The power of puppy fur

and the obligation of grief

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Moose on a warm spring day

When we think about love, it’s no stretch to believe that a lot of us envision the warmth of soft fur, a wet nose prodding us to pet them again, and an insistent paw ready to bring our attention back to them. I have loved dogs for as long as I can remember, and this is the first time in many decades that I am without one of them in my life. So it’s not just about the pain of losing a best friend, it’s a kind of hollowness that defies anything and everything I do to close it off.

There have been so many dogs in my life, and each of them is lodged inside my heart. I’ll be telling their stories for the length of my days, as will my wife and my children. These are the stories of us, of our family, of those we love and the adventures we have shared. But every story has a beginning, and this story isn’t one with a happy ending yet. It deserves to be told as much as the ones that do end with joy, but it is not for the faint of heart to hear.

Once upon a time, when I was very small—5 or 6 years old perhaps?—we drove in our 80s Honda Civic hatchback to a nearby farm. My parents settled a cardboard box in between where I sat with my brother in the backseat, and a tiny white puppy with two or three splotches of brown wagged her tail at us.

And then she bit me.

But there was nothing that little dog could do to ruin my inner vision of love for her. She was the fulfillment of some innate need I had to love and cuddle and pet an animal who might also learn to love me back. I have seen my own children with their dogs in those tender young years, and I understand that our evolution as humans and canines is intertwined. Many times we had to extract our youngest from the dog bed on the floor, what he saw as just another comfy place to snuggle with his pack. Tiny me wanted that same comfort, that familiarity of someone who could love me unconditionally (or at least for some treats and pets), someone I could love unconditionally as well.

That was the picture in my head. We would bring our dog home, we would love on her endlessly, she would curl up in bed beside me at night, and the two of us would be inseparable.

When we got home, we kept her in the box in the screened in porch off the side of the house. My brother and I went through a long list of names, each crafted around her (mostly) white fur, until we landed on Snowflake. And then my parents promptly took her outside, attached a metal chain to her collar, and shut the door behind them.

That’s it. That was her whole life.

Especially in those early days of Snowflake becoming a fixture in my world, I would venture out to play with her or make some kind of contact. I was warned each time not to get too close, that she would bite me again. It built up a tremendous fear of being bitten mingled with a deep need for love and touch. I would go out and sit just far enough away that her chain could not quite reach, and I would talk to her soothingly, forever hoping that something I said would calm her enough to make her approachable. She hadn’t broken the skin when she bit me on that first day. She was a puppy. Lots of puppies nip or bite or explore with their mouths. She was probably teething, too. But being chained and abandoned did immense harm to Snowflake’s developing mind and persona, and there was nothing a 6-year-old kid could say to undo that harm.

Try to imagine what kind of person you would be if you were chained in place for the entirety of your life. You could never have companionship, never be allowed indoors, only allowed to shelter in a part of the garage that we knew had rats in it.

That yard flooded sometimes, too. I distinctly recall literally swimming in the flood waters one year, the depth at the garage end being maybe two feet of standing water. My parents had clearly moved the dog’s chain elsewhere, but I don’t know where that was.

All four of us lived in fear of the anger and burning hatred within that little dog. We could barely get anywhere near her before she would lunge and snap. Many times I overheard my parents express how much they hated her, how they didn’t want her, how she was such a burden to us. I cried myself to sleep thinking about her loneliness outside. I was lonely, too.

One summer, we departed on a family road trip vacation. It might have been the trip to Florida to see Disneyworld when I was 8. That sounds about right. My parents left Snowflake with a neighbor who had a big farm. They didn’t spare her another thought. When we got home, we—my brother and I—were told that Snowflake had gotten loose and run off. They story went that the farmer friend of ours had her chained to a tree, but it was too hot and there was no shade there. He unhooked her to move her somewhere better, and she took off, chain still snapping at her heels as she sped down the road and out of sight.

