24: Funeral for a a Faithful Friend

We didn't get the chance to bury our dog. She ended her walk with our family in a humble, almost mean way, carted from the back of my truck into a foreign garage with a cremation room attached. There's a reason we bury loved ones. Or at least have a time of remembrance set aside to allow for the finality of life to wash over us and allow us peace.

I know some readers may think i'm making much over the death of a dog. And if you find yourself becoming one of those readers, I would encourage you to stop reading, because there isn't a fun little twist in the end, and you may not need to hear a man lament his friends passing. But this isn't necessarily for the reader, though if some truth is passed through these keystrokes, I won't belittle it. But this is for me. This is me burying my most faithful friend in the best way I know how.  This is my eulogy. More than that, this is my harsh night wind off the mountains that freezes the eyelashes shut, and yet opens eyes to the stark reality of the blurred events that recently subsided. A moment of clarity, a moment of solemnity, a moment of memory. And as I sat beside my dying dog, only a week ago now, slowly running my hand through her rusted and greyed fur, I fell backwards in time.

It's 1999. Its late, its frosted outside, and I am curled around my comforter as tightly as my 9 year old body can be. My orthodontist-inflicted headgear digs into my cheek as little beads of drool swing hand over hand down the rubber bands protruding from my upper jaw and connecting to the grotesque assortment of metal and plastic strapped to my face, giving me the appearance of some sort of prepubescent gargoyle with a bowl cut. After this sort of description, coupled with my mentioning that I was homeschooled, one would not have to make a large logical leap to conclude that this young boy did not have many, if any, friends outside of his family.

In the next room, my only real playmate sleeps. Jordan, recently turned 6 and not in much better social shape than I, nests in the middle of a pile of golden curled hair-turned pillow. We have each other, but outside of that brotherly company, next to no friends to speak of. Military family, constant in the change of location. Ready to uproot and be put in a pot for transport to the next post. After a few such moves, we find that it is simply easier to keep inside the pot, not letting roots out into the social soil of our surroundings, so that when the time comes to be relocated, the roots that tied us to that place and those people were simply non-existent.

Here we are, lying in a house we didn't know as home. Under unfamiliar stars, and on an unfamiliar street in the unfamiliar town of Eagle River, Alaska. Our parents had seen our need for a constant companion, and this night, they remedy that.

Pressure. Four soft points of it, starts on my legs, and quickly moves up to my torso. I don't feel any panic or fear from this unknown entity on my bed, possibly due to the grogginess still hanging on my eyelids, but when I break free from sleep, I find a pair of deep eyes staring into mine, followed by a barrage of wetness from the flat of a puppy tongue. A friend has been dropped into my brother and my life, and there will be no time from our meeting to our parting that she (shortly afterward named "Tobi") and I are anything less than best friends.

Last tuesday.It was early, It was frosted outside, and my mom had laced up her icebug running shoes and clipped the leash to Tobi's collar in preparation for the daily tradition of a pre-sun run on the icy streets of the neighborhood. Tobi's clouded eyes and grey muzzle hairs still quivered with excitement and joy at the thought of her favorite pastime, but when mother and dog returned from the excursion, long overdue, the old dogs legs were quivering, and her head was low to the ground. That day was the last time I saw my dog walk.


2000. The family is winding through the mountain passes and lakeside vistas of Resurrection Pass, packs full and backs bent, but eyes ever up and drinking in the views. Tobi travels twice the distance of any of us on her unalterable mission to ensure the safety of the group from the unknown ahead, while simultaneously scratching the itch in all dogs, that of exploration. We take occasional breaks to awe over some particularly breathtaking scenery, and  she sits beside my feet, panting from her scouting, but choosing to be company to us rather than indulge her favorite pastime.

I squeeze the tip of the rubber and plastic tube protruding from my backpack, and the reservoir hiding inside spew forth lukewarm water, which she happily laps out of midair. We seldom bring a bowl for her to drink from, and this method has become the preferred method of watering the dog, a method quickly learned and often applied.

Bending around a low turn in the trail, the trees fall away to reveal a shallow lake rimmed by tall grass and small beaches. We make a quick decision to pull lunch together from the deepest corners of our packs in this slightly breezy place, hoping to safeguard slightly from the unorganized hordes of mosquitos that have been plaguing us all morning. While a casual meal is prepared, Jordan and I lob sticks and rocks and all things not attached to Mother Earth (and some that we had to work quite laboriously to make unattached)  into the glass of the lake, delighting ourselves in the simple physics of it all.

A golden retriever, though a deep auburn one, Tobi feels compelled to bring back any items that splash close enough to the shore to not require swimming. Although her breeding and heritage marks her as a water dog with web between her toes, she has never attempted to push off from anything deeper than would touch her chest, an issue that might have given her the label of "defective" from the American Kennel Club.

But, braver today than others, and without much more prodding than usual. She tiptoes to the edge of the deeper water, hoping to snatch a floating stick that bobs just out of reach.

A slip.

A splashing attempt to regain footing.

And suddenly, the instincts that had been passed down by birth for untold years take over. A tottering slap of the water with each paw, rear weighed down like a ships anchor, and frantic eyes looking both everywhere and nowhere at once. She is swimming.

