A Dog for All Seasons: A Reflection

Note: This is less of a review, more of a personal reflection.

“Oh. That book,” my wife said when she saw me holding our copy of “A Dog for All Seasons” by Patti Sherlock. “You do know the dog dies at the end?”

Sorry for the spoiler. But as it’s a book about a dog, we all pretty much know how it ends. Because that’s pretty much how every book about a dog – or any animal – ends. Sure, not “Rascal,” by Sterling North. But damn few else.

And, in the end, we all know Rascal died too.

Thus is the nature of living, whether with animals or humans. Life passes. And we’re rarely prepared for the end of it. Dogs, who live in the moment, maybe have the better point of view, at least in the realm of mortality.

Once immortal, maybe we can learn things from each other.

Our own dog Dottie, now sixteen years old herself, gave us a scare last week, tumbling down a flight of stairs to end up in a shaking, crying heap at the bottom.

I’m not sure I liked how I reacted, yelling chastisement at the dog for not waiting for me to pick her up before she went pell-mell down the stairs, because picking her up is just what we do now when any amount of stairs are involved. She won’t ascend the four wooden steps on the back porch and balks usually at going down them, so I have no idea why the fourteen carpeted steps to the basement were so appealing that day.

So I was mad. Surely she didn’t understand the words, but knew the tone, and that is not what she needed. Chastisement in the moment rarely helps when all we really need is comfort.

Madder still it happened after hours, when no vets were open to see her. Madder still she woke crying during the night and I sacrificed sleep to hold her in my arms as we both fitfully tried to get some rest, waiting for the sun to crawl over the horizon.

Our vet was booked, so we took her to a vet we’d used previously until our emergency backup dog, Daisy, quailed at the ride there, knowing each time she was riding to her doom. We picked a vet closer to home so the anxiety of the trip was as short as the several-block trip.

The vet gave Dottie some pain meds and a cautious bill of health, and for the most part she’s been fine since. But I still don’t like that I yelled.

It didn’t help that at the bottom of the stairs Dasy was too fixated on getting her nightly rawhide to bother with her injured sister, and that I hurled the treat bag at our oldest, asking for help in a less-than-nice voice.

So when George kicked Duncan, the dog in Sherlock’s book, I felt a wince of regret. Never mind I’d stayed up that night cradling that little idiot dog in my arms after the fall. I’d hollered at her. Not what she nor our oldest needed at the time.

But that’s what pets do. They bring joy and laughter, sadness and pain. It’s what all creatures do. I can imagine God wanting to pick up our shaking forms at the bottom of a metaphorical staircase we’ve just tumbled down, irritated that the help that was forthcoming was ignored or the counsel given was forgotten, even momentarily.

“For those of us who have been loved by a great dog, who have, in turn, loved the dog back, we can say, and this is not too large a statement, we have known Glory in our lives,” Sherlock writes at the conclusion of her story.

Glory, indeed.

And maybe, when inevitably the dog passes and is with us no longer, a little bit of grace as well.