Crossing the Rainbow Bridge

BY: SOLANGE

He was the first, the first of any dog I’ve had to let go, and the landscape of grief is unfamiliar terrain to me. It’s a strange, sometimes terrifying place and I’m here without a flashlight or good boots and I’m just doing my best to stumble through. I think I’m doing better, but just when I’m feeling really solid a friend will send me a text or something will come in the mail that sends me into a gale of tears again. I’ve cried every day since he died, sometimes endlessly, other times just a few pretty tears as I’ve maintained control, and some strange part of me fears that the day I don’t cry is the day I’m disloyal to him.

I lost him several weeks ago, amid an already chaotic and crisis-laded period, and his sudden death was a one-two KO punch that left me breathless and stunned and longing for the ability to lie on the floor motionless and try to remember how to breathe, but instead I was in the position of being unable to stop, of having to carry on, go to work, pack a suitcase, ready my other dogs to go into boarding, to get on a plane and go to the other side of the world, all within a few days of his passing. I had no time to mourn at our home, so my mourning was done on the road, as I wandered the islands and cities and holy sites of Norway, leaving pieces of him scattered across the Scandinavian landscape.

Since the day he died I’ve wanted to write it all down, everything that I can remember, so that I won’t forget those days, or him – as if I could ever do that.

Benito was the bossiest, scrappiest, most chutzpah-filled 3-and-a-half pound Chihuahua you’ve ever met. He arrived on my doorstep in 2004 an emaciated two-pound pathetic creature in need of neutering and extensive dental work, and from day one that tiny dog didn’t take nothin’ from nobody, as my dear friend Erin said. He ruled the roost and put his big sister, three times his size, right in her place, and he never stopped.

He was the best worst dog ever. He was a bad dog, and we called him a little fucker and asshole and jerk all the time, partly because he was so pushy with the other dogs, but also because he impulsively peed a fragrance reminiscent of a musk ox that would peel any varnish off the floor if left longer than one minute, and because he would not shut the hell up when other people came over. At the same time, he was often everyone’s favorite, not just for his diminutive stature but also for his charm and pure charisma. He was a very loving little guy and fit just perfectly into the crook of my arm (so he ended up getting more cuddle time than any of the others purely due to anatomic advantage). He was as sweet as he was sassy and he was adored by many, even being a minor celebrity at the vet’s office – ‘Benito’s here!’ the techs would shout when I brought him in for appointments.

About five years ago, when I bought my first home, his hair started lightening. In the ensuing years, he went from a silky chocolate brown to a thin, brittle white. His eyes clouded up. The cough he’d always had grew worse, but his spirit never dampened. In the last year or so I knew he was ‘winding down’ and I often picked him up and told him how much I would miss him when he went. I took him for a dental surgery last June and sprung for a complete blood panel and all systems were go – he was old and his eyesight sucked, but he was still chugging along and doing ok for a 15-year-old Chihuahua.I joked to my goddaughter that I had the world’s first immortal dogs. Now I eat those words.

On a Sunday night in August, while I was deep in the throes of a vicious upper respiratory infection and five days before my plane was to take off, he came into my office and stood at my feet while I was in the middle of a packing frenzy. Ordinarily I would have shooed him off, but something prompted me to pick him up and lay him on the fuzzy sheepskin that covers my office chair, bundle him in a blanket, and pet him periodically for the next couple of hours as he snoozed and I packed. I’ll be forever grateful for that inner voice, and for the foresight to take a picture of him when he dozed. That night he let me sleep through the night – which had become more unusual as he had begun to wake up and cry to be picked up in the wee hours – but when I heard him wake up and go to his water bowl I heard an unusual ‘thunk’ and looked over the edge of the bed to see him lying on his side in a pool of what I figured was water from the water bowl. I scooped him up and cuddled him and realized it wasn’t water he’d slipped in on the floor but pee, and I knew something was wrong enough that I called my wonderful mobile vet and booked an appointment for him to come see Benito in a couple of days.

