Sam
the first famlily dog
Mary our four year old, rolled over and said, "She'll come back as a mean dog, monster dog"! This was 11:50 pm, October 8th, 1998, about a half hour after I would normally be taking her from our bed to her bed. For the last 6 months, Renee would sit on our bed doing her homework while Mary laid and watched cartoons until she fell asleep. I would be down on the computer or feeding the fish, adding Kalkwasser and R/O water to make up for evaporation in the reef tank, before I would come to put Mary in her own bed. Mary would sleep until, about 2:30 then she would crawl back in our bed around 2:00 to 2:30 each night.
Well this night, I would not be attempting to get her to sleep in her own bed, which proved prudent as she tossed and turned and talked throughout the night. In one of those plaintive outbursts she explained, "We should bury Dee Dee at the cemetery next to Christy, not in the backyard." I explained that dogs were not allowed to be buried in a people cemetery. I laid there troubled, unable to sleep, wondering what must be going through the mind of our little child. The phone rings, and from Renee's half of the conversation I gather that Jim is asking to stay overnight at BJ's rather then come home after they watched their movie. Abruptly and with concern in her voice, Renee asks, "Are you ok, Jim?". He apparently claimed to be, considering the almost immediate response, of; "Don't stay too long in the morning, come home early, you need to help with watching Mary, as there is no school again tomorrow, because of UEA.
As Renee got up to lock the back door, Mary sat up begging for mom to; "take me with you". I reached up and took Mary in my arms, and snuggled her and held her head to my chest, in as comforting gesture as possible. Mary is usually very much a mama's girl, and likes to play a game where she will not give me any hugs or kisses unless her lips are slathered with lipstick. Mary usually giggles wildly as she tries to spread as much lipstick on me as possible. This was a different night and a different mood as she willingly snuggled next to me, until mother returned.
Mary was very preoccupied about what might happen if Dee Dee woke up, crying "she'll have dust in her eyes, she will not be able to see. The dust, the dust!" Later Renee made the connection, and after some thought, so did I.
That afternoon had been like so many others, car pooling home, pausing in the driveway, trying to work out details of how the grown ups could go to Private Ryan that night for my birthday, and find some place to take Mary where she would be happy and safe.
Renee asked me what I wanted for dinner, and I had only suggestions of what I didn't want. I went in the bedroom hunting down the leftovers of a large Hershey's Krackle bar that my brother, Girk had given me for my birthday. I had been very good about not eating junk food for two weeks, but I was rationalizing a nibble before dinner. I could not find it. I came out to accuse the kids of eating my birthday present and I found Jim cleaning up, an all to frequent doo doo from Dee Dee on the wood insert I had put in place of carpet, just inside the front door.
I turned away from Jim so as not to get involved in the clean up of "HIS DOG". He had complained a quite a few times about having to be the ONLY one to clean up Dee Dee's "mistakes". Jim had been doing well, and Dee Dee for the most part had been doing somewhat better during the last month. Just that week we had rededicated Jim to the difficult task of retraining Dee Dee.
When we picked the dog out, I was in favor of getting this dog, because it was part Rat Terrier, part Poodle and Cocker Spaniel. We had a Rat Terrier before, and was a fun loving and territorial dog. If anyone as much as shook hands with us at the door Sam, our previous dog, was ready to bark their heads off. And like Dee Dee, Sam was a chewer. They both chewed on everything, bit the heads off Barbies, Pocahontas, anything plastic. They nipped at your socks and made quilt filling out of any stuffed animal that was not on a shelf at lest five feet in the air.
Sam
the first famlily dog
When we got new carpet over a year ago, Sam continued to "mark" her territory inside the house. After a few weeks of warning, and no change by Sam, I put my foot down on the new damp carpet and insisted that the Sam must go. We found a wonderful family for her, but we don't ask them about their carpets. This decision did not make me at all popular with ANY of the family. I was in the dog house for months, for that decision. Whenever someone mentioned Sam, I felt like I was back in the dog house again. So this time I searched the Internet and read up on dog training, and found this little dog cage and instructions how the cages were almost fool proof for training your dog.
I knew that we were getting into another dog that had some of the bad traits that Sam had, but I kind of liked the way Sam would bark her head off at everyone that came to the house. If I liked the people being there, I would try to calm Sam down, if I didn't I would just pretend that I had no influence over her yapping and snipping and snapping. Dee Dee was different, she had VERY sharp teeth and was more of a puppy when we got her. She was NOT trained at all. Not as loyal or defensive as Sam, but just as playful, if not more.
