The Fredösphere

Chile was a Pembroke Welsh Corgi and the companion of my family for seven years.  This week we learned that his worsening limp was caused, not by arthritis, but by a tumor.  We ended his suffering on Saturday.

Bad breeding and early neglect by previous owners left Chile neurotic.  He would bark hysterically whenever a window was opened or a fan was run -- those sorts of things might lead to smoke alarms.  He abruptly lost interest in fetching tennis balls when I hit him accidentally on the nose twice in two days.  He renounced the game forever, a foolishly cautious decision that greatly limited his capacity for fun.  His record regarding house training was, yes, spotty.  Yet he was fully a member of our family, which earned him a status beyond criticism:  he was neither a good dog, nor a bad dog; he was simply our dog.

The death of a dog is a strange event.  You lived with him; he knew you intimately; you loved him.  Yet one doesn't want be one of those people who grieve excessively.  Unlike another corgi I heard about, Chile will have no bagpipes at his funeral; indeed, he will have no funeral.  Certain disrespectful thoughts, e.g., that vacationing without Chile will be logistically simpler, can be entertained to a degree that I would never consider if the deceased were, say, a grandparent that was too old or distant ever to develop fond feelings for.

His death was an occasion for me to contemplate the Four Last Things:  Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell.  It was an occasion for me to resist the temptation to think depressed thoughts, to ask why a life has a point if it ends in death, to wonder at death's awful irrevocable nature. 

It was an occasion to resist the temptations of anthropomorphism.  When we were kids, my sister and I would play Daniel Boone out by the tall maples in our front yard.  The freakish tree that had been struck by lightning and lost a bough -- the one that had a hole in it you could look right through, yet still stood and lived -- was our fort.  Our dog at the time, Tim, was given the role (by my sister, who was older, but not old enough to know better) as the "retarded son."  But a dog isn't like a handicapped relative, who, in death, is pitied for the loss of potential as well has the loss of life.  The handiwork of God and man has been combined in the breeding of a dog to give it a peculiar destiny.  We ought not to imagine Chile missed his.