How to Grieve The Loss of a Great Dog
While living on the Big Island during the winter/spring of 2017 I had my first significant experience with losing a beloved pet. Trek came into my life in December of 2009 when I first met my now husband Patrick. He wa a 7-year old, active sweet soul of a pup… and we warmed up to each other almost instantly, I loved this dog and it was an honor to be his dog mama for the next seven years.
We knew something was off with him when he started having strange nosebleeds in February of 2017. We could never find the source of them and our vet in Hawaii controlled the symptoms with Chinese herbs and acupuncture. And we knew that, given that Trek was 15 years old, our time with him was becoming more limited.
We took all three of our dogs in for a check-up on a late Friday afternoon in mid-May and our vet said “They’re all looking good.” That following Saturday morning at 5:24 a.m. I woke up to a horrid sounding noise coming from our living room and as I stumbled in to see what was going on I saw a trail of blood throughout our kitchen leading into the living room where Trekker was laying on his bed with his head propped up and blood oozing from his nasal cavity. I instantly knew something was very wrong.
We called our vet who said she’d meet us at her office at 8 a.m. and for the next couple hours we took turns laying with Trek and petting him, doing our best to comfort our sweet boy and keep our minds off the looming thoughts that this could be it.
“There’s nothing more I can do, you two,” she told us a couple hours later. Not words we were hoping to hear. And while I knew this day was coming, and had tried to prepare for myself for saying goodbye to Trek,, nothing could have prepared me for the waterfall of tears and the tsunami of sadness that came next. It was a wave of deep sadness and grief like none I’d ever experienced. I’d heard many people say that losing their pets was harder for them than losing a human they’d loved and in the weeks and months that followed Trek’s death I finally understood what they meant.
I’ve been thinking about that time in life a lot recently as we spend a short stretch of time back here on the Big Island and it felt apropos to share this piece I wrote about losing Trek that I titled: “How to Grieve the Loss of a Great Dog.”
Rest in peace, sweet Trekker boy, and I hope you’re running around (with those beautiful silky ears flapping in the wind!) having a wonderful time with Ellie and Birkie and all your other doggie friends who have also crossed over to the Rainbow Bridge. We love and miss you.
How to grieve the loss of a
great dog
1. Remember: you have never been here before. It is okay to cry. To sob. To let the tears flow as they never have before. They will eventually subside but for now there is no need to hold back.
2. Forgive yourself for chasing him around that morning last week when you were in a rush, trying to get the pill coated with peanut butter down his throat. You knew he’d feel better if he took it and you didn’t mean to chase him out the back door where he fell off the steps and onto the lawn. Let it go, dear one. He was just fine and you felt worse about it than he did.
3. Take him up the hill to the coffee shop to get ice cream and hold his head in your lap while he slowly eats it. Stroke his silky soft ears and tell him what a very good boy he is and what an incredible privilege it has been to be his human all these years.
4. Take him to walk in his favorite spots on the land down near the ocean and ask him to let you know where he wants his body laid to rest. Be grateful when he plops down and looks up at you both as if to say “This. Right here. This is it.”
5. Try to hold it together (and fail) when your vet, Dr Robin, says to you both with such genuineness, after Trek has just taken his last breath: “He was a great dog. I’m so glad I got to know him.”
6. Curl up in the back of your White Subaru Forrester parked in the garage and spoon with his still warm body wrapped in the white sheet. Let more tears flow. Feel your heart cracking open.
7. Looks around and take in the picture perfect, sunny Hawaiian day and feel how wrong it seems that the sun is shining and birds are singing and the day is so beautiful when it feels as if your heart is breaking.
8. Cry some more. And then go inside and begin to gather the items you will bury with him: his raggedy old favorite toy, a bag of Zuke’s treats, a printout of Mary Oliver’s’ “In Blackwater Woods” poem that you will read at the sunset memorial you and your husband will have for him that evening. In the spot he chose himself that morning when his heart was still beating and oxygen still coursing through his veins. A spot with a killer view of the ocean. You think “I wouldn’t mind being buried here myself some day.”
9. Light candles. Keep them burning for days. Make an altar with photos of him. And place his black collar with the rainbow peace signs on it, too. Add the sympathy cards to it each day and watch it grow.
10. Remember that one day you will wake up and begin to feel joy again. The sunshine will not feel so offensive. You will get up one Friday morning and feel a slight tug to get out of the house and re-engage with the world again. You and P will load up the other two dogs and take a drive to Honokaa, have lunch and walk down the steep hill to the Waipio Valley Overlook. Bits of joy will begin to shine through the cracks in the armor of grief you have been wearing. “He was a great dog,” you can still hear her saying. Indeed, he was.