The Dogs

Laura —

A six-year anniversary is a weird one. One, fine. That’s a big event. That feels momentous. Two, three, and four are close enough that things are still raw. Five’s got that nice, round, building-block number. I was going to write something for the five-year anniversary of us losing you, but I didn’t have anything. That day I spent mostly in the freezing-cold basement of a house in Vermont, feeling sad and looking up at a ceiling. My tank was empty.

Six, I find, is weird. It’s still close enough that I can recall those open-wound feelings of the days and weeks and months afterward, but they don’t have an edge. They’re fuzzy now. It’s like watching an old sporting highlight shot in standard definition after being used to HD. You know what happened, but things aren’t as clear. Time dilutes things.

Sometimes I even feel ashamed I can’t conjure up that same sort of despair that took hold for a while. But, shit, it’s life. You just have to go forward, no matter what happens. The past is always going to be the past. As Sarah Connor said, the unknown future rolls towards us.

Speaking of life. When I sat down to write this, I wanted to make it about everything that’s happened to me. I wanted to tell you how I fell in love and got married to a wonderful woman because I know how much you would enjoy that and how much you wanted it for me. But I can’t do it. It’s too much. It’s too painful. I’ll keep that to myself, and maybe I’ll tell you about it someday in my dreams.

I’ll just tell you about the dogs.

We have two of them. They’re golden retrievers named Sam and Stella. They were born in Turkey, and somewhere after their puppy stage, some person abandoned them at a landfill outside Corum (a few hundred miles to the east of Ankara). That’s where they spent the next year or so of their lives, scratching and clawing with hundreds of other dogs for scraps of food and sleeping outside in the wind and the rain and the heat.

There’s a service here in the United States entirely dedicated to just rescuing dogs from this landfill. My wife knew she wanted a golden and got hooked up with this rescue service. Sam and Stella (named Sophie then, BTW) were a bonded pair by this point. We don’t actually know if they’re sister and brother, father and daughter, mother and son, or just two dogs that found each other. I kind of love the mystery, honestly.

They asked her if she’d consider adopting one and fostering the other, with the idea that she’d take them both if it worked out. My wife said yes. She drove five hours down to Dulles Airport to pick them up from Turkey and bring them back to Boston. The first night, they walked upstairs with her into the bedroom we now share and plunked themselves into their $300 LL Bean beds, snoozing away. She took both of them, of course.

When we were introduced — via text by friends and friends of friends, in the middle of a global pandemic — shots of the dogs were among the first pictures I got sent. We met at a bench in Powderhouse Square Park a month or so later. The first thing I saw of her were two gigantic golden retrievers on leashes happily bounding towards me, Red Sox and Patriots bandanas around their hairy necks. We talked for a while, then took the two of them on a long walk around Somerville and Medford.

I proposed to her on that very same bench a year and a half later. The dogs were the stars of the save-the-date. Sam wore an “Our humans are getting married!” bandana. Stella wore a “She said yes!” one.

They’re very different, in the ways you only notice when you spend all day and every day with them. Stella’s smaller and lither, though the doctor continually recommends she lose a few pounds. She’s very much the alpha dog. When you make eye contact, she’ll quickly look away and place a paw on your thigh or shoulder. I’m the alpha. How dare you look at me.

She’s the first one to bark at a squirrel or a tree or a dog the size of a mouse peacefully walking past the house on the leash of an owner or just at the sheer craziness of reality itself. Last year, she caught and munched on a bunny whole in the backyard of one of our friends, to our terror. Later that summer, another rabbit made the poor decision to burrow in our backyard and give birth to a litter of bunnies. She probably got one or two of them before we got her into the house.

After that, my wife erected a steel cage around the rabbit hole, which we would open every night to let the mother in to feed, then close when it was time for the dogs to go out. After a few weeks, they grew enough to hop away, free from the bunny terminator that prowls 117 Rock Street in Norwood, Massachusetts.

I’m making her sound horrible. She’s not, of course. She’s just an animal. That sort of stuff happens. She’s a sweetheart. When you sit down on the couch, she’ll walk over and nudge your hand for pets. Sometimes I’ll lie down and haul her on her back next to me, and she’ll just lie there, a big furry throw pillow, accepting pets until she drifts off to sleep and starts giving a low gentle snore.

Whenever I get home from a walk out to Dunkin’ Donuts or my daily gym run — or whenever my wife gets home from work — Stella will run to the door, wag her tail a few times, then pick up whatever random toy is closest to her (these days it’s a heavy red donut-ring thing) to present to the person entering the door. Once you take it from her, she’ll jump on your stomach to retrieve it (every so often, she’ll mistime her jump and hit me in the nuts), repeat the process once more, and then play with her toy on the living room.

Then there’s Sam. Sam’s bigger than Stella is but is much more passive. Stella steals toys from Sam’s paws, boxes him out for treats and bones like an elite NBA rebounder, and gives him I’m-the-boss leg humps in the backyard. He just shrugs everything off and lies down in the shadiest spot in the room. Sam has a perma-dope expression on his face, wide-eyed and confused, like he’s always just discovered something life-changing but can’t make his brain process it. I always think if he had a human voice, it would sound like the “Duhhh…what a cute little bunny rabbit … I will name him George” creature from the old Bugs Bunny cartoon. It seems to fit him.

I like to think I have a special bond with Sam. Maybe we just connect on some higher (or lower — yeah, probably lower) level. He’s just my buddy. I’ll be working and writing during the day, and he’ll just come strolling over — I can practically hear the tuba in the background as he walks — and look up at me.

“Hey, buddy.”

Pantpantpantpantpant.

“I’m working, Sam.”

A big yoga stretch, downward dog position, eyes fixed on me the whole time. Now his feet tap back and forth. Pantpantpant.

“You need attention? I’m working.”

Taptaptap. THWACK. One of his giant paws — the size of a catcher’s mitt — swipes at my lower leg.

“Ow! Sam. Damn it. That hurts.”

THWACK. Taptaptap. Pantpantpant. THWACK.

“OW! Okay, outside.”

Then we’ll go sit in the sunshine. Stella runs around the backyard, and I’ll just sit with Sam and lie back and soak up the moment before I drag myself back into work, my clothes always a fine shade of golden fur after we’re done. I don’t mind.

It’s the same thing in the mornings. 5:30, on the dot. There’s a shuffle in the room and a giant golden shape creeping from one side to the other.

“Hi, Sam.”

Now he’s by my side of the bed. Taptaptap. Breakfast?

“It’s early. Let me sleep.”

Taptaptap. YAWN. Breakfast, please?!?

“Go back to bed. Here, I’ll pet you. That good?”

THWACK. Not good enough. Breakfast. Now. Taptaptap. THWACK.

“Ow. Okay. Fine.”

After that, one of us will struggle downstairs, feed the beasts and let them out, and then start our days. On the weekends or the days when we need more sleep, we’ll go back up to the bed, and Sam will jump in — Stella, of course, is too good for the human bed (or she just gets too warm sleeping there). Then it’ll just be the three of us, Sam somehow taking up 95% of the space on the mattress, a furry, golden pillow breathing hot dog-food air into the room, and it’s one of the best parts of my day.

That was the routine this morning, year six. Taptaptap. THWACK. Downstairs. Breakfast. Another trudge up the stairs with Sam’s paws clickclickclicking on the wood. Then he jumped into the bed and I laid down next to him and my wife, thinking about all the new life I’d gained and all that I’d lost before that. And I couldn’t go back to sleep.