The Joy and Sadness of Loving a Good Dog
How our dead dog Cooper gave us one final happy memory in the woods.
When my husband and I got married, our dog Cooper was there. Used to following me around, he trailed me down the aisle and then sat off to the side while my husband and I said our vows.
Looking back at photos from the first few years we were married, I see how attached the three of us were to each other. When we went hiking, swimming or to the Post Office, Cooper was there. He was in every photo and became a thread in every storyline.
Cooper was kind of a low-key dog with a so-so personality. He was mostly quiet, but as coonhounds do, if you howled at the moon, he would howl along with you. When he howled, his lips curled up like a cartoon dog and his big brown eyes would hold your gaze as if to say, “This is serious, Buster!”
Later when he lost his hearing, he stopped howling which marked the first time he broke my heart. The thing about dogs is that the arc of their lives is just shorter than ours. While I felt like my life was still just getting started, I saw that Cooper’s life was already in a decrescendo.
We broke his heart too though, when one day we left our house without him and then returned a few days later with a squishy pink baby daughter. Already 10 years old, Cooper wasn’t interested in giving up his position as our all-time number one priority. But there he was, alone in his dog bed on the floor as we turned our backs to him to read books and snuggle our new tiny person.
Despite the shifting landscape in our household, Cooper was a steadying reminder that not everything in our lives had changed. Baby or no baby, he still demanded his can of kibble at 7am and 6pm on the dot.
When Cooper was 11, he tore his ACL. The vet said she wouldn’t typically recommend such an expensive and invasive surgery for a dog over 10. This time though, she made an exception because of Cooper’s ‘extreme vitality,’ which is to say he was the type of dog that could interchangeably sleep all day or go for a 10 mile hike.
So we wrote the check and nearly broke our backs helping him in and out of the house to go to the bathroom for two weeks while he recovered from the surgery.
Over time, he became friends with our daughter and let her dress him up in tutus and Mardi Gras beads. She learned to walk by toddling along next to him with one hand on his back for balance.
When he was 13, a growth developed on his hind leg. Within a few months, the tissue around his right hip tripled in size making him look like a body builder who only worked out one side of his body. We were so certain it was cancer we started mourning before the biopsy results even came in.
When the vet called, it was to tell us that the growth was inoperable and benign. Aside from increasing his bodyweight by 15%, it had no effect on him whatsoever. Cooper settled into the life of an old dog, which is to say he ate what he wanted, slept where he wanted and sometimes sniffed at the squirrels and chipmunks who gnawed at the pumpkins and squash in my vegetable garden.
He was so deaf by that point that when I came home from work, I stomped my boot on the floor and then watched him closely to see if he would lift his head to acknowledge my presence and give me proof of life.
When we brought home our second child, Cooper faded even further into the background. During the day, busy with our kids and jobs, he slept, content to be left alone. But in the evenings when it was quiet, my husband and I would lay down on the floor next to him with our heads on his bed. We would pet him from head to toe and entertain each other with stories we had already told each other a million times.
The winter of 2017 was cold and icy. The freeze and thaw cycles turned our yard into a skating rink which made it hard for us to get across, let alone a geriatric coonhound. Cooper struggled to take the three or four steps necessary for him to go to the bathroom. We tried helping him, but it was a comedy of errors to see two grown people on glare ice trying to carry a tender dog with a full bladder.
When he could no longer stand up independently, we made an appointment to have him put down the following day. When morning came, I couldn’t do it. I cancelled the appointment and we spent the day surrounding him with his favorite things and crying as we came to terms with reaching the end of an era.
The next day, I came home from work and found him lying on the floor panting with his head in a pool of foamy saliva. His bowels had let go there was bloody black poop smeared across his bed. My daughter, now a competent first grader, helped me get him onto a towel and drag him to the car. My husband met us at the vet’s office where we said our final goodbye.
Losing a pet is a private kind of grief. Other people might know your dog and like your dog, but the deep, cutting sadness you feel when your dog dies is yours and yours alone. The death of a dog is a reminder that life travels in one direction and although there may be other dogs, your time with that dog is over and you will never get it back.
But, like all grief, it can’t stop time. The months passed and we got used to life without a dog. We loved the freedom it afforded us and we decided not to get another dog. Until we got another dog. Salty is another coonhound who was found wandering the side of the road. Young and chipper, he plays with our kids like a best friend and we love him dearly.
What Salty didn’t know though, when he settled into our house and our routines, is that Cooper was still with us in our house. I don’t mean that in any figurative sense, I mean Cooper’s ashes sat on a shelf in our basement in plain sight.
This past weekend, with much of our state closed due to the pandemic, and our family in need of something to break the monotony of remote school followed by not seeing our friends and not going to our favorite places, we decided to give Cooper a proper sendoff into the doggy afterlife.
It was an easy plan to make. When we first got Cooper, we were renting a big old farmhouse on a dirt road in the western part of New Hampshire. Cooper loved running on the trails near our house, chasing critters, jumping stonewalls and rolling in mud. It was obvious that those woods should be his final resting place.
So we drove an hour and a half and visited a friend who still lives nearby. We talked for a bit, but our kids, now age 9 and 3 were antsy to do the deed. When we picked up the ashes from the crematorium, they were in a classy wooden box with the lid screwed on. Our son, who was only 1 when Cooper died, was fascinated with the whole process had carried around a screwdriver all day, anxious to use it.
We unscrewed the lid to find a plastic bag holding about a pound of light gray, dense, fine powder. The kids argued about who got to carry it as we walked into the woods. They settled on taking turns, which mean there was a lot of swinging and jostling.
Until this weekend, I had never made a journey across a state to spread ashes from a long dead dog, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I guess I thought we would walk to a spot, say something nice, tip the ashes from the bag and that would be it.
Instead though, as we hiked, a small hole developed in the bag. I looked at my son’s face and it was streaked with ash. When I watched him pass the bag to my daughter, I saw a trail of ash fall from the bag onto her shirt. I thought about trying to confiscate the bag, but they were so happy I just kept walking.
We got to a place in the woods where wild blackberry bushes grew in a tall thorny tangle. I told the story of the time Cooper had learned how to pick blackberries from the bush and he had eaten so many that he later threw up what looked like blackberry jam on our staircase. I thought it would be appropriate to put his ashes there.
In jubilant agreement, my son opened the bag and reached in for a fistful. He threw it in the air like party confetti. My daughter joined in and grabbed two handfuls of ash, throwing it up in the air to be caught in the wind and whisked away to nothing.
“Aren’t you even going to help?” she asked us.
My husband and I joined in by grabbing the remaining dust. I held it in my hand, waiting to feel sad or somber but nothing came. Everyone was laughing and happy. There were no tears, just pale, powdery cheeks, lightly coated with the dust of a dog we had loved.
