I Will Love You, Always and Evermore…

My eldest dog has not been in good health, for a good long while now… she has endured a great deal of pain and suffering in her life. Pain I could do nothing about, save throwing pain pills and seemingly ineffective anti-inflammatories at it. She, and I, eventually learned to cope with her many difficulties and found a new rhythm and patience with her disabilities and discomforts…but not without cost, which both of us had to pay.

She is by far the most intelligent animal I have ever met, or even heard about.

I cannot recall, and therefore relate, the many times in our days together that she did things that I could only marvel at. I remember one specific incidence that I can no longer recall the circumstances of, but have a very clear memory of the surprise I felt, when she used problem solving thinking to process through whatever issue she was handling.

I do remember, very much, the great tenderness with which she treated my mother.

My mother was not a kind, nor a sentimental woman. She was raised on a farm and animals were either commodities or work tools. After years of begging for a dog, to assuage the deep loneliness that clung to me like a shadow, she finally relented and allowed me to have a small white poodle. One day when that poodle peed on the carpet, as young animals are wont to do, when still learning about where and when to eliminate, my mother picked it up and threw it with great force against a plate glass sliding door. Having been on the receiving end of my mother’s violence for years and years, I was still shocked and surprised that she could vent so, on a being so totally free of guilt, and was equally surprised it didn’t kill or severely break my small dog.

So you may be able to imagine my surprise when Mocha, my beloved spaniel mix, stole my mother’s hardened heart.

She was only six months old when they met…my mother ill with a deeply debilitating lung disorder, and my physically young, but emotionally deeply mature, animal. Mocha was never what one thinks of when thinking the term “puppy”. She was never hyper, excitable, or dependent, she wasn’t even charming in that goofy way that puppies normally are. Instead she had this fascinating dignity and character to her demeanor, much like we imagine higher order of beings might display. Nonplussed, she could and did, take on all comers. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, frightened her. In our years together we have been attacked by no less than four different pit bulls and chows and pit bull mixes, it is almost has if they can see, or more likely smell, her natural superiority. For that is most assuredly what it is…a regal bearing, a calm view of all things, a fierce and compelling fearlessness.

When confronted with my sick and distant mother, she merely walked with dignity to her sick bed, sat on her haunches just within reach, and waited for what seemed like days for my mother to notice her. I can’t recall her ever presenting herself in that exact same manner before or since, be very clear, she is not the body wagging, belly exposing, soft touch her housemates are…she will come to you, but only with the awareness of her own dignity moving in front of her like waves of grain rippling and bowing to an unseen hand.

So she sat, and waited, watched and offered herself, to my sick and stoic mother…and one day…I happened around the corner to find my mother touching her very soft and wonderfully copper brown head. Mocha received her touch with so much elegance and beauty; it would cause you to catch your breath, if you have any love for animals at all.

I stopped dead in my tracks willing myself to become invisible, hoping that my breath, presence, interest, surprise, and joy would not disturb this poignant moment, filled with such tenderness and selflessness.

It reminded me a great deal of one of the strongest memories I have of my childhood. My mother, in her confusion, extreme fundamentalist religious background, and her motherless childhood was a very easily aroused and angry woman. Her rage, could and did, send shock waves through me. She would beat me until I could no longer restrain my fear and confusion, and would often wind up begging her to stop.

But one day while driving on some day long excursion, with the sun pouring in through the windows touching everything in the car with its warmth and light, she allowed me to lay my head upon her lap and she began to absentmindedly twirl her fingers through my hair…the only time I can remember her touch as soft, easy, simple, and kind. And just like the day I saw her touching Mocha in much the same way, it caused me to catch my breath, lay perfectly still and hope that she wouldn’t stop.

As I stood motionless watching her touching my beautiful dog I hoped again, this time for her sake, that she wouldn’t stop her easy stroking.

A few days later, Mocha still young and in training peed on the carpet and my mother caught me cleaning it up. I was past the fear of her that had loomed up out of my childhood, but not past the guilt I felt at letting a dog have an accident in the house which would so upset her notions of cleanliness and appropriateness…and yet, to my great surprise, when I began apologizing and back pedaling, my Mother allowed as to how it didn’t matter, no crime had been committed. I can’t begin to express my surprise…and I have no doubt it was the dignity and tenderness with which my dog made herself available to my mother, that softened her easy anger and her view that animals have no value other than as food or tools.

