Friends and family who followed my blog posts last year about our brief and devastating attempt at dog ownership have repeatedly been asking my husband Greg and me when we would get back on the proverbial horse. In April, knowing we would not be traveling for at least a month, we headed to the SPCA where we had become frequent visitors last year at this time. We wiped tears from our eyes as we drove into the parking lot, remembering the day we said good-bye to our sweet, broken dog. Then we braced ourselves, and entered the building.
The sound of unwanted dogs echoed off the bare walls. We wanted to take them all - drive off like Cruella de Vil, with a busload. But then we regained our sanity upon seeing the first cage of eight German Shepherd puppies. As adorable as they were, we knew our limits. We moved on and picked the first full-grown dog on the left.
A Husky mutt, she’s approximately a year old, although we think she’s already given birth. She is house-trained and has a sweet disposition. When she doesn’t like something she vocalizes it so that the neighbors think we are torturing her. When she’s tired, she cuddles up next to us. And when she’s playing, she leaps over us like some kind of canine Evel Knievel, sending Greg and me into fits of laughter.
“You’re going to cause us all kinds of heartache in ten years,” I heard Greg say to her. It's true, of course. But it’s worth it, right?
The joy is worth the pain
According to the Heart Association’s website, people who own dogs live longer after heart attacks than those who don't. The reasons run the gamut from the social to the physical. I'm living proof that they help you get your steps in.
My mother-in-law came to visit a week later. Thinking that having a dog might increase her longevity, I asked if she might consider getting one herself. She shook her head with certainty. “It’s too painful,” she said.
In April my book club read The Redhead of Auschwitz. The main character, closely based on the author’s grandmother, survived the horrors of the concentration camps in part by defiantly believing she would be going home. At one point in the story the women in the camp are locked in a room during an air raid. The protagonist wants them to try to escape but all they want to talk about is recipes. One by one the women riff off each other, conjuring up baked goods they haven’t had since before the war in an effort to block out the idea of their imminent death. When pain and suffering is all we can feel, having faith in the future can be the hardest thing to do because it feels so futile. Yet it is absolutely necessary for survival.
“I don’t know how you go on to get married and have a family and live a normal life after that,” commented one book club attendee. Another woman reframed it, “That was only one year of her life when she was a teenager. She lived to be 100. Eighty-four years is a lot of time.” What would be the option, really? No one sits in a room and reconstructs recipes for 84 years. We get up and dust ourselves off and keep trying to live the best lives we can.
As part of the CFP education program, you learn about all the possible biases that influence our decision making. I find that it is particularly easy to fall prey to recency bias - which is when our vision is clouded over by the most recent storms. Be it inflation, the war in Ukraine, a failed relationship, or the death of a dog. In the span of a lifetime, though, what is a year-long storm? When we get to the end of the road, what will have defined us more, the one year or the other 80+? We must experience sorrow, say the epistemologists, or how would we know joy?
Courage, friends
When we were moving my grandmother from her home on March Air Force Base to senior living, I found a yellow sticky note on my grandfather’s side of the bed. It read, in his signature all-caps style, “RISE TOGETHER!”
I have it still, somewhere in a file. Every now and then I rediscover it. Every time, a lump rises in my throat as I recall how much my grandparents loved each other. It was a gift, each day given anew, to be able to rise and face the day, arm in arm. In their final years, it was their duty to each other. It gave each day a unified purpose.
We named our new dog Moxie. Maybe we are wishing her into being a healthy and strong dog after poor Tope lost her fight against Valley Fever. I’ve already noticed that Moxie frequently snarfs, which has me worried that she, too, might have Valley Fever, because, as you may have guessed, not even two months have passed, and we are already attached.
We live in a time where the media makes us instantaneously aware of every shooting, every bank crisis, every retaliation in this new Cold War. Every calamity and every possible calamity are mental hurdles in our daily lives. Still, we proceed. We enjoy meals with family and friends. We love on our dogs. We travel. We invest. We invest in the betterment of our children and grandchildren, our nieces and our nephews. We invest in our communities - in housing and infrastructure. We invest in companies and we believe in a free market even when we have a hard time believing in a better future, because in spite of what we’re seeing in the news, we have lived long enough to know that this, too, shall pass.
One day, Moxie will leave us. But between now and then we will have hundreds of adventures, log millions of steps, buy tons of toys and bones and treats and give her so much love. Every morning until that final day, she will appear by our bedside, tail wagging, and we will rise to face a new day, together.