Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog, Page 26

  “I know,” I said. “I do, too.”

  I wanted to write a farewell column to Marley, but I was afraid all my emotion would pour out into a gushy, maudlin piece of self-indulgence that would only humiliate me. So I stuck with topics less dear to my heart. I did, however, carry a tape recorder with me, and when a thought came to me, I would get it down. I knew I wanted to portray him as he was and not as some impossibly perfect reincarnation of Old Yeller or Rin Tin Tin, as if there were any danger of that. So many people remake their pets in death, turning them into supernatural, noble beasts that in life did everything for their masters except fry eggs for breakfast. I wanted to be honest. Marley was a funny, bigger-than-life pain in the ass who never quite got the hang of the whole chain-of-command thing. Honestly, he might well have been the world’s worst-behaved dog. Yet he intuitively grasped from the start what it meant to be man’s best friend.

  During the week after his death, I walked down the hill several times to stand by his grave. Partly, I wanted to make sure no wild animals were coming around at night. The grave remained undisturbed, but already I could see that in the spring I would need to add a couple of wheelbarrows of soil to fill the depression where it was settling. Mostly I just wanted to commune with him. Standing there, I found myself replaying random snippets from his life. I was embarrassed by how deep my grief went for this dog, deeper than for some humans I had known. It’s not that I equated a dog’s life with a human’s, but outside my immediate family few people had given themselves so selflessly to me. Secretly, I brought Marley’s choker chain in from the car, where it had sat since his final ride to the hospital, and stashed it beneath the underwear in my dresser, where each morning I could reach down and touch it.

  I walked around all week with a dull ache inside. It was actually physical, not unlike a stomach virus. I was lethargic, unmotivated. I couldn’t even muster the energy to indulge my hobbies—playing guitar, woodworking, reading. I felt out of sorts, not sure what to do with myself. I ended up going to bed early most nights, at nine-thirty, ten o’clock.

  On New Year’s Eve we were invited to a neighbor’s house for a party. Friends quietly expressed their condolences, but we all tried to keep the conversation light and moving. This was, after all, New Year’s Eve. At dinner, Sara and Dave Pandl, a pair of landscape architects who had moved back to Pennsylvania from California to turn an old stone barn into their home, and who had become our dear friends, sat at one corner of the table with me, and we talked at length about dogs and love and loss. Dave and Sara had put down their cherished Nelly, an Australian shepherd, five years earlier and buried her on the hill beside their farmhouse. Dave is one of the most unsentimental people I have ever met, a quiet stoic cut from taciturn Pennsylvania Dutch stock. But when it came to Nelly, he, too, struggled with a deep inner grief. He told me how he combed the rocky woods behind his home for days until he found the perfect stone for her grave. It was naturally shaped like a heart, and he took it to a stone carver who inscribed “Nelly” into its surface. All these years later, the death of that dog still touched them profoundly. Their eyes misted up as they told me about her. As Sara said, blinking back her tears, sometimes a dog comes along that really touches your life, and you can never forget her.

  That weekend I took a long walk through the woods, and by the time I arrived at work on Monday, I knew what I wanted to say about the dog that touched my life, the one I would never forget.

  I began the column by describing my walk down the hill with the shovel at dawn and how odd it was to be outdoors without Marley, who for thirteen years had made it his business to be at my side for any excursion. “And now here I was alone,” I wrote, “digging him this hole.”

  I quoted my father who, when I told him I had to put the old guy down, gave the closest thing to a compliment my dog had ever received: “There will never be another dog like Marley.”

  I gave a lot of thought to how I should describe him, and this is what I settled on: “No one ever called him a great dog—or even a good dog. He was as wild as a banshee and as strong as a bull. He crashed joyously through life with a gusto most often associated with natural disasters. He’s the only dog I’ve ever known to get expelled from obedience school.” I continued: “Marley was a chewer of couches, a slasher of screens, a slinger of drool, a tipper of trash cans. As for brains, let me just say he chased his tail till the day he died, apparently convinced he was on the verge of a major canine breakthrough.” There was more to him than that, however, and I described his intuition and empathy, his gentleness with children, his pure heart.

