A eulogy for Jack

My mother swears that our border collie Jack prays before he eats his dog food. Indeed, he shuffles over to his bowl, lies down like a Roman at the feast, bows his snout, and pauses for a good 10 seconds before he begins to eat. But I should speak in the past tense. He shuffled, laid, bowed, paused, and began. For the tragedy of dog lovers everywhere has finally fallen upon our family. Our dog of more than 10 years died suddenly last week, disrupting us to the core.

Why is it that when your dog dies you feel as if you are the only person it has ever happened to? Very few magazines accept eulogies for dogs, no matter how brilliant. I checked. On submission pages, they explain their space-stinginess by saying they receive too many of the funereal send-offs. “Please,” they say, “we know your dog was dear to you. But don’t send us any more.”

I wore my fresh blow to church Sunday, crying during the prayer because I wondered what my parents would do with the remaining bag of dog food. To the casual “how are you?” I responded, “My dog died yesterday.” The answer imbued the faces of the church people with a heavy, shared sorrow.

“It’s OK,” I told our friend Jim, trying to assure myself. “It’s not like he was a person or anything.”

“But most dogs are nice,” Jim said. “Not all people are.”

I had to agree that in the area of niceness, Jack outclassed many humans. But if I tell you why, I will just be rehashing every dog obituary in the world. He always ran to meet you. He forgave you for being gone a long time. He didn’t know many tricks, but he never ran away from home. And if we found another dog with all those attributes and brought him into our house to live, it would not assuage our grief. No matter how perfect, he wouldn’t be Jack.

In the Sunday school room, my friend Hannah’s blue eyes welled up with genuine feeling. She told me not to hide my sadness, that the death of dogs registers on the scale of “things worth grieving about.” My husband reminded me of Aristotle’s hierarchy of souls: nutritive souls (plants), sensitive souls (animals), and rational souls (humans). I have never felt invested enough to discover where Aristotle triumphed and where he erred. But somehow it helps to know a long-dead Greek with a significant philosophy considered my dog sensitive.

These past few days—maple sap boiling season at my childhood home—my father has traversed the woods working on his sap lines, seeing a shadow of Jack everywhere he walks. He has no one to lick the syrup off his plate in the morning, and my mother will start going on long walks without the leash. When I go home to visit, no familiar bark will herald my arrival.

I never expected to be such a baby about this, but I keep crying. And nothing feels healthier than to be surrounded by saints who sympathize—even with the smaller things, like dogs.