The Writer’s Corner features poetry, essays, short stories, satire and various fiction and non-fiction from SCAD Atlanta students. To submit your own work for the Writer’s Corner, email features@scadconnector.com.
Death of a Dog by Marian Hill
Last month my small poodle-mix died. Two months before that, my terrier died. I was not there to see either of them pass. The first dog to leave us, Fay Fay, we did not think would go before the other. She was younger, but still harbored the problems of an old dog. After so many surgeries to remove a tumor in her back leg, she could not walk. I got the text during a very inconvenient time, and so I had cried about it in an AT&T store. I was the only customer in the store, too.
My other dog, Pinky, we knew definitely that she would pass this year. I told myself that I’d see her one more time before that could happen, but I failed miserably in doing so. Again, the news came to me not in the best place. I was walking through an airport when my mom told me over the phone. That time, I cried in a corner because a bathroom was not near enough. The plane I was getting ready to board would have taken me to her if she had waited a day longer.
My mother made it clear that I could not tell my sisters about the second dog’s death. My older and younger sisters were, according to her, also not in the best place to hear about Pinky. Neither was I, really. But, my sisters would not be able to bear it normally. The older one was staying in a hostel in Honduras doing her dive master test. The younger was dealing with a bad roommate and cramps the first week of boarding school in Massachusetts. Both have the tendency to let it all go to waste when the wind brings bad news like this. So I am the only one of my sisters to know about it, for now.
It is grim to say, but I’d rather see Pinky and Fay Fay’s in an urn on a shelf, then see them alive as they were this past year. They suffered great pains before death. But if I could, I would give them proper ancient Egyptian funerals. I’d place their bodies in golden doggie sarcophagi surrounded by watermelon rinds, which they loved to chew on. The whole idea of an Egyptian burial for a dog, now that I’m thinking about it, is silly. Dogs do not care much for worldly possessions, they only care about their owners. The hardest thing for them to do is leave us behind. So, not much would go into the ground with them.
They will instead be cremated, which is by far more appropriate for two old dogs. Much like ash, the product of a once lit fire, they burned great for so long then turned into ambers. As ambers, they held on for their family. But when death came, the ambers had to crumble into ash. They faded away in the arms of my mother in a cold vet’s office, far from me and my sisters. They’ve left our third dog, Gingie, behind. She has been left broken because Fay Fay was her mother.
What an inconvenience to be crying right now. I need to finish writing. I know death has no consideration for the living when it takes from us. We are left alive and well with the ability to be burdened and inconvenienced by the death of our dogs. And what can one do about it? A dog has no will. A dog has no last words. A dog can’t leave anything behind except for fur on the couch and whole in the heart.
