VERNON, Conn.
Mark Twain, who said pretty much everything worth saying, said about dogs: “The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.”
Twain, one of those lucky few in whom the virtue of humor was fully grown, told a stretcher or two in his day, but his humor was the iron fist of truth, always difficult for those of us who are not saints to bear, wrapped in appetizing comic chocolate, and so made easier to swallow.
He liked dogs and often compared them to people: “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”
A modern progressive, full of rancor and social justice, might want to pause over that one. One of Twain’s dogs was named “Prosper” and, unlike the fire breathing, eat-the-rich, modern progressive, Twain had no quarrel with prosperity. A true child of the Gilded Age, which he named, Twain’s fervent hope for today was always that he would be prosperous tomorrow. Lucky for him, he lived, among other places, in Hartford, Connecticut, rather than, say, Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, an exploded post-Stalinist pipe dream.
But enough about politics.
Yesterday, we drove Titan, my wife Andrée’s Fidelco guide dog, to the Bolton Veterinary Hospital and had him “put down,” a modern locution intended to rob death of its sting. It does no such thing. Titan lived to be 13½ years old. Andree was deeply, deeply wounded, and grief silences the heart. You want to scream, and no sound issues from you; you want to weep, and your eyes are a parched desert. The choice was made for us by Titan’s afflictions: a condition in dogs very much like Lou Gehrig’s Disease in humans (degenerative myelopathy) and extreme vertigo (vestibular disease). Titan struggled with these disabilities for months, always bravely.
Titan came to us nearly 12½ ago where, bounding into the house, he met Jake, Andrée’s first guide dog, the handsomest black and tan German Shepherd in Connecticut, perhaps the world, full of years and happy to be retired.
Andrée: The world will become a true utopia when the tireless reformers so rearrange it that one is able to retire upon graduation from college.
Jake, like most German Shepherds, more or less prowled, always alert, head up, ears pointed, and ready to meet the bristling world on its own terms. Titan bounced, the perpetual youth, an irrepressible spring in his step. I wrote about Jake here. He is alive in our memories. Dogs, for reasons hinted above by Twain, are more easily remembered than people.
Andrée insists – and one can disagree with this imperishable truth only at the point of a sword – that Titan kept Jake in good order for two years, before he slipped from our grasp and went on his way to Heaven at age 14½. Twain again: “Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”
I’ve lost many things during what folk now call my “life’s journey” – my youth, the spring in my own step, my hair, my reputation, my patience, occasionally my sense of humor – but I can tell you, none of these losses compare with the loss of a dog, because a dog, especially a guide dog, is not just a dog. He is a piece of God’s grace dropped like Holy Water into Hell.
None of us lucky sighted people can know how life presents itself, most often with bared teeth, to those like my wife of 53 years, who was legally blind from birth. It’s a daily struggle. To be won, the day must first be conquered, and the struggle is exhausting. This she has done with great courage and grace all her life. But when Jake first came into her life, she was, for the first time in her life, truly and fully liberated.
Then Titan put a bounce in her step. His fur was not coarse but silken; his eyes were brown amber gemstones; if he could smile, his smile would wrestle the world to the ground. Everywhere he went – and he never left her side for a moment -- he drew gasps from people. Men especially were drawn to him.
Me: Hey, Andrée, if I just step out of the way, I’m sure you could do much better with Titan at your side – maybe pick up one of those white or black privileged hedge fund millionaires down there in Fairfield County.
Born in Fairfield County, Connecticut’s Gold Coast, Andrée was familiar with the breed.
Andrée: Hmmm. Let me sleep on it.
My love, nothing that the creative hand of God has touched is lost forever to nothingness. Love is the greatest of God’s many gifts to us, the most precious of his wonder working mysteries. And because you loved Titan, and his love to you was retuned a thousand fold -- he lives.
Don Pesci is a columnist who lives in Vernon.
E-mail: donpesci@att.net