Then I had to get up and go to the hospital to be checked to make sure I didn’t have pneumonia and, once cleared, I came home and did something I’ll always regret – I got dressed to go to a job interview in the City. I texted two friends and said I was considering blowing off the interview to stay home with Benito and they both said to go – so I bundled Benito up on the couch with his brother and sisters, and I left him. I knew from the moment I walked in to the interview I didn’t want that job, and then of course when it was over I went to a friend’s to kill time while the impossible rush-hour traffic died down. When I got home that night at around 7:30, I found Benito on the couch right where I’d left him. He stood up and stretched and started to walk to the little dog stairs that lead down to the floor.

“Do you want an airlift, Little Buddy?” I asked him, and picked him up and placed him in front of his water bowl. To my horror, he swayed on his feet, banged his tiny apple head into the bowl and collapsed on his side. As I reached for him, he peed a huge arc of urine into the air and that’s when I completely lost it – I knew he was dying. I scooped him up and put him in the crook of my arm and with my other hand placed what has to be the most embarrassing, ugly, hot mess of a phone call I’ve ever made to my vet and asked if he could please come tomorrow because I thought it was his time. Then I took him to bed and slept with him cuddled up next to me for what was his last night.

In the morning I dressed him in the little red sweater he’d worn his entire life and carried him to the park. We lay in the warm morning sunshine and as he closed his eyes and breathed rapidly I told him how loved he was – how Mommy loved him, his Aunties Erin and Natasha and Sydney and Bernie and London loved him, and his Uncle Dan and everybody who ever knew him. Then I carried him home, stopping to pick some rosemary and wildflowers in the neighborhood, and we lay in the bed and I began the measuring of time – three more hours, two more hours, one more hour – that has never stopped.

He hadn’t wanted to eat the night before and seemed disinterested in food, but a little voice in my head said ‘try salami,’ his lifelong favorite, so I did, and to my joy he ate an entire slice. That brought happiness to my heart, then and now, and I still joke about it. My friend Lisa from work came over, with a bouquet of flowers (my only request) and hung out with us until Dr. Ken came and we began the process of helping him cross over.

The vet took one look at him – and, true to form, Benito tried to snap at him when examined – and with very wide eyes said ‘his tongue looks terrible!” We found he had a serious heart murmur and I was told, ‘If it’s not today, it’s soon,’ and so we decided to let him go. To this day I ask myself if I would have done the same thing if I weren’t leaving the country in a few days, but I was so caught between the desire for another few days with him and the horrible fear of having him die organically, but in pain, as a friend of mine went through with her little terrier a couple of years ago. It was an agonizing choice.

The process itself was simple. I held him curled up in a blanket while Dr. Ken gave him a shot that anesthetized him and send his brain off to la-la land. While he drifted off we stood in front of the large window in the dining room that looks out onto the street, the window he used to constantly pester me to pick him up so he could look out of and bark at passerby, and I repeated the list of all the people who loved him and told him what a good boy he was. My friend Lisa had the presence of mind to take a picture right then and I thank God she did because it’s so touching – our last picture, and he looks so happy. Once he had no reactivity, we gave him the shot that stopped his heart, and my boy was gone.

My vet helped me curl up his body and I wrapped him up in a shell-patterned towel that I inherited from my late grandmother and gently laid him in the only appropriate box I could find – a green Ikea organizational box (I have stopped more than once to think ‘could you have imagine when you bought that that you’d be putting Benito’s body in it?’), and covered his little body with the rosemary and wildflowers and the yellow Gerber daisies Lisa had brought over. I held that green box against my body – I can still feel the weight of it in my arms – until the very last minute Dr. Ken had to take it so he could be cremated.

I kept a brave German face until everyone was gone and then I disintegrated. The following days are a blur. I packed. I cried. I counted time by his death (‘an hour ago, three hours ago, a day ago, two days ago, he was alive, he was here). After two days I finally picked up his tiny bowls (half the size of the other dogs’ bowls). I wailed. I had to go to a meeting at work. I got the other dogs ready to go to boarding. I sobbed. I drank cold medicine and coughed by guts out and went through two full-sized boxes of tissues between grief and sickness, I slept as much as I could and I got my hair and nails done, numbly, and at every stoplight I cried for my little guy. I am not a stoic when it comes to death, it turns out – I am a garment-rending, keening banshee of the most old-world, operatic variety, apparently.

