unitarianism, my mother’s chosen path, after the minister caught me French-kissing his twenty-two-year-old son. At nineteen, I got a loan from Bank of America and ran off to India to study Hinduism at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh. From there I took a train to visit Mother Teresa’s Hospital for the Dying and Destitute in Calcutta, where I was depressed and horrified by the brutality and waste of deep-seated poverty. Violently ill with amoebic dysentery, I decided to do my soul-searching closer to home.
I returned to Berkeley and sought out a Tibetan lama for meditation instruction, but lost my virginity to him instead. Even worse, I got pregnant. My distraught brother-in-law paid for the abortion, as the lama was forbidden to marry. In the eyes of strict Tibetan Buddhists, I had committed a heinous sin by having an abortion and had accrued God-knows-how-many reincarnations in which to burn off my bad karma. In the end, I decided to bypass religion altogether and become a poet. Many years later, after a heartbreaking divorce, I declared myself agnostic and found that animal companionship provided the most comfort and solace in my sometimes bewildering spiritual life.
I ACQUIRED Harpo at seven months, sight unseen, from a breeder who was devastated to find that this beautiful boxer specimen had a fatal genetic flaw: a set of testicles that would not descend. His ears and tail had already been cut for show and were bound in tape when I picked him up. When I had him examined, the vet railed against the ear and tail bobbing, calling it a “barbaric practice” that should be banned. I wondered what I had gotten myself into and imagined ducking stones thrown by fulminating animal-rights activists as Harpo and I strolled down Solano Avenue in Berkeley on our daily walks.
Nevertheless, I saw to it that Harpo was properly socialized at the Point, a dog park where hundreds of faithful owners let their canine pals casually mix and play with their own kind. The park jutted out into the San Francisco Bay and was divided in half by a narrow channel whose waters were continuously filled with four-legged swimmers retrieving frisbees or tennis balls or limp and gnawed pieces of rope. Everyone observed an unspoken code of animal civility: all breeds were welcome, but not dogs who lunged at strangers or picked fights at random. If an animal or its human companion got too aggressive, a large group of aging Berkeleyites would swiftly surround them and insist that they leave. The ex-hippies obviously relished their new role as undercover dog police.
Sundays at the Point looked like a brilliant Seurat painting. The subculture of dog owners and their pets created a multicultural panorama unlike any other I have seen. Wealthy owners with thoroughbreds mixed happily with children from the local housing project playing with their prize pit bulls or mutts; judges and lawyers compared shepherd breeds with gangbangers wearing colors of red or blue. When conversation arose between owners, however, it was always about the breed or age or name of one’s pet.
Almost never did anyone ask, “What’s your name?” The experience taught me just how hesitant people can be to form bonds with their own kind, how afraid of random intimacy. Unlike our animal companions, who voraciously slobber over the new dog on the block, we stand on the sidelines in bashful silence, vicariously indulging in our dogs’ sexually charged curiosity.
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