  What I really wanted to say was how this animal had touched our souls and taught us some of the most important lessons of our lives. “A person can learn a lot from a dog, even a loopy one like ours,” I wrote. “Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart. He taught me to appreciate the simple things—a walk in the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight. And as he grew old and achy, he taught me about optimism in the face of adversity. Mostly, he taught me about friendship and self-lessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty.”

  It was an amazing concept that I was only now, in the wake of his death, fully absorbing: Marley as mentor. As teacher and role model. Was it possible for a dog—any dog, but especially a nutty, wildly uncontrollable one like ours—to point humans to the things that really mattered in life? I believed it was. Loyalty. Courage. Devotion. Simplicity. Joy. And the things that did not matter, too. A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes or designer clothes. Status symbols mean nothing to him. A waterlogged stick will do just fine. A dog judges others not by their color or creed or class but by who they are inside. A dog doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his. It was really quite simple, and yet we humans, so much wiser and more sophisticated, have always had trouble figuring out what really counts and what does not. As I wrote that farewell column to Marley, I realized it was all right there in front of us, if only we opened our eyes. Sometimes it took a dog with bad breath, worse manners, and pure intentions to help us see.

  I finished my column, turned it in to my editor, and drove home for the night, feeling somehow lighter, almost buoyant, as though a weight I did not even know I had been carrying was lifted from me.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Bad Dog Club

  W hen I arrived at work the next morning, the red message light on my telephone was blinking. I punched in my access code and received a recorded warning I had never heard before. “Your mailbox is full,” the voice said. “Please delete all unneeded messages.”

  I logged on to my computer and opened my e-mail. Same story. The opening screen was filled with new messages, and so was the next screen, and the one after that, and after that, too. The morning e-mail was a ritual for me, a visceral, if inexact, barometer of the impact that day’s column had made. Some columns brought as few as five or ten responses, and on those days I knew I had not connected. Others brought several dozen, a good day. A few brought even more. But this morning there were hundreds, far more than anything I had received before. The headers at the top of the e-mails said things like “Deepest condolences,” “About your loss,” or simply “Marley.”

  Animal lovers are a special breed of human, generous of spirit, full of empathy, perhaps a little prone to sentimentality, and with hearts as big as a cloudless sky. Most who wrote and called simply wanted to express their sympathies, to tell me they, too, had been down this road and knew what my family was going through. Others had dogs whose lives were drawing to their inevitable ends; they dreaded what they knew was coming, just as we had dreaded it, too.

  One couple wrote, “We fully understand and we mourn for your loss of Marley, and for our loss of Rusty. They’ll always be missed, never truly replaced.” A reader named Joyce wrote, “Thanks for reminding us of Duncan, who lies buried in our ow
n backyard.” A suburbanite named Debi added: “Our family understands how you feel. This past Labor Day we had to put our golden retriever Chewy to sleep. He was thirteen and had many of the same afflictions you named with your dog. When he couldn’t even get up to go outside to relieve himself that last day, we knew we couldn’t let him keep suffering. We, too, had a burial in our backyard, under a red maple that will always be his memorial.”

  An employment recruiter named Monica, owner of Katie the Lab, wrote: “My condolences and tears to you. My girl Katie is only two and I always think, ‘Monica, why did you go and let this wonderful creature steal your heart like this?’” From Carmela: “Marley must have been a great dog to have a family that loved him so much. Only dog owners can understand the unconditional love they give and the tremendous heartache when they are gone.” From Elaine: “Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come home each day. It is amazing how much love and laughter they bring into our lives and even how much closer we become with each other because of them.” From Nancy: “Dogs are one of the wonders of life and add so very much to ours.” From MaryPat: “To this day I miss the sound of Max’s tags jingling as he padded through the house checking things out; that silence will drive you nuts for a while, especially at night.” From Connie: “It’s just the most amazing thing to love a dog, isn’t it? It makes our relationships with people seem as boring as a bowl of oatmeal.”

