Cherished (2 page)

I wrote about his death on my blog, saying how much I had loved him and how hard I was grieving for him. I received a lot of comments, including one from a veterinarian friend who suggested there should be an anthology of such pieces about the love and loss of an animal. I realized this was the kind of book I wanted to read — how other animal lovers got through their loss, how they made meaning out of it. Grieving for an animal can be a pretty lonely place.

So I wrote to writers whose work I admired, both friends and strangers, and asked if they'd contribute essays for this book. Everybody responded, passionate about the stories of their animals — the funny, crazy parts, as well as the grief at the end of the animal's life or when they had to give the animal up for reasons beyond their control. They brought so many different angles to my original idea that this anthology grew deeper and far richer than I had originally imagined.

I
'VE ALWAYS LIVED WITH AN ANIMAL
— or multiple animals. When my daughters were growing up, we had three dogs, four cats, and a rabbit. One of the dogs was a Newfound-land named Jennifer who was the size of a small bear and loved to sleep in our bed with her huge head on the down pillows. One of the cats, Crazy Alice, insisted on sleeping in our bathroom sink. Another cat, Yeager, got hit by a car, had his pelvis crushed and rebuilt, along with an expensive tail amputation, and then, after he recovered, raced out into traffic again to have his jaw shattered, and once more survived. (Our cats then became indoor cats.) And Sidney, the youngest of the cat gang, would fish tampon tubes out of wastepaper baskets and then appear jauntily holding one in his mouth as if smoking a cigarette.

Then there was Winesburg — the cat I rescued in New
York when I was still a teenager. When she died almost two decades later, we had been on a long journey together, both in miles and time — half my life in fact.

Here's the thing about losing animals: they take a piece of your life with them when they die. They love the best in you, they share your days and nights, and then they're gone and there's a hole in your life — this vanished past they've taken with them.

In California I live with two elderly cats, Stuart and Charlotte, who joined me as kittens when I was newly divorced and then became my bridge through single life to a second marriage. They're now eighteen years old. Stuart, the bon vivant of the feline world, has failing kidneys, and Charlotte, his shy sister, is diabetic, requiring two insulin shots a day. I worry about them. But I think one of the lessons animals can teach you is how to live in the moment; and at this moment, as I type these words, they're happily sprawled on my desk, purring in the sun.

Last summer when I returned to Montana, I visited Robin's grave out in the pasture by the river — this dear valiant horse whose gentleness and patience gave me the gift of knowing and loving a horse, who made me a whole lot braver than I actually was. I remembered how he smelled of wind and hay, the softness behind his ears, the way he'd nuzzle me when he hadn't seen me for a while — and gratitude began to move the sadness out of my heart.

I
N THE FOLLOWING PAGES,
twenty-one writers put into words what it's like to love an animal — in all its joy, frustration, craziness, humor, grief, and gratitude.

During World War II, Joe Morgenstern's parents found a unique way to get rid of his beloved childhood dog: he remembers how Mr. Fluff was enrolled in Dogs for Defense for the war effort. Billy Mernit, though terrified of pit bulls, fell in love with his new wife's pit bull, Molly, and, he writes, “I was her dutiful bitch in no time.” Jane Smiley sat by her horse's body after he was put down, and writes of staying with him “long enough to recognize that he was not there, that this body was like a car he had driven and now had gotten out of.”

Judith Lewis Mernit's two dogs, who died within a week of each other at age seventeen, taught her about conflict, love, and loyalty, causing her to revise what she thought she knew of their relationship and what she herself knew about love. Robin Romm found a stray she adored who embodied hope for her, but she had to give the puppy up when her other dog, named Mercy, terrorized it. When one of Thomas McGuane's horses had to be put down, his veterinarian told him that “we had to change our perspective and try to understand that animals accept what happens to them. And it's not as if they don't know. They know.” Jenny Rough fell in love with a photograph of an old cat with kidney disease up for adoption on the Internet, and learned something important about herself from her obsession with her virtual cat.

When her dog died at home, Anne Lamott felt that “something huge, a tide, had washed in, and then washed out.” Carolyn See remembers the coyote mix who appeared, starving and thin, in the canyon where she lived, and how with
time and love, Isha became part of the family, turning into a coyote diva and turning Carolyn's daughter Lisa into a love slave. Michael Chitwood, preparing for his new creative writing class by finding quotes about “why we write and what the real subjects of writing should be,” periodically went out to check on his ailing sixteen-year-old cat, The General. “The General's story will be concluded,” he writes, “but it won't be finished. That may be the truest thing about a story. Even when it's over, it's not over.”

I
F YOU'RE AN ANIMAL LOVER,
you have stories. I hope our stories deepen and confirm your understanding and love of animals, entertain you and make you laugh, and also comfort you if you've recently lost a pet. C.S. Lewis once wrote, “We read to know we are not alone.” On the following pages are the stories of kindred souls who have cherished their animals, mourned their deaths, and eventually learned from them what's truly important in life.

W
hen my life partner, John Espey, and I first moved into a new little house in Topanga Canyon, we found ourselves out in the sticks — literally. It was a rough part of the canyon, arid, parched, unwelcoming. John killed maybe six rattlesnakes in the first two weeks. Tarantulas jumped in the basement. Scorpions were plentiful. It was, as my old Texan dad would say, hotter than a policeman's pistol. My daughters, eighteen-year-old Lisa and eight-year-old Clara, were highly skeptical of the whole project. I think we all had second thoughts in those first weeks. This was the first time we'd tried to live together as a family.

