THIS ABOVE ALL
Musings After the Death of a Dog

Polly Ann Brown

How are we educated by children, by animals! —Martin Buber

I am haunted by the feeling that I have allowed something besides my little dog, Cinder, to slip away. I click through the sequence of events leading to her death like rosary beads. I am in search of some nagging thing. I figure, in time, I will be able to isolate it from the pure grief that follows naturally the loss of a trusted friend.

Cinder was 11 when diagnosed with lung disease. My neighbor, a veterinarian, offered to euthanize her at home.

“When do we do it?” I asked.

“You’ll know,” she said, adding, “I don’t believe in hospice for dogs.”

We were going away for the summer. I hinted to my husband that maybe we could take Cinder with us. His look I took for an answer. I told myself it would be too hard on Cinder—the long trip, the adjustment to apartment living. Our plans were made: we had commitments. With the date of our departure approaching, Cinder’s breathing seemed more labored. I called the vet and asked if I could give Cinder a pill to relax her. The vet replied that no, she would give Cinder a tranquilizer by injection before putting her down. “It’s a painless, peaceful process,” she said.

It was not a painless, peaceful process. Cinder yelped at the needle’s stab, wailed over the ache of medicine seeping through deep muscle. The vet was chagrined. “I’m used to big dogs,” she explained.

My friend and I buried Cinder beneath a boxwood in the backyard. My friend said, “You did the right thing. You couldn’t go off for the summer and leave her with someone when she was so sick. You had a deadline.”

I mentioned the injection. I couldn’t shake it off.

“It’s a brain snag,” my friend noted. “It’s part of grief. If your brain wasn’t snagging on the injection, it would find something else to snag on.” “Let it go,” my friend said each time I brought it up.

The next day my husband and I drove to our summer apartment. The further we pushed on in the car, the more I felt like I was being vacuumed up by a powerful riptide, sucked out to sea.

Adrift for weeks, I become, by turns, sad and numb yet curiously waiting for an answer without even knowing the question. I turn to writers who give me the bad news, who ask questions that make me feel as if I can breathe no matter how in over my head I am. That’s how hearing bad news affects me right now. I don’t want cheering up.

“It’s rough out there and chancey,” declares Annie Dillard. “Cruelty is a mystery,” she writes, after vividly detailing the consumption of a small frog by a giant water beetle. In the Koran, Allah asks, “The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?” Annie Dillard says, “It’s a good question.”

I am like a castaway facing the starkest of realities, asking the most basic of questions, needing to begin again, critiquing everything I have said I believe.

We go to church and my brain snags on the words the preacher uses to identify himself. “I am an Orthodox Presbyterian,” and of this way of presenting himself, says, “It doesn’t get any better.” Through the years, I have crossed many denominational boundaries and have heard (and used) words that, in one form or another, create “us” and “them.” I leave, walk away, knowing I will never return to this church.

There is a seed of future promise in my bottom-line existence, my new-found determination to let go of anything that no longer rings true or fair. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, I want to become real. Nothing short of honesty will do.

In this phase of radical reflection, looking back over my life, I see how I leaped from one movement to another, took on large calamities, systemic injustices: a famine in Ethiopia, racism in the United States, misuse of the medical model in education in students’ lives, a war in the Gulf.

I notice, now, that in all of these, there had to be a villain, someone to blame and dehumanize. There were two sides, a right side and a wrong side. I was on the right side, the side of justice. In my pursuit, there was no capacity for imagining the merit in the other side. Another thing I notice: All those battles were waged on behalf of someone else’s well-being, never my own.

My world shrinks as I think about how I sometimes treat the person in front of me. I judge and criticize my husband without trying to imagine where he is coming from. I don’t have the courage to tell my mother something she doesn’t even know is still a barrier between us. I bite my tongue when one of my grown children almost pleads with me to speak. I can’t even manage my dog’s demise without bungling.

A wise woman I know asks me, “And why would you expect to find peace and justice outside if it can’t be in your tiny group, between you and the one in front of you?” It’s a good question.

I remember the exact location, the intersection where, 20 years ago, in a car, a friend, dying of cancer, said, “I never question God.” We rode on in silence.

I have never known how to reconcile the reality of suffering—the Holocaust, Hiroshima—with the notion of an all-powerful, all-loving, a totally in-charge, sovereign God.

And then, while rehashing how it went with Cinder’s death, a friend says, “Sounds as if it wasn’t your choice.” The words stoke their way into some inmost nerve. After she leaves, I think about what she has said.

I could have stayed with Cinder until she could not longer put her head down for lack of breath, or decided that, under no circumstances, would I let her suffer that much. There are moments I should drop everything—Stop right here!—take all the time I need to think about what another says and what I think. When the vet said she didn’t believe in hospice for dogs was such a moment.

And how is it that a look becomes a factor in my decision-making? My husband is a reasonable man. I could have arranged for Cinder to spend the summer with us. And why didn’t I insist on giving Cinder something by mouth to relax her?

My hunches are usually good ones. It’s possible I could have given Cinder two more fairly decent months, or longer. I’ll never know: I accepted other’s views, looked around, failed to look within. I yielded when I didn’t want to yield, gave up my own authority (and secretly blamed those to whom I had yielded).

Cinder was my dog. This was no time for compromise. I betrayed Cinder. I betrayed myself. This was a time, is time, to step up to the plate!

“This above all:” said Shakespeare, “to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night, the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Thomas Merton asked himself what he feared most. His answer: “Forgetting and ignorance of the inmost truth of my being. To forget who I am, to be lost in what I am not, to fail my own inner truth, to get carried away in what is not true to me, what imposes itself on me from the outside.”

In the church, I have heard little of what Shakespeare and Merton are pointing to here. I have been well-schooled in the need to love and to serve, that it is better to give than to receive.

Yet biblical shalom is about right relationships with God, self, and others. And right relationships are about justice: genuine mutuality and reciprocity, knowing and being known. Summing up the law and the prophets, Jesus said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

This is not the way of duty or one-sided paternalism, ways which often barely hide subliminal hostility, resentment, a sense of superiority.

Huckleberry Finn, believing he’d go to hell for helping his friend Jim, a slave, journey toward freedom, said, “Alright then, I’ll go to hell.” At the most, knowledge of self, claiming one’s own authority, commitment to one’s own heart, to God’s heart, might mean laying one’s life down for another.

At the least, it might mean making the best possible choices about the care of another.

How like my dog Cinder to drive the point home.

—Polly Ann Brown lives in Philadelphia with her husband, Ken. They are members of Norristown (Pa.) New Life Mennonite church. Polly Ann, a semi-retired educator, is writing a children’s book and planning another book encouraing ongoing dialogue among communities, families, educators, and students. She is housebreaking a new puppy. Lois Schlabach, the friend referred to above, deserves thanks for comments that improved the article.