Excerpt from Heart-drama: A Way to Beauty and Truth

Over our years in Horseshoe, North Carolina, I calculate I have gone on at least 3,500 walks on the same dirt road. My dogs and I have become an integral part of this place, spotted every morning and late afternoon, as familiar as a wide bend in the dirt road, as certain as the place where thickets break open to the steep valley, as foreseeable a sight as the Magnolias flowering.

For the first few years on these walks, there were three of us. Jewel’s more complaint sister Raven moved freely, unburdened by a leash, because she was innately dependable. Secure about the world, she had a keen grasp on how these walks needed to work if we were going to be walkers together, whereas I kept tight to the lead with Jewels who was tense and worrisomely impulsive.

As it happens, Raven began to slow down, no longer prone to prancing around us and teasing with her poking nose. I remember vividly one long last special walk up to a nearby mountain meadow, Raven struggling to keep up, her breathing ragged. Within a few days she was dead, leaving us all—my wife, Jewel, and I—in heavy mourning.

Jewel couldn’t have had a better mentor than Raven, her surrogate mother, a gentle older fur sister. A man in the kill shelter where we rescued Jewel seemed to have a keen insight. He said, “We think she is two years old, and all we know is that she was chained out in the yard with an aggressive dog. We had to put that dog down right way because he lost his mind. So, you know, she hasn’t been taught much and she is jumpy, but she wants to be a good girl.”

Of course, Raven was the one who taught her to be that good girl. Much more than my wife or I, Raven showed her the ropes and conveyed how this life together needed to work if we were going to be family.

After Raven’s passing, I learned to trust Jewel on these walks more and more and stopped thinking she was going to run off or lunge out at a every car or truck. She remained hypervigilant, but this came to serve us, as her jumpiness acted as an early warning system. If a vehicle was heading our way, she’d know it well before I would, and she’d move to the side in the grass and sit patiently until it came into view, where she remained immovable until it passed.

However, for the sake of full disclosure, there always remained one old red chevy truck that drove too fast, and which offended her because, by this point in our story, Jewel knew how all this needed to work if we were going to remain safe together.

I don’t know if it was truly necessary, but kneeling beside her, I would grab hold of the collar as Jewel growled and, to her best ability scowled at the son of a bitch, a sour-faced driver who never slowed, speeding off into the dust and around a corner, leaving us fading sounds of spitting gravel.

Once we got past the need for a constant leash, Jewels walked freely beside me-Though again in full disclosure, sometimes, when she couldn’t help herself, she jumped for a few moments into a bush to chase a rabbit or a squirrel. But that was fine as I saw it. She was still the best of girls. And after her bit of excitement and failed hunt, she would quickly return where we could discuss the “cheaters,” those little creatures that swerved and hopped and spun about with ridiculous adeptness, going up or under, always out of reach. It was unfair, we agreed, if not exactly morally wrong to have such ability.

One day my wife and I got the idea that Jewel might need a companion. But Jewel had learned to trust only one dog in her life, and when we tried to introduce a Springer pup into the mix, a gorgeous girl we named Lady Merriweather, Jewels was frayed by the experience, anxious and restless, irritable, and confused. After several weeks of trying to make it work, we gave Merri up (to a truly fine home. It was the only right choice, of course, because we had long ago made a commitment to Jewel.

She got older, as I did, our muzzles grayer.

For some who might have witnessed our walks, they would just see repetitions up and back on a road that led nowhere, an unpaved fragment on a map. It would seem we never really got to a destination. But for us the walks did lead somewhere, each time we made some further steps toward faithfully attending to Love’s work.

As it had to come, there came the night we found the lump, harder than the fatty tissue bumps the Vet always dismissed. This was cancer in her left leg, growing from the center of her joint. Surgically removed once, it came aggressively back, an oblivious speed demon, an ugly massive intrusion, ultimately fatal. Of course, as anyone knows who has ever loved and lost, this wasn’t the way it was supposed to work.

I’ve known a few great lovers in my life, most of them canine. My emotional memory has trapped the last seconds of these intimate relationships in grief. It always fades with time. But I think I am a little wiser now and would never attempt to hurry away such pain.  Indeed, I have found it important to remember the last moment, as important as any affirmation of this short life in a beautiful world.  It is a last but infinite moment when we have both earned the right to look deeply into each other’s animal eyes.