  When the messages finally stopped coming several days later, I counted them up. Nearly eight hundred people, animal lovers all, had been moved to contact me. It was an incredible outpouring, and what a catharsis it was for me. By the time I had plowed through them all—and answered as many as I could—I felt better, as though I was part of a giant cyber-support group. My private mourning had become a public therapy session, and in this crowd there was no shame in admitting a real, piercing grief for something as seemingly inconsequential as an old, smelly dog.

  My correspondents wrote and called for another reason, too. They wanted to dispute the central premise of my report, the part in which I insisted Marley was the world’s worst-behaved animal. “Excuse me,” the typical response went, “but yours couldn’t have been the world’s worst dog—because mine was.” To make their case, they regaled me with detailed accounts of their pets’ woeful behavior. I heard about shredded curtains, stolen lingerie, devoured birthday cakes, trashed auto interiors, great escapes, even a swallowed diamond engagement ring, which made Marley’s taste for gold chains seem positively lowbrow by comparison. My in-box resembled a television talk show, Bad Dogs and the People Who Love Them, with the willing victims lining up to proudly brag, not about how wonderful their dogs were but about just how awful. Oddly enough, most of the horror stories involved large loopy retrievers just like mine. We weren’t alone after all.

  A woman named Elyssa described how her Lab Mo always broke out of the house when left alone, usually by crashing through window screens. Elyssa and her husband thought they had foiled Mo’s wandering ways by closing and locking all the ground-floor windows. It hadn’t occurred to them to close the upstairs windows, as well. “One day my husband came home and saw the second-floor screen hanging loose. He was scared to death to look for him,” she wrote. Just as her husband began to fear the worst, “Mo all of a sudden came around the corner of the house with his head down. He knew he was in trouble, but we were amazed he was not hurt. He had flown through the window and landed on a sturdy bush that broke his fall.”

  Larry the Lab swallowed his mistress’s bra and then burped it up in one piece ten days later. Gypsy, another Lab with adventurous tastes, devoured a jalousie window. Jason, a retriever–Irish setter mix, downed a five-foot vacuum cleaner hose, “interior reinforcing wire and all,” his owner, Mike, reported. “Jason also ate a two-by-three-foot hole in a plaster wall and backhoed a three-foot-long trench in the carpet, stretching back from his favorite spot by the window,” Mike wrote, adding, “but I loved that beast.”

  Phoebe, a Lab mix, was kicked out of two different boarding kennels and told never to return, owner Aimee wrote. “It seems she was the gang leader in breaking out of not only her cage but doing the favor for two other dogs, too. They then helped themselves to all kinds of snacks during the overnight hours.” Hayden, a hundred-pound Lab, ate just about anything he could get his jaws around, owner Carolyn reported, including a whole box of fish food, a pair of suede loafers, and a tube of superglue, “not in the same sitting.” She added: “His finest hour, though, was when he tore the garage-door frame out of the wall because I had foolishly attached his leash to it so he could lie in the sunshine.”

  Tim reported his yellow Lab Ralph was every bit as much a food thief as Marley, only smarter. One day before going out, Tim placed a large chocolate centerpiece on top of the refrigerator where it would be safely out of Ralph’s reach. The dog, his owner reported, pawed open the cupboard drawers, then used them as stairs to climb onto the counter, where he could balance on his hind legs and reach the chocolate, which was gone without a trace when his master returned home. Despite the chocolate overdose, Ralph showed no ill effects. “Another time,” Tim wrote, “Ralph opened the refrigerator and emptied its contents, including things in jars.”

  Nancy clipped my column to save because Marley reminded her so much of her retriever Gracie. “I left the article on the kitchen table and turned to put away the scissors,” Nancy wrote. “When I turned back, sure enough, Gracie had eaten the column.”

  Wow, I was feeling better by the minute. Marley no longer sounded all that terrible. If nothing else, he certainly had plenty of company in the Bad Dog Club. I brought several of the messages home to share with Jenny, who laughed for the first time since Marley’s death. My new friends in the Secret Brotherhood of Dysfunctional Dog Owners had helped us more than they ever would know.