When you got her wound up, and sometimes even on her own, she would run in circles, faster and faster, making Velcro like sounds with her toe nails in the carpet. Sometimes running in large circles, other times very small. She would go spinning and spinning , and then leaping for her tail, snapping loudly, as she bit the air or the hairy tip of her tail. Sometimes she would run from one room to the other, diving under the carved legs of Renee's Grandmothers low sitting Victorian style sofa, with barely enough head and body clearance to fit under the front molding when her legs were retracted.
Dee Dee would also raced around in circles on the front lawn and back lawn, faster than any dog I had ever seen. Just the night before, Renee and I were tossing a little bean bag between us as Dee Dee would leap high into the air. For a dog that was barely over one foot tall she caught some great air. She would run towards one of us and we tossed it as high as she could barely reach, she would swing her head and body around quickly, to attempt to change direction to follow and grab the bag. She did this for about 15 minutes, we tired before Dee Dee did.
Sometimes she would race across the road, and run in circles there. A few times when she would cross the street we would try to punish her for going into the road, but she would think it was a game. When we tried to catch her to put her back on her chain, she would run from us, then circle back towards us, running right at us only to dart right or left at the last second, as we bent over to pick her up. She was a free spirit and oblivious to scolding. So when we would get home from work we would disconnect her from the leash connected to a roller on a cable and she would take off on the run, very fast. If we were in the back yard and she was tied to her runner, she would whine and whine, to have us let her free to run. Rarely we could resist the temptation.
That day, I clearly remember Mary screaming as she was standing on the pouch. Usually that meant Sam, oh I mean Dee Dee, had jumped up on her and scratched her arm or licked her face or grabbed some toast out of Mary's hand. I sensed that something was different, as no follow up scolding was forth coming. I moved faster than normal towards Mary, who was crying, "Dee Dee has been run over by a car". The look of terror on Mary's face told me this was something real. I looked out into the road and a car was stopped in front of the neighbors house and the neighbors across the street were all looking towards the back of the car that was now parked in the street.
Mary wanted to run to Dee Dee, but I stopped her, and told her to wait right there. Instantly I felt the need to be the best Daddy on the planet for the next five minutes. Jim was already at his dogs side when I got in view of the accident. Dee Dee's little jumping legs were spread out. She was laying on her back with her neck twisted with no movement or signs of any life at all. A closer look revealed thick blood coming out of one ear. Jim stood over her motionless.
I was approached by the driver, who by bizarre misfortune to him was an acquaintance that lived in my Stake and a person that I had played basketball with and who also worked in the same department as I did at Nu Skin. He apologized that he had came around the corner and the dog ran out in front of him and he tried to stop, but could not stop fast enough. His (14ish year old) daughter was very pail and I felt so bad for the two of them that they had been traumatized so unexpectedly like this. I tried to explain that we had tried to train the dog, but were not completely successful. I tried to explain how the dog was so fast and that it was not his fault, when Mary came up curiously looking for Dee Dee. I picked her up and introduced him as a friend that I worked with, and that he tried to stop, but that was why we are never to go out into the road without an adult there to help you cross the street.
All the while I watched Jim out of the corner of one eye and
the man's terrified daughter out of the other. I begged off our
conversation to go get something to retrieve Dee Dee from the
street and to tell Renee what had happened. It is strange how
the mind works in situations like this, as I thought that I must
get a shovel as to not get any maggots or bacteria on me. Then
I thought, that is silly, there couldn't be any maggots, she has
only been dead less than a minute. How odd that I was now leery
of touching her, when for 6 months there had barely been a day
where she had not chewed on my hand and licked me on the face
to greet me in the morning.
Deedee
I walked into the house and called for Renee. I quickly told her that Dee Dee had run into the street and was hit by a car and is dead. She asked, are you sure she is dead? "I am sure", I replied. "Where is Jim", she asked. "With Dee Dee", I replied. "I'm going to get something to get her off the street", I said. Renee suggested a box and to use the wheelbarrow. I brought the wheelbarrow around, and was met by a neighbor who had a box, in her hand. She must have been talking to Renee. Mary saw her two little neighbor girl friends and ran to tell them what had happened to Dee Dee.
James had moved Dee Dee to the sidewalk. I placed my hand on Dee Dee's chest, which was still warm but very motionless. I picked Dee Dee up by the legs and put her in a box. I took her to the side of the house by my Geraniums, where I don't run the rototiller at all.
I retrieved two shovels from the shed, and started digging a plot. After I had dug about a foot and half, while still wearing my dress shoes and slacks, I turned it over to Jim, thinking that more participation in the process may be healing for his loss. As I paced around the yard trying to collect my thoughts, I picked up an apple off that had fallen off the tree. I took one of the shovels and scooped up a large shovel full of ashes from underneath our often used, rusted $5. "DI" special BBQ grill, that I bought some 10 years ago.
