Opinion

Trying to find the silver lining

Friday, January 28, 2005

Doggie snow globes. Doggie seat belts. Doggie leather jackets (Harley Davidson, of course). If you want something for your dog or something featuring your dog, it's out there. You just have to be willing to fork over some hard-earned cash.

So, it was no surprise to find that there is an abundant supply of dog urns, dog remembrance items and dog funeral options available for purchase if you lose your dog, which happened to my family this past week.

There are dog people and cat people. Despite five permanent cats and two regular visiting felines at my house, I still list myself in the dog column. After nearly a dozen years, I find myself dogless.

Losing a dog is in no way like losing a parent or a child. Yet over time, an animal can become like a member of the family and the loss is still great.

No longer will the dog be laying on the front porch, "pretending" to be asleep if a burglar would try to break into our house.

No longer will the dog run up to the vehicle when I arrive home, running into the door because he can't get stopped in time.

No longer will the dog be lounging on the side lawn, making you question whether he is alive or dead. Over time, you can learn to see from a distance if the chest is rising and falling -- a valuable skill.

While the death of an animal may come quickly, every animal will be remembered in a variety of ways. My dog left more than a few mementos behind.

His lost-dog tickets.

I have to admit that my dog liked to wander. We could never get another dog because the new dog followed his elder right out of our yard. Lost-dog tickets were so common that I had to bail my dog out of the humane society often, even on the morning of my wedding. (We wanted him in a few of the pictures, otherwise we would have left him in for the weekend -- just to teach him a lesson.)

The blisters on my hands.

With cold weather moving in, we wanted to get the burial over quickly. Since my dog was the size of a small car, digging the hole was no easy task. After using an ax to remove tree-stump roots, a pitchfork to loosen the ground and every shaped shovel conceived, my hands were flaming red. But still I persisted and after only five hours of digging, the hole was done.

Dog hair everywhere.

While dogs have many fine attributes, shedding is not one of them. Even in the middle of winter, my dog would drop clumps of hair on the porch. For at least the next decade, I'll be finding my dog's hair in my car, on my coat, floating through the air.

Losing a dog from your family is hard on everyone, especially the younger members.

My family's dog slept so much that the smaller children didn't think he was dead, rather that he was just off somewhere sleeping.

When the cold reality finally set in, they took it hard. In fact, my 4-year-old made the hole-digging even more difficult as he heaped in a scoop for every scoop I shoveled out. When asked why, he explained that he was trying to make the hole smaller, so the dog wouldn't fit in the hole.

***

While looking up dog funeral options, I came across urns for nearly every possible animal from iguanas to ferrets. You can have the animal's picture mounted on the outside of the box, if it's a box you want. Perhaps you want to splurge on a tall, marble vase for your former favorite animal. And then there was the urn for a horse. Without a point of reference for its' true size in the picture, I can only assume it was large in size. Maybe we should have considered that for our dog.

-- Ronda Graff is waiting a while to get a new dog, although her kids are all ready for a new pooch. They began asking as they returned to the house from the service.

Respond to this story

Posting a comment requires free registration: