When Boo first entered my life, I didn’t know how to feel about having a puppy. Prior to her arrival, the primary images of canines that I’d gleaned were through my grandparents and my few friends who had dogs in elementary school.
I didn’t know what having a dog of our own would entail. I just knew that when we visited Pop-pop and Grammy, the stubby legs of their shin-high, long-haired dachshunds would erupt into a stampede as they scurried to the door to greet us. Their names were Pansy and Petunia.
From when I was 5 until I was old enough to vote, each time I walked through my grandparents’ front door, the dynamic duo would careen down the hall as fast as their compact legs would carry them — name tags jingling furiously with each carefree gallop. And each time they saw who had come to visit, the two wiener dogs would bowl me over and attempt to reach my summit. Once the Olympian climbers had conquered their goalpost, they licked my face as though it were the hallowed peak of Mount Bacon and wouldn’t stop unless scolded.
They were twins, and the final pair in a long lineage of dachshunds who had shepherded my grandparents and their three children through life. They offered my first glimpse into what it might look like to have a furry companion of our own scampering across the carpet as we went about our daily routines. A goofy little guardian who would spring into action anytime a rabbit or squirrel would dare to approach our property. A four-legged confidant who would enthusiastically devour whatever scraps of food found their way under our table.
But no amount of time with Pansy and Petunia ever managed to tame the questions that kept cropping up in my mind.
What would it be like to have a friend of my own that saw the world through smells? That would go through life at my side? Who would spend their days at the shameless mercy of a thousand happy whims?
Back then, I didn’t have the vocabulary to voice such uncertainties. But curiosity about the fetch-playing friend that I might be missing out on had begun to steadily snowball.
At seven years old, my new friend, Gabe, had a standard poodle named Reggie. He dwarfed both of us in size. Standing on his hind legs, he was nearly twice our height, and offered a very different type of sidekick than what I knew in Pansy and Petunia. Reggie was a centerpiece of the family, and the games he played were so spirited that he regularly swept an entire household of athletes into his shenanigans.
When my parents picked me up from play dates at Gabe’s house, I’d pepper them with “Can we pleeeaase get a dog!?” questions the entire ride home. (I’m not sure if my incessant badgering helped to erode their resolve, but it certainly didn’t hurt.)
I had started to see the role that dogs could play in peoples’ lives. But I still struggled to grasp that these creatures weren’t possessions. I couldn’t square the idea that these soulful beings could simply be sold by breeders or bought in pet stores. I spoke about getting a dog in the same vein that I did the prospect of a new video game, or a trampoline for the backyard.
“Ben, having a dog is a lot of responsibility,” my dad would tenderly remind me each time I raised the topic. Drawing from a well of patience that he’d forged in the heart of a Himalayan monastery, he brought up the less-than-stellar care I’d taken of my previous pets. His tone was devoid of animosity or judgement as he reminded me of Fishy’s fateful demise(s).
I had a series of Petsmart-purchased beta fish from ages four to seven that each bore the name Fishy: “Fishy 1,” “Fishy 2,” and of course, “Fishy 3.” I even briefly forayed into the world of hermit krabs. (I named my pet krab, perhaps not unpredictably, “Hermy.”) And while none of the pint-sized companions lived for very long, and none of them managed to foster enough responsibility for me to properly nurture my childhood dog in those earliest years, they were the first animals I ever felt a softness toward, felt sadness when they passed away. Each time we sent a new pet to its final resting place, I’d fight tears.
For my eighth birthday, my parents finally decided to introduce a dog into my life. But it wasn’t because I made it clear to them that I was prepared to handle such an ambitious undertaking. They elected to wait long enough for me to be able to remember and fully appreciate the magic of those early years spent with her. They thought that at six, I wouldn’t quite understand, and that at eleven or twelve, it might be too late to provide that quintessential “growing up with a dog” experience they’d both had when they were children. They figured if they waited much longer, I’d finish high school, college, and be living on my own somewhere by the time she was ready to depart from this world.
Walking in my house one day after school in 1st grade, I could tell that something was amiss. The halls were quiet enough to arouse suspicion. There were no grocery bags rustling, no wood creaking, and no talking heads on the living room TV chattering. Both of my parents’ cars were in the driveway, but neither of them had waited for me at the bus stop that day. I was young enough not to fear the worst, yet old enough to race through a torrent of possibilities as I bravely prepared to get to the bottom of the mystery at hand.
Climbing up the stairs, my footsteps went from rambunctious to cautious to confused in rapid succession as I caught sight of a four-legged silhouette waiting at the top of the stairwell. She was a hand-sized poodle hybrid and her tail wiggled back and forth as she surveyed me. “Surely she wasn’t responsible for my parents’ sudden disappearance,” I reasoned, taking notice of her too-pearly-white-to-have-feasted-on-my-family teeth.
I sheepishly tiptoed toward her. Her fur was a deep and curly black with a streak of silky white that ran from chin to chest. She tilted her head to the side in bemusement as I continued my uncertain ascent.
That was the first time I ever met Boo, though we hadn’t yet named her.
My parents debated beforehand how best to reveal my “present,” but ultimately concluded it would be most fitting to let me cross paths with the weeks-old puppy on my own. There was no warning, ceremony, or grand unveiling. One minute, I was an only child, and the next, there was a doughy-eyed playmate in the place that had previously been bare.
We went outside together. My parents stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the overcast day as they reveled in the innocence of our first encounter. Splotches of daffodils had begun sprouting from the desiccated soil. They feathered the yard in timid strokes of pale yellow. Birds called brightly overhead, but there was a dissonance to their spacing. The chirps echoed through the open sky in disjointed bursts before evaporating. As each sound prepared to surrender to the silence, its final reverberations were swallowed by the arrival of new notes.
One moment, Boo was docile, the next, darting across the yard in erratic zigzags, and the next, scanning the wide world around her with boundless curiosity. There was a naive elation in her eyes, the kind that people only know when everything is new. Even at eight years old, I’d already lost much of that sense of novelty. I’d sooner stare at my Nintendo Game Boy than sit in awe of the adventures my backyard had to offer.
But for Boo, it was all mysterious. From the clouds in the sky to the birds in the trees and cars on the streets, her pupils ping-ponged from side to side and took it all in with wide-eyed wonder.
It was the first day of spring, but too breezy and inhospitable to feel like a dead world flickering back to life. After a few minutes outside with her, my attention began to wane and I retreated indoors and do something else.
I wasn’t exactly overflowing with excitement after finally having my long-held dream realized. I could scarcely process the weight of the change.
It’s easy to inflate the subjects of our imagination into something different than life can deliver. We think when fantasies come to fruition, we’ll suddenly be new people. Our personal histories will neatly sort themselves into elegant befores and afters. The story I’d written in my head about the dog I’d one day call my own were as lofty as they were two-dimensional. They were borderline cartoonish — saccharine in their simplicity. More binary than the shades of color life traffics in.
I saw the world lit up in gold, and my dog and I walking side by side, hardly a worry between us. I envisioned us charting out a future so perfect and everlasting that none of our culture’s noise or pandemonium could ever permeate it. I saw fences and fields and fairytale endings sprawled out before us.
But the reality of this new dog looking me in the face was infinitely more nuanced than the Hallmark portrait I’d painted in my mind beforehand. It was weightier. More vivid. More daunting. More alive.
I couldn’t bring myself to believe my parents when they said that Boo was “ours.” It was a concept that simply wouldn’t compute.
It hadn’t dawned on me that my world had quietly and irreversibly shifted forever that day. It would take years to fully register what had taken place.
As I went inside, Boo followed me in. Setting down my coat on a chair, she looked up at my towering figure expectantly. I made a sudden, testing movement and she responded with a playful growl, eagerly waiting to see how I’d proceed.
I paused, weighed the moment, briefly returned her glance, and launched bombastically into motion. She mirrored my movements as I sprinted down hallways and weaved between sofas. Her eyes were warm brown and deliriously lock-focused on mine. There was a loving wildness in the unwavering gaze. Too affectionate to be angry and too wound-up to divert.