I went over to the wheelbarrow, reached down in the box and removed the special red collar off Dee Dee's body, noticing again that her body was still warm. I touched her chest again for a sign of a feeble heart beat, but there was none. I unsnapped the part of the collar that went behind her front legs and tried to remove the front part of the collar that went in front of her legs and around her neck, all the time trying not to get blood on it or on my hands. I did not succeed in removing it without getting more blood on the collar or on my hands or handling Dee Dee too much to the point of reinforcing just how much she was lifeless.
I took the collar in the house and washed it up, to keep as a memento of our family friend. I could not get some hair to wash off the collar. As I looked closer I noticed that the hair was fused to the nylon collar by, what must have been, friction against the road. I got a sharp knife and cut into the nylon, removing the impregnated hair, all the time, trying not to allow the analytical part of my mind to think exactly how that might have happened. There are some things I don't really need to know.
About an hour after the grave side, I noticed Jim taking the collar off the counter where it was drying and putting it into Dee Dee's cage. The same cage that was littered bits of chewed up cardboard from shoe boxes, that we used to make the cage the right size for Dee Dee to sleep in, but not allow the her cage to be large enough to walk around in and mark in.
The attention span of children is amazing, as I tried to gather the family together to put Dee Dee to rest, Mary was at the next door neighbors playing and laughing with the neighbor girls, as if what had happen 20 minutes previous had no effect on her ability to have fun with friends.
Mary's friends came over and joined us in a semicircle around the grave, and I was asking them not to play their new whistles for a while. Steve came down the street, from being with at a friend's house. As we called him over, the look on his face indicated that he knew that something was happening. From the look on our faces, and a glance at the whole and the box sitting in the wheelbarrow, Steve knew what was in the box, without looking. H his face grew ashen with the realization.
A small dish rag, not ours, had blown into our yard and I placed it in the bottom of the hole for Dee Dee to lay on. "We are gathered here to put Dee Dee in her final resting place", I said with a certain amount of uncertainty, as my life long propensity for nonconformity has always excluded me from the ranks of those that conduct, verses those that mutter on the back row.
I picked up the box, not knowing how to place Dee Dee in her grave without dangling her body in a lifeless position or dropping her two feet into a whole. I tipped the box over slowly covering up the whole and obscuring the drop from the tender eyes of all. When I lifted up the box, she slid into the bottom of the grave, as if asleep, but with her neck twisted, unnaturally. Unfortunately she lay there with the bloody ear, face up. Mary commented that Dee Dee had blood on her. I went on and did not comment on her accurate and painful observation.
"In the ancient days of Egypt the important people were buried with food or objects that they enjoyed during their lives", I squeaked out, through a cracking voice. "So I place this apple in here as a symbol of food and toys that Dee Dee liked to chew and paw and play with", I said, as I laid the apple beside Dee Dee.
I retrieved the rose which I had previously picked from the rose bush, the only one on the vine, at this late time of the year. It was in full bloom, just before the outer peddles start to wilt. The rose bushes were bought from money given me by my parents and brother and sisters, as a remembrance of our baby Christy Lynne. I plucked a peddle from the yellow and pink rose and let it float down upon Dee Dee. I then passed it to Steve standing to my right in our semicircle, and indicated to him to do the same. At first Steve seemed startled as if I was going to call on him to talk, but quickly caught on.
When all the grown ups had done so, Renee bent over and asked Mary to go next. She resisted, as her playful mood of 10 minutes ago was gone and returned was her feelings of worry and sadness. After some explaining and comfort, she too plucked a peddle from the lovely rose along with the neighbor girls, and dropped them in the grave.
I then retrieved the shoveled, unrehearsed, without notes, uttered the following; "We all come from existing matter, from the earth". I held the shovel over the grave and shook some of the powdery gray ash into the hole, saying; "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and from the dust we came, unto the dust we shall return, that we may rise in the resurrection and be a family together again." I cast the remaining ashes into the grave, causing small whirling dark clouds to hover over and obscure any remaining view of Dee Dee.
The words, apparently to others, came freely from my mouth, but the feelings were indeed ambivalent. I used to incorrectly think of ambivalence as meaning indifference or apathy having mostly drawn the meaning from context and probably misuse by others around me. I have since looked up the correct meaning as of late, my life has had way too many mixed or conflicted feelings. This was an intense ambivalent moment. For in my mind at that point in my life, I had doubts to the reality of any resurrections, especially the resurrection of members of the animal Kingdom. But in my heart, I wanted to heal the tender and moaning hearts of my loved ones. Isn't this the saving grace of religion, to give meaning to a child, to the tragic happenstance's of life? To give comfort and consolation, when life offers up chaos, confusion, and injustice to the innocent children and their impetuous pets? This was not a right brain, moment, but an opportunity to heal and bond.
