Hard arithmetic |
It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.
-- Jim Harrison, "The Road Home"
I have been doing some hard arithmetic.
Savannah was a puppy when we got her; we know she's between three and four years old. Rikki is about the same age; maybe a few months younger. They are healthy and fit, with obvious capacities for joy. There is no reason to believe they won't be around for at least another decade.
It is ridiculous that I have already begun to grieve her. I don't mean that in the sentimental sense. I don't look at Savannah and imagine her old and infirm. But I can imagine a world without her, and sometimes that grief sits sideways in my chest.
This is one of the indignities of getting older: You start counting things you once assumed inexhaustible. Summers. Christmases. Presidential elections. The number of times you might reasonably expect to see Paris (the city) again.
And dogs. You only get so many dogs.
Coal Dog would be 35 this year; Bork would be 33. They had good lives, all of our dogs did. Paris, Dublin, Audi and Sherpa. Tsingtao died young, at the vet, after a heart attack. His was the only death I did not attend, the only one that genuinely shocked me, though I found him limp on the deck and carried him in. I thought he would pull through.
There were others before these. I never knew the fate of Bucky or Lady; we left them with friends when my family had to move. Copper might have wandered off. Our relationship with him was provisional; he came and went, as dogs and salesmen sometimes did in those days. We had Duchess for 12 years, and she........