Raccoons, possum, more snakes of the harmless kind. Our house was at the top of a cliff, at one end of a crescent of raw earth. From the back our view was literally endless. In front, a narrow road ended in a cul-de-sac. Every night at the end of the crescent, maybe a dozen coyotes gathered to howl. And there was another animal, not readily identifiable
— probably half coyote, half German shepherd — starved down to the bone, cowering, skulking, skidding back into the underbrush whenever she saw one of us looking at her. But she began to look marginally better after a few weeks. That was because separately we'd all been feeding her on the sly.

John named her Isha, a feminization of the Indian name Ishi, which was the name of the last member of an Indian tribe that Kroeber, the anthropologist, had immortalized. But Isha had it better than Ishi, by far. Since she played so infernally hard to get (what else could she do, really? She was wild, she was mad as a March hare), we competed slavishly for her attention, talking baby talk to her, handing her little treats, trying mightily to get her to eat from our hands. All this took weeks. And it took over a year to coax her inside the house. People anthropomorphize their pets all the time, and it's a trait I scorn in others, but it was hard not to project human meaning on her diva ways. She was mistress of the injured look. She cringed every time she got near John, until he raised his voice to a falsetto. “She must have been mistreated when she was young,” he said, but who was really to know? She'd already had one litter of pups before we knew her; during that first year when she prowled the borders of our house, she had another — she ate a few and squashed the rest. She had a different frame of mind than the rest of us.

Finally she'd come inside the house, but the house was tall and narrow — three stories. The living room was eight steps up from the kitchen: what a production to cajole and wheedle
and generally carry on to get her to the living room level! We all adored her, but her plain favorite was Lisa, who was as hard to get as she was; they spent time giving each other scornful looks. But then as we'd be watching television, John and I on one couch, Lisa and Clara on the other, Isha would come up and lay her head on Lisa's knee. Lisa would reciprocate by bopping Isha on her snout (can't there be a prettier word for the space between a dog's eyes and her nose?), bopping her gently but negligently, then doing it with more and more decision, until it might have been called abuse by an animal rescue person, but Isha loved it, pushing her head up under Lisa's hand, wanting more. It had a particular sound, like a champagne cork coming out; celebratory.

Stories about pets often carry something silly and intrinsically embarrassing about them. Lisa, a bestselling novelist now, used to spend fifteen minutes bopping Isha's nose, while we all watched fondly? Unimaginable, really. But once, when I was cleaning up the living room, Isha was sitting on the couch and I wanted to sweep off the dog hair. I said “Down, Isha,” and said it again. And again. Then I put my hand to her body to give her a little shove. She laid back her ears and snarled, showing all her teeth, and she wasn't a dog anymore. She was Isha, and she could lie on the couch as much as she wanted. She was also Isha when the coyotes, about ten o'clock at night, would gather in the cul-de-sac or out on the crescent and howl, and Isha, living her dog life, would pause on a landing and pitch back her head and howl along with them. I would watch the hair on my forearms rise up.

One morning a Chinese moving man brought a new easy chair for the living room. The house, as I've said, was on three levels — the kitchen at ground level, then eight steps up to the living room, then another eight to where the bedrooms were. The chair was enormous, and John helped him push and pull the thing from the kitchen level up those first eight stairs. John took the “up” side, pulling the chair with all his might. The moving man took the “down” side, pushing the chair up. His muscles strained; his legs were bowed. Isha was outside, but the door to the house was open. As I watched from the kitchen, she sped past me so quickly I couldn't focus on her, ran up about four stairs and chomped down from behind on the mover's defenseless crotch. Then she hurtled back out again.

The mover, in the living room by this time, let out an ungodly yowl and yanked down his pants, sure he'd been castrated. John and I were mortified, and also afraid he'd sue us for everything we had, which would have been totally appropriate. But the poor guy, once he found himself in one piece, only said mournfully, “It's because I'm Chinese. Some animals don't like that smell.” We weren't going to argue with him.

She was wild! We had to learn it over and over again. By this time she would jump on our beds and cover us with “kisses,” and push at Lisa to bop her on the head, and greet our cars coming up the driveway with all the doglike signals of delight. One day we gave an afternoon party full of journalists, and one of them, Digby Diehl, brought along his daughter, Dylan, a pretty but willful little girl. I went out into the yard to stock up on more lemons for rum drinks, and Dylan ran out and put her arms around Isha. Isha laid back her ears and stiffened. Dylan was still small, so that her throat was just about at a level with Isha's teeth. I remembered the Chinese mover and was filled with dread. “Dylan,” I said in the low voice you reserved in Topanga for talking in front of rattlesnakes, “let go of the dog and come over here.” Of course, Dylan tightened her grip. Isha began making a noise. “Dylan, the dog is dangerous. Take your hands off her, and come over here!” That little girl wouldn't do shit. It took four or five attempts, and to this day Dylan doesn't know how close she was to an unpleasant death.

The question comes up: Why did we keep her? We were crazy in love with her is the answer. But I don't think it was for all those “unconditional love” reasons you hear when people talk about their beloved pets. I think it was more the part of her that would happily tear the balls off a Chinese mover, or eat up a few of her pups because she was hungry or she felt like it. The part of her that left Dylan Diehl alive only by whim, the reach into a world we don't talk about but know is there — the part that's acknowledged by a howl, and not by any means a heartbroken howl — in the depths of the night.

Remember that when we moved in together, good manners had to be the order of the day, and they were. Maybe Isha made all that good behavior bearable.

About thirteen years after all this started, Isha died. The household had changed. Lisa had married a deeply respectable husband and was living a life of extreme rectitude. She had children and a fine career. Sweet little Clara was old enough to
be in college and have a darling boyfriend, Chris. John had changed from a man strong and sure of himself into a tentative person in the last four years of his life. He fainted frequently, walked slowly, seemed far away. I remember myself as brash and pathetically ignorant of the fact that the best times in my life were about to be ending — the years with John, the whole freewheeling existence that was Topanga, all of it.