I took a shovel of the pile of dirt and started filling in
the hole. When it was about three quarters full, I handed the
shovel to Jim to have him put in a few shovels of dirt. He was
in an emotional state standing still and quietly crying streams
of tears. I prodded him to be involved in the family ritual that
we were creating. He put a few more spades of dirt in the gave
and passed it around. Again Mary was reluctant to put dirt on
top of where Dee Dee lay, but with help from Renee, she was able
to break out of the role of an observer to be a participant. I
finished up making a mound, where once was flat soil. I ended
the gathering by placing the rose on top of the mound.
I then said I would like to say a few of the things that I loved about Dee Dee. I had kept my composure pretty well up until that point. "I remember when we picked out Dee Dee from the pet store, I knew that she was a breed of dog that would cause mischief and maybe incessant yapping", which it turned out the yapping was not one of her negative characteristics. I continued, "In spite of what I knew would be bad things she would do, I felt that she would be..." I was crying a this point and had a hard time saying, "playful and fun". I went on to say what I liked about Dee Dee and what I would miss about her. Steve was next and as usual tried to stay a little aloof as he often does, but he participated. Mary simply said she liked playing with Dee Dee. Renee was emotional as she was often the 1st line of defense when it came to seeing that Dee Dee had water, food and warmth, as she does with the rest of the family. Jim had the hardiest time, because it was his dog, in spite of all the times we enjoyed her. When Dee Dee would shred a Kleenex all over the room, it became Jim's dog again.
At the end I took the opportunity to reinforced to Mary and the neighbor kids the importance of not crossing the street unless an adult is present. Just three weeks ago, Mary and the younger neighbor girl Ashland, had crossed the street to play with a stray dog. Mary crossed the street without looking for cars, and Ashland darted a moment later, causing a car to quickly stop and wait for her.
I felt as if the service had gone very well even though I had thought of going into the house to retrieve a few things such as Dee Dee's, rawhide chewing sticks or the under used plastic chewing bone, or a well used toy, but decided against something that would make it too emotional for Jim.
I have a different relationship with each of my Children. Tiscia seems to be growing closer to me as she matures. Steve and I have the most in common, but more often than not, such similarities cause more conflict than camaraderie. Mary and I have special times together, mostly when Mommy is out of town. James tries the hardiest to please me, except when it comes to doing chores. As his mother puts it, he has always been the most tender hearted.
A few years ago in his preteen years, on a rare occasion, when Jim was going somewhere, he would give me a hug and a kiss. The frequency lessened when he got older. At some point I felt that he was too old for the kiss part. I still have seared in my brain the image of a High school friend, as I picked him up to got to Mutual, we were Seniors in high school at that time, as we left his house to go to the church, he went up and give his dad a kiss good-bye. On the LIPS!!!!
I don't have any childhood memories of my dad kissing me and I don't know if I want to either, not that there is anything wrong with that. I didn't grow up in an affectionate family, and don't remember my dad hugging me, at any particular time, but I am sure he did a few times. I once talked to Renee about this and voiced concern that I didn't want to be cold towards Jim, but I felt that he was too old to be kissing me anymore. Hey I even went on my mission to Italy, but didn't kiss any men on the cheek and wasn't allowed to kiss the women. Renee suggested that I talk to Jim about this. I even sought advice from Internet friends but drew a blank. What I didn't want to have happen to Jim was to have him feel like he didn't have the love an affection from his father. And I didn't want to be too affectionate the way my high school friend was with his dad.
I realize that being gay is a very hard lifestyle with little
or no approval from anyone, but those of the same disposition,
or maybe one or two blood relatives. I would not want to wish
that kind of social marginalization on another human being let
alone my own child. So a few years ago, Jim and I had this very
awkward talk about how it is ok with me if people are gay. Followed
by, you are too old to kiss your dad, and the two are not related.
He went away thinking I was indeed odd, he may have even thought
for a very short moment that I might be gay, who knows. It was
probably very confusing to combing the to talks at the same time.
For the last few years, when Jim had felt I may be not paying
attention to him enough and he was feeling lonely he would sneak
up on me from behind, usually when he is off to sleep over at
friends and he would give me a hug and a kiss on the cheek, while
I'm at the computer, before I can have a chance to react. It has
become a little game of his, that he grew out of a few years later.
As the 14 year old teenager, James walked away from behind the back of the car where Dee Dee lay with her legs in the air and neck twisted, I approached him. His shoulders were rounded and hunched over, his eyes red and moist, as much as I could tell, behind his glasses and baseball cap. I reached out my arms to embrace him, saying softly, "Now is a good time for a hug".
The last family dog Milo.
P.S. A few months later James asked if we could get another
dog, we couldn't day no to him.
Ciao Perry
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