At our house, we have a ritual. Once a week, we Skype the kids’ grandparents. They eat Cheerios together and read books. Recently it occurred to the kids that they could dance ballet while on Skype, and they do that for a while, giving the rest of us time to refresh our Cheerios.
But there’s something important they have to do first, which is to greet Callie, my mom and dad’s dog. On Skype, Callie always takes priority. She’s the feature presentation of every Sunday morning, and has been for some time.
My parents adopted Callie 10 years ago. She was no puppy then, but time has been kind to her since. Callie’s grown mellow with age, not churlish. Slow to growl, quick to wag, she’s a good girl, one who’s recently gone gray around the snout. It’s a delight to see Callie over the computer. As time goes by, it has also become something of a relief.
My kids haven’t noticed that Callie has grown older. When her time comes, they won’t be expecting it. They will need an explanation of what’s happened, and I don’t want to have to explain death to my children; although more than that, I don’t want anyone else to.
My oldest has asked me about death before, and because I don’t have an easy answer for him, I’ve avoided giving him one by giving him far too many. Some people, I told him, might say there’s such a place as heaven. Some others would tell you that when you die, you become part of a beautiful light. Others would say you circle around back to life, as a butterfly, or an oak tree or a sea creature.
“Like a hammerhead shark?” my son asked me.
“Sure,” I said. “Like a hammerhead shark.”
That one caught on. And so now, when Callie departs this life, we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that she’s not really gone, but rather enjoying her time hunting stingrays off the coast of Colombia.
My first impulse is to beat her to the punch, to buy the kids a half dozen goldfish, then wait and see. My own first experience with death was a goldfish, and while it wasn’t a nice surprise, it softened the blow of the hamster, the next to go. I did weep for the hamster, but it had bitten me a lot, and I was able to regain my composure in time for the next episode of DuckTales.
My first and only really big dog loss to date was the collie I grew up with. Like Callie, he lived into old age, and when I left my junior year of college to study abroad, I knew he and I were saying goodbye. Still, it was a shock to receive the news over a phone call I made with an international calling card, which is already the most depressing kind. If there’s a time and a place to feel sorry for yourself, it’s at night, in the winter, in a phone booth with instructions that aren’t in English. And then you find out your dog died.
For my kids, I want better. I want to pull them to me in our living room, where someone has, uncharacteristically, built and lit a fire in our fireplace. I want to speak wisdom in a way I didn’t know I could speak, to tell a story so layered and meaningful that once I’m done with it they’ll know Callie is gone without having to jar them with the blunt force of the words.
This isn’t that story. I don’t have that story yet. But I have something close to the start of what I’d like to say.
A long time ago, long before I had my kids or their dad, I lived alone in a speck of an apartment underneath the house of a woman named Hannah. Just before taking me in, Hannah had taken in Jack, a 9-year-old German Shepherd. Jack lived on the top floor, but on days his hips felt up to the staircase, he essentially had the run of the place.
We were both new there and at first, Jack and I were nervous around one other. But over the course of some months, we came to live not just in the same place, but together. I fell asleep to the sound of his nails clicking overhead on the linoleum. He woke to the sound of my back door slamming as I left for work. We grew little rhythms and patterns in response to each other. We grew little attachments to each other.
It was a quick year. At the end of it, I got a new job, and it wasn’t so hard to move on. After all, he hadn’t been my dog. But we had both liked living at Hannah’s, which we each separately seemed to appreciate for what it was: a place on the way to somewhere else.
Susan Anspach is a product of Northern Virginia’s schools, swim teams and cultural mores. She is a mother of three and champion of all dogs.