The world was a brand new place for her. For those first few months, if we took her outside of the house, it was in the safety of a fuzzy blue hat. We cradled her like a toddler, certain that some rabid dog or raccoon might pounce from behind a bush and attack if we let her free from our arms. (Our fears were proven valid when, a few weeks later, a hawk nearly snatched her from a local dog park.)
As with the frictions between siblings being raised under the same roof, there were slight growing pains in those first few years with Boo. Before I was 10, I’m not sure the word “love” ever really crossed my mind in relation to her. I was annoyed with the dog-related chores she came coupled with. I resented being forced to walk her.
But by the time I’d reached middle school, it began to occur to me that I couldn’t really imagine my life without this tiny creature that had wandered into it. I realized that one day in the distant future, I’d have to lose her. She’d have to die. And each time that foul thought surfaced, I did everything to push it as far away as I possibly could.
She was a permanent fixture throughout those early years. Even if I was busy growing up, doing my homework, or keeping up with my extracurriculars, Boo was always there in the background.
Once I was a teenager, I started to understand just how special she was. Just how much it would hurt if something ever happened to her, and how much a part of my world she’d become.
As the years ticked by, I grew increasingly aware of Boo’s mortality. Black hairs turned to gray. Cataracts colored her windows to the world, but if life’s shades had dulled even slightly, she refused to let it show. She was a being of the present who didn’t lose a second fretting over the past or future.
Every time we went somewhere together, she beamed toward me with such endless affection that it made me wonder what humans ever did to deserve dogs. How we cheated the fates to be entrusted with such precious creatures. How could we be worthy of anything so loyal and loving? So joyously unconcerned with the world outside of the present moment? So inexhaustably silly and so indifferent to how another might judge them for entertaining each and every ecstatic impulse that crosses their minds?
I’ve procrastinated for years on writing in greater detail about my final day with Boo. Just as the thought of her one day leaving us had haunted that younger me, I still struggle to talk about the memory of her last day with us — even five whole years after she passed. And just as the years leading up to her arrival into our home were defined by my bright-eyed musings about all the joy a dog could bring into my life, her twilight years quietly haunted me as once-faraway futures began to suddenly feel real. As the last stops on our journey together entered into view, my heart sunk in my chest. Each time the realization that my dog was going to die reared its hideous specter, air would be siphoned from my lungs. Whatever molecules were left in its wake continued to buzz with infernal intensity.
I wish sometimes that all of that horrid speculation about what those last hours would look like had remained just that. That thoughts could have remained thoughts rather than painful recollections. That the contours of that day never crystallized. That the details of that distant shore never filled in. That my eyes never gained focus.
I wish that Boo’s departure could forever be considered in the abstract—unwritten, formless, and free from the oppressive grip of a memory recalled too clearly. The room she was in as her heart stopped beating could remain shapeless. Unpopulated by objects and furniture. Untainted by all of the tears and tissues and contorted faces of people who spent the last 16 years at her side.
But now, there’s no wondering. When I picture Boo’s final day, it comes intimately bound with details. They’re seared forever into my brain. Yet even while the scars they’ve left behind hurt to this day, I can hardly stomach the thought of their erasure. The memory of those heartrending goodbyes being softened, tamed, or obscured.
My recollections of that day provide the most palpable understanding that I have of love’s transcendence. Just how deeply it’s possible to care for another person. Another being. How much affection we can still hold for another place in time, and how much it can hurt when we understand that those times have ended. How much grief can reshape us, and what a beautiful privilege it is to be able to feel the overwhelming expanse of emotion that the human experience comes paired with.
After we scheduled the lethal injection that would end Boo’s pain, I laid beside her all night long. The urge to sleep never knocked and I never invited it. With my mattress sprawled across the living room floor, I reveled in my ability to stall our forsaken limbo. Losing over 15 years in the blink of an eye, I refused to squander another minute tending to a demand as trivial as sleep.