  The days turned into weeks and winter melted into spring. Daffodils pushed up through the earth and bloomed around Marley’s grave, and delicate white cherry blossoms floated down to rest on it. Gradually, life without our dog became more comfortable. Days would float by without me even thinking of him, and then some little cue—one of his hairs on my sweater, the rattle of his choker chain as I reached into my drawer for a pair of socks—would bring him abruptly back. As time passed, the recollections were more pleasant than painful. Long-forgotten moments flashed in my head with vivid clarity like clips being rerun from old home videos: The way Lisa the stabbing victim had leaned over and kissed Marley on the snout after she got out of the hospital. The way the crew on the movie set fawned over him. The way the mail lady slipped him a treat each day at the front door. The way he held mangoes in his front paws as he nibbled out the flesh. The way he snapped at the babies’ diapers with that look of narcotic bliss on his face, and the way he begged for his tranquilizers like they were steak bits. Little moments hardly worth remembering, and yet here they were, randomly playing out on my mental movie screen at the least likely times and places. Most of them made me smile; a few made me bite my lip and pause.

  I was in a staff meeting at the office when this one came to me: It was back in West Palm Beach when Marley was still a puppy and Jenny and I were still dreamy-eyed newlyweds. We were strolling along the Intracoastal Waterway on a crisp winter’s day, holding hands, Marley out in front, tugging us along. I let him hop up on the concrete breakwater, which was about two feet wide and three feet above the water’s surface. “John,” Jenny protested. “He could fall in.” I looked at her dubiously. “How dumb do you think he is?” I asked. “What do you think he’ll do? Just walk right off the edge into thin air?” Ten seconds later, that’s exactly what he did, landing in the water with a huge splash and requiring a complicated rescue operation on our part to get him back up the wall and onto land again.

  A few days later I was driving to an interview when out of nowhere came another early scene from our marriage: a romantic getaway weekend to a beachfront cottage on Sanibel Is
land before children arrived. The bride, the groom—and Marley. I had completely forgotten about that weekend, and here it was again, replaying in living color: driving across the state with him wedged between us, his nose occasionally bumping the gearshift lever into neutral. Bathing him in the tub of our rental place after a day on the beach, suds and water and sand flying everywhere. And later, Jenny and I making love beneath the cool cotton sheets, an ocean breeze wafting over us, Marley’s otter tail thumping against the mattress.

  He was a central player in some of the happiest chapters of our lives. Chapters of young love and new beginnings, of budding careers and tiny babies. Of heady successes and crushing disappointments; of discovery and freedom and self-realization. He came into our lives just as we were trying to figure out what they would become. He joined us as we grappled with what every couple must eventually confront, the sometimes painful process of forging from two distinct pasts one shared future. He became part of our melded fabric, a tightly woven and inseparable strand in the weave that was us. Just as we had helped shape him into the family pet he would become, he helped to shape us, as well—as a couple, as parents, as animal lovers, as adults. Despite everything, all the disappointments and unmet expectations, Marley had given us a gift, at once priceless and free. He taught us the art of unqualified love. How to give it, how to accept it. Where there is that, most of the other pieces fall into place.

  The summer after his death we installed a swimming pool, and I could not help thinking how much Marley, our tireless water dog, would have loved it, loved it more than any of us possibly could, even as he gouged the liner with his claws and clogged the filter with his fur. Jenny marveled at how easy it was to keep the house clean without a dog shedding and drooling and tracking in dirt. I admitted how nice it was to walk barefoot in the grass without watching where I stepped. The garden was definitely better off without a big, heavy-pawed rabbit chaser crashing through it. No doubt about it, life without a dog was easier and immensely simpler. We could take a weekend jaunt without arranging boarding. We could go out to dinner without worrying what family heirloom was in jeopardy. The kids could eat without having to guard their plates. The trash can didn’t have to go up on the kitchen counter when we left. Once again we could sit back and enjoy in peace the wondrous show of a good lightning storm. I especially liked the freedom of moving around the house without a giant yellow magnet glued to my heels.