I begged them through a flood of tears to take the car out and look for her. I knew if we just drove out and looked she would know we wanted her back, and we would find each other. She was our dog, I argued, and it was up to us to take care of her. She needed us.

They refused.

You and I, we know better. We know what the real story was. We know they didn’t want that dog from the moment they brought her home, and I cannot tell you what compelled them to get a dog when it was clear they didn’t want one. Had they envisioned something different? Were they always intent on chaining her outside from day one? What did they think their children would learn from having a dog that none of us could interact with? What were we supposed to inherit from their cruelty?

And why do parents of any generation think that lying about the intentional death or abandonment of a pet is a good idea?

Here are the things I learned from my parents.

• Love is always conditional.

• If you behave in ways we don’t like, you can be gotten rid of.

• We will always overwrite the real story with one we like better.

I cried over the loss of Snowflake for years. No joke, I still cried over her into my early teen years. Because she was so incredibly symbolic of everything that I felt about myself, that was true about my relationship with my family, because I knew on every level accessible to me that I would be treated in exactly the same way she was. And all of this built up a crescendo of guilt over my own capacity for cruelty.

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In the twenty years that my wife and I have been together, we have brought nine dogs into our family. Each of them had a unique story to tell, each of them brought their own trauma. They have all been shelter or rescue dogs (we often describe them as “used dogs with low mileage”), and you can’t fix whatever happened in their past even with all the love you can give them here and now. To us we felt that they still deserved love and security and a chance to be themselves. It didn’t always work out. Sometimes we had to admit defeat.

Every time we adopted another dog, I felt that 6-year-old inside of me clutch onto the hope that we could give and receive the love we had always needed. I wasn’t afraid of being bitten anymore. And they never slept outside on a chain. But I have never been able let go of the fear of my own cruelty when we come to the end.

I faced it again recently with the loss of our last dog, Moose. How is it, after all, that I am always tasked with the responsibility of deciding when to end such a life? And doesn’t that make me cruel for saying yes? For bringing a forced conclusion that even nature wasn’t willing to opt into just yet? Or is it more cruel to allow a body to degrade and suffer? And as I wrestled with these unanswerable questions for days and weeks and months, I remembered Snowflake. I remembered the 6-year-old who so desperately wanted to go out and find her, to save her, to prove to her that I was not cruel, that I loved her even though I was afraid of being bitten. It was my fault too, as a 6-year-old, that she had been treated so cruelly. It was my fault that I did not demand louder, more persistently, that we should do better as a family. It was my fault that she knew nothing but horrible treatment.

Yeah, therapy helps. And I’m working on it. But the parallels between these experiences in my life are tied inextricably to now, to future moments when I will again have to decide horrible things that nobody wants to be tasked with deciding.

Moose was diagnose with degenerative myelopathy at age 4 last year. We made it almost a year with him, through stumbling and neuropathy, through a lack of coordination with his entire back end, through falling and slipping on curbs and slopes, through digestive problems, right up until elimination issues brought the severity of his symptoms to light. And in all of that time he remained happy, loving, sweet, and eager to be with us. He was a 100-pound lapdog, a goldfish in a dog-suit, and a constant reminder that love can be simple and beautiful.

We adored him.

I will never know if we ended things too early or too late. I will never know if my decision to let him go was cruel.

What do we do with our days when someone we love is suddenly gone? How do we fill our time when it once had the certainty of companionship and now it’s empty? What gifts do we keep from these experiences? How do we reconcile our feelings of cruelty when no one else can relieve them for us?

I do know that my heart aches for him, for all of the dogs we have loved and lost, for all of the moments with them that has made us who we are as individuals and as a family. It has never been so hard for me to talk about losing a friend as it has been this time. This loss has broken some part of me, and I don’t want it to heal just yet. The ache and the hurt are the only comfort I have right now, because there is no warm, soft, furry body to lean into like I have always had in the past.

Your grieving trans friend,

Robin