I softly caressed Boo’s fur until the sun rose. It took so long for shades of black to give way to purple and gray that I imagined for a minute we’d somehow broken free from time’s relentless flow. But the sun crept up behind a thick wall of clouds with a horrible certainty. Dying branches of trees whipped back and forth violently in the late November breeze as its sparse few leaves made their way toward the frigid ground.
I listened to Boo’s labored breathing and hoped against hope she’d find the strength to recover. To walk another walk and play another game. To pull us toward another creek and feverishly plead for us to toss another stone for her to chase into its sun-dappled shallows. To dart from side to side across the stream bed as ripples formed and fractured, glee stretched wide across her face.
I wondered against wonder how years had turned to months, and weeks into final hours. How I’d walked this road for long enough to reach its final bend — a road that I once watched stretch so far into the distance that I was certain I’d never reach its terminus. A road that was so impossibly endless there was no point in even considering the realities that might be waiting for me on that faraway horizon.
Deep blues crashed against the shores of that unfamiliar land, and I let go and allowed the current to pull me toward its alien coast. Last walks and last meals and last hours and last minutes. Last “I love you”s. Last confessions about the life she helped to brighten. The last “Thank you so much for being my dog.”
I always thought that when Boo died, it would be in some sterile, white veterinarian’s office. I didn’t picture it taking place in the comfort of our home. It didn’t feel wrong, but nothing would have ever made the day feel right.
I was grateful she got to spend her final minutes surrounded by the people she spent her entire life loving, on the floor between the same sofas where we played our very first game.
Neither of my parents could bear to be in the room when the needle entered her bloodstream. But I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her alone, regardless of whether or not she was too sedated on pain killers to understand who was there in those final, dilated seconds. I wanted to stay at her side in the same way that she’d always been at mine. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t scared confronting whatever mystery the universe had in store for her next.
Nothing could prepare me for the pain of watching life drain from those loving, ancient eyes. Watching her limbs fall limp at her side, I shattered into a thousand separate pieces that I never fully managed to reorder. The person I was before she died is as inaccessible to me as the days of the dinosaurs.
But as much as I miss Boo, I’d hate to unlearn all that she taught me in her death. I don’t want to be the person I was before I understood human’s capacity for grief — the lows that hurt so much they make us wonder whether it’s worth going on at all. I don’t want to be who I was before I understood our potential for transformation, and our ability to pull empathy and presence of mind from life’s greatest pains.
Five years later, I’m just thankful that Boo was a part of my life at all. That I was graced with that silly, black shadow waiting at the top of the stairs for me one day. That she could be there for me as I went through breakups and tests and college applications and bad political administrations. I’m thankful that, by the time the pandemic hit, we were going on miles-long adventures every single day that made our infected world feel less dire. That we carved out moments of enchanted calm even when life was at its most frenetic.
I’m thankful that I got to know that little being who loved so enormously, so unconditionally, and with such simple purity that it altered the trajectory of my life. I’m thankful she taught me how to savor all of the people and creatures that flit in and out of my world, and how to be more present, loving, and in awe of this strange place I’ll one day have to leave.
Losing a dog is always the hardest. I got my first dog at age 11. It was a Golden Retriever named Buddy. I had one of those memorable first meetings after school, where I came into the house and found him. He helped me grow as a person and also helped me get through the loss of my dad, who passed from cancer when I was twelve. Buddy lived to be 11 years old himself. In 2015, he collapsed in a seizure while on a walk and couldn't walk or function well afterward. So, we brought him in to put him down. Ever since, his collar has been around my car's review mirror in the center of the windshield. A few months after Buddy died, my sister wanted a dog, so we got an Australian Shepherd that we named Rosie. I was emotionally opposed at first, but after about a month, I grew to love Rosie and accepted that it was okay that she wasn't Buddy. Rosie is ten now and will be eleven this coming March, so I know that the dreaded time is going to happen again within the next few years. It's been on my mind a lot lately. Thanks for sharing.
This is absolutely beautiful, Ben. What a tribute to your Boo. I had a similar experience with my Cocoa...they never know the impact they have on our lives...the love, loyalty, friendship.