I once shared a house with several roommates: Becky, the homeowner; Andrew, Becky’s younger brother; and a revolving door of model-turned-CNN-interns from various foreign lands.
And then there were Irma and Rosalind, our beloved beagles.
Andrew adopted Irma, but she spurned him in favor of Becky. Once Andrew relinquished Irma, Becky adopted Rosalind, a dog I adored because she chewed up the Calvin Klein undies belonging to a particularly annoying model-turned-CNN-intern.
Those were good days, but our happily dysfunctional family split up. I moved in with a more conventional roommate who had a cat. Andrew joined the Peace Corps. Becky moved to Florida to do hurricane relief work, taking Irma and Rosalind with her.
A few years later, Becky told me of Irma’s passing. She died fat and happy. “Poor Rosalind,” Becky told me. “She went under a bush in the back yard for a couple of days and wouldn’t come out even to eat.”
Rosalind, shunning food?
“I think she was grieving,” Becky said.
I nodded. Obviously she was grieving. I didn’t stop to think whether Becky was just another dog lover ascribing a human characteristic to a canine. Dogs grieve.
They spend most of their lives on the other end of the spectrum: ecstatic over the possibility of a hard, dry Milk Bone; tail-wagging glee that a master has returned home at the exact time she always does; jump-up-and-down-it-doesn’t-get-better-than-this exuberance at the sound of a leash jingling and the promise of a five-minute walk. Even when dogs are sleeping, they appear happy. But what goes up must come down, and how can anyone or anything experience such joy without the potential for the most intense sadness—profound loss?
I read a Newsweek story that further impressed upon me a dog’s Doberman-size capacity for love, loyalty, and grief: A Tokyo college professor died of a stroke. His dog, Hachi-ko, “continued to meet his master’s four o’clock train at Shibuya station every day for the next nine years,” the story says. This was back in the 1920s, and the public was so moved by the dog’s loyalty, a statue was erected.
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