It was too soon to have his ashes back, but I knew I wanted him to go on this trip with me, so at the last minute (literally within an hour of leaving for the airport) I put a tiny bit of the fur we shaved off his paw into a heart locket and put it on and took three of his teeth from prior dental surgeries (because yes, I’m that girl who saves her dog’s teeth) in a test tube with me to the airport.

In the following weeks, I took six plane rides throughout Norway. At liftoff and landing on each one, I held the locket around my neck in my hand. I left his three teeth in places very special to me and to Norwegians, places I hope to visit again and again, and in a fairy tale story, a beautiful man I met in Norway asked me for the last bit of him I had left and so we buried the tiny scrap of fur under a tree in his garden. I realized not everyone takes mourning to this level (‘goddamn, you’re so Scorpio,’ says my Scorpio girlfriend) but to me it was comforting, and necessary. He was a three-and-a-half pound Mexican dog with the spirit of the most ruthless Viking, and so it seemed appropriate to leave a little of him there, in the land of fearless explorers and conquerors, under the watchful eye of his spiritual forefathers.

I’ve been home from Norway for weeks now and the process of grieving and healing continues. I have his ashes back and took peace in sifting the bone shards from the fine ash (Scorpio!). In the aftermath of the horrific fires that devastated the wine country north of me, I gave away as much of my extra dog supplies as I could, but I found there were several things of his I’m not ready to let go of. I have an appointment for a memorial tattoo that will have his ashes embedded in the ink. And still I ache for my little guy, every day I wish for ‘just one more day.’

I asked my friends who have been through the euthanasia of a pet if they feel the same way; if they wonder if they did the right thing, did they put their pet down too soon? Not soon enough? Could any of us have done something differently? I tell myself I could have at least given him one more day. I could have blown off that stupid interview. I could have clued in that his worsening cough was a sign of something serious. Intellectually I know this is useless, and that I must find peace in the fact that he had a beautiful, painless passing in my arms, not alone in boarding or at home without me or under the wheels of a car or worse. I’m grateful he told me it was time to go before he went away to ‘Dan Camp’ for a few weeks, that he knew I was leaving and so it was time for him to go with me, in spirit if not in body.

I am grateful I have a vet that makes house calls, and I’m grateful I had at least put enough thought into it beforehand to be able to give him some beauty and dignity in his death. Yes, I wish I had had a few more days, I wish I’d had a more beautiful box to put him in, I wish I hadn’t had to get on a plane a few days later and choke back my tears over the Atlantic, I wish I still didn’t miss his tiny clicking footsteps and I wish I’d never, ever had to say goodbye to that tiny little boss. Yes to all of those things, it’s true. I miss my boy – I don’t think I knew until he was gone that he was my favorite – and I always will.

If I can offer any advice, it’s just the following: think about your friend’s passing, whether from old age and/or disease or an unexpected cause. Have a plan for what you want to do – I truly recommend having a vet make a house call if you can – I believe it reduces stress for both you and your pet. Decide if you want to bury or cremate your friend, and how you want to treat their body prior to either. Pay attention to signs your pet is weakening or ready to go, and please don’t prolong his or her life to where they suffer needlessly.

And here’s what I’ve learned that I want to share most of all – let yourself grieve in your own way. Some people are content to let their pets be buried or scattered in a communal grave, others want a proper burial with a marker, and others want to keep the ashes at home. Some go full-Greek tragedy like I do, others shed a tear and get on with life and are very pragmatic. Some get memorial tattoos, some get jewelry made with cremains, some think that’s just plain weird. Just mourn the way you want to, and don’t let anyone tell you that you’re either too cold and detached or too dramatic and overly attached. Whatever. Grief has a landscape as varied as that of the earth itself, and you have to walk its geography in a path that gets you where you need go – for me that was scattering teeth, getting tattoos, sifting ash from bone, and writing these words. I hope they help you, and me.

In memory of Benito M., 2002-2017 ‘He Didn’t Take Nothin’ from Nobody’