We cheer and rub her wet fur when she swam back to us. Covering our faces from the spray from her shaken back, but smiling and laughing through the unpleasantness. She draws confidence from our happiness, and by the end of our lunch, she swims circles around thrown sticks just for the sheer joy of a newfound skill. The slow, strong, measured push of air from her nostrils as she pulls through the water echo across the lake...
Thursday.

I heard shallow breathing behind the door. Harsh fluorescent light greeted me coldly as I opened the door to the garage. She has hardly moved from the reeking and lumpy dog bed that she hobbled to after a morning bathroom break, and still hasn't eaten a thing since her last run. I panicked when I saw her full muzzle drooped into the water dish beside her bed. Fearing her drowning, I quickly stepped to her side and put my hand under her chin, lifted it and held her....a minute, two minutes... I felt the slow breathing echoing off the cold concrete...




...She spends her days running and playing and hiking and loving everything that we do and everyone who comes through our door. And on cold winter nights, I lay by the woodstove and listen to the rolling of the fire. She mirrors the crescent of my body, with her chin in my hand and her tail swishing the seconds by. I end high school and make the leap to college, but we both know that when the snow falls and the alaskan days grow short, the woodstove will flame again and we will end our days adventures in front of it.

Her face becomes grayer with every trip home. And our hikes take longer every summer. But sleep near the woodstove never grows old...


Saturday Morning.

I had emptied my truck bed of all it's usual contents. There was only a reeking and lumpy bed back there now. And she lay on it.
I had tried to close her eyes, but the stiffening had already happened, and they would not be shut.

Blood dripped softly from her nose. I wanted to put it back.

My dad and I quietly shuffled out of the house. Trying not to disrupt and ruin my sister's overnight birthday party. She just turned nine.

The drive took much longer than it should have, I thought. But when it was over, it was incredibly quick. Animal control paperwork was quickly penned, and we were told to drive around to the back doors.


  A small young lady in a flower print shirt was waiting for us with a cart. She probably began this job because she wanted to love animals. I wondered if she realized this would be a part of that.

We made small jokes that fell to the frozen ground as we opened the hatch and door to the truck. I was glad she hadn't slid too much.

We lifted the filthy bed with it's cargo of gold easily. Too easily. Set it on the cart gently.

My dad and the lady talked, but i don't remember any of it.
I wound my fingers through the deep, rusted fur. Ran my fingers behind her cold ear, her favorite spot to be petted.

And then she was wheeling away.

A piece of flesh and fur receding into the darkened garage.
To the world, that was all.

But that's not what I saw.

I saw one of the last legacies of my childhood, my link to a simpler life, my truest friend fading away into the dim and hazy light of finality. And even though I saw this patch of my life's quilt slowly come loose for years, that final thread being severed, the even and measured tear of this piece of my life coming to a final tug, the hole was felt immediately.  

I don't believe that animals have a life after this. And I don't console myself with the illusion of Tobi being "in a better place". But as I paced heavily back to the door of my truck, I realized fully something that had always been in my head, but had never sifted down to my heart.

She lives through me.

She showed me through every aspect of her life what it really is to be loyal, what is it to love someone enough to pass over their faults and put your heart in their hands, knowing they could push you aside, drop your heart in the dirt at their feet, but to pick up that dirt-coated love and place it back in their hands because they need to know that someone sees them.
Cares for them unconditionally.
And she never said a word.

You may meet me, spend time with me, befriend me. And you may never have known Tobi. But every time I come alongside, go out of my way to just sit with you, not speaking, but being comfort to you, you meet the heart of my best friend echoing in my every kind action.

This is true for all of us. Any person who leaves their mark on your life, who leaves your life better than when they entered, they live in you and through you. We catch a glimpse of the Face of God in theirs, and heaven help us to be that face to the lives we enter, since the only other options are to be faceless, or a mask of evil, haunting life till death.



Tears untouched dried on my face as we drove. I see no shame in them. We stopped at a gas station to towel up the puddle of blood slowly streaming from the bed of my truck to the frozen street, I still remember the smell. But I would not have let anyone else take that chore from me.

We left, leaving behind rose-stained snow. And yet not leaving anything behind at all.

23: A short soliloquy by a fictitious nobody.

I recently got to thinking on the potential that lies behind human imagination and creativity. And instead of going about such a task in a way that any rational entity with a preexisting set of societal norms placed on them (i.e. A sane person), I created a fictional character to have a monologue with himself  that discusses the free-floating ideas that were surfacing in the muddled swamp of my mind as if he thought of them. Without any more ado or further psychological confusion, here is what I (as narrated by Marcus) came up with.


Everyone walks around on the pavement and they hear their footsteps and they see the light glinting off the glass windows and that's all that is there for them at that point. Do you see? They have what they're looking for because what they're looking for is already right in front of them.

But there are handfuls of people who are walking around in those crowds and on those streets or roads that hear something else when they walk, feel something. They look through the light reflecting on the glass and see something totally different. And it may not even exist, it may not even be possible.

Take about two thirds of those people away and discount them because the rest of the world convinces them that what they see isn't there and what they hear is just shuffling, and what you come away with are the people who find the unfindable.

Cause when it all comes down to it, there are two kinds of people in the world.
There are people who see the world for what it is. They will live in it.

There are people who see the world for what it could be. They will live in it. -Marcus Franz





Hope that train of thought wasn't too confusing.