Mocha’s fearlessness is something to behold as well. My other dogs dash, and dance, and bark, at the smallest changes in their environment…a grocery bag dancing in the wind, a darkly painted motorcycle sparkling in the moonlight, a shape that bears a vague human outline too far away to be identified, all and more, will make them yip, and dance, and argue loudly. Not so, Miss Mocha…

Nothing moves her to fear responses, save the smell of a vet’s office.

One day I was blowing my leaves tending to my garden, and she was directly in the path I needed to take to accomplish my task. The blower with its loud and obnoxious sounds, and its wind tunnel effects I thought, and wrongly so, that a tiny blast from its mouth would get her moving and out of my way. …Nope… She just stood her ground, with her ears blowing back from the force of the wind like she was ridin’ a Hog and commanding some center stretch of desert asphalt. God that girl is self-possessed…

When she was young and her back first went bad, she would come to me and whimper ever so lightly and press on my chest with her feet. I sincerely felt that she lacked only the vowels and the soft palette that would have been necessary to say clear as day “Look my back hurts, do something about it!”

I would do what I could, giving her pain medications and drugs to slow the swelling and warm poultices to soften the muscle constriction, even slow deep warm baths that I thought might loosen her back and ease her discomfort. But in truth, nothing really seemed to work, and she would continue to silently shake and quiver, no matter what I did, or what the many vets I took her to prescribed or indicated might help her.

One of the saddest days I can recall of our many years together came on the day she stopped pressing her small feet upon my chest to urge me to do something…anything, for her. She had come to the intelligent, sane, and sad understanding that I could not help her and thus she stopped asking me. Even here her great dignity served her, she no longer came pressing and pushing and causing me anguish over the fact that I could not help her, but rather bore in silence what could not be helped. (This was the first time I thought about euthanizing her, but my vet in California gave me a boxing about the ears when I tearfully brought it up, “Good grief”, he said…”she just has a bad back”.

There were times when finances made helping her any further undoable, and the guilt of that bears a weight upon me. I don’t mind the doing without that poverty has placed upon me…I do mind, what it has caused her to go without…

Her nobility is such a palpable presence that my other animals are deeply cowed by it.

On more than one occasion I have found my small white dog pacing the floor, or my lovely copper colored dog baying his lungs out because she chose to lay herself across a threshold of a doorway and inadvertently trapped one or the other, on the wrong side of freedom and escape. Neither of my other animals will dare to try and slip past her, even though to my knowledge she has never so much as showed her teeth to them. She is so clearly in charge that they will not trespass on her territory even to find freedom or escape, it has always made me smile when I come upon such a scene…Mocha lying there resplendent in her golden brown and white markings, relaxed and in repose, while the other two are pacing and baying, with their foreheads knit in consternation because they see no way out of the fix they find themselves in. A soft word from me, and Mocha moves aside making escape and freedom once more possible.

In the dark days when my inner conflicts ruled my world and threatened my well being, it was not her way to coddle me…licking, or nudging me out of my tears or woe.

No she would come, sit within reach, and look up at me with the most beautiful eyes you have ever seen. A dark pupil, a honeycomb gold ring and an auburn outer burst…she would look the long way up to my tear stained face, with her smooth and easy countenance and admonish me with her calm…”you are making much ado about nothing - life is as life does - and it is your job to fit yourself without complaint, into its curves and contours and circular comings and goings.” My head has known that for a good long time now, and Mocha’s simple acceptance and grand decorum helped me to know it in my heart, and more…to begin to exhibit it in my behavior and attitudes.

So now we come to the reason for all this reminiscing about my beautiful and poised dog.

It is time to exercise my obligation to send her back to whence she came.

I do not fear or tremble at the loss of her presence in my life, I do, of course, grieve…I want only the best for her, and she is due the best and the bravest from me. She is due respect and care and kindness and tenderness and remembrance…and I write this, so that you, who read, may help me to carry my obligation to serve her and her memory.

Perhaps she will find her way to the spirit that is my mother and once more offer her willingness to teach that all are important, that all are valuable, that those who cannot speak are here to teach those of us who can; compassion, right treatment, and the respect due all of Life, in all it’s many forms.

I have spent a good deal of the day in tears, as I work toward what it is my obligation to provide her…and I will allow Josh Billings a contemporary of Mark Twains to explain so well why that is…”A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.”

Thank you so much for spending these moments with me…as I move toward the humane and the kind.

And thank you Mocha, for exemplifying Beauty, Dignity, and Nobility even in the face of Life’s many travails. I will love you, always and evermore…

Adayre R. Miller

1/4/11