Dispatches: Memories of a ‘moosh’

by Hank Kalet, Managing Editor
Coffee cups on the counter, jackets on the chair
Papers on the doorstep, you’re not there
Everything is everything
Everything is everything
But you’re missing
— Bruce Springsteen
“You’re Missing”
   I’ve not been myself this week.
   I’ve found it more difficult to drag myself from bed in the morning, a bit tougher to do the things I’d normally do — make our lunches, do the dishes, lace up my running shoes.
   I’m just not feeling up to it.
   We put our dog, Honey, to sleep on Monday, and the house now seems so empty without her. I see her dog bed in the living room, her toys around the house. We keep expecting her to be around the next corner.
   Honey came to us 10 years ago — was forced on us, really — when my wife’s brother rescued her from a cemetery in Brooklyn. It seems that people get dogs and then decide they can’t keep them. Instead of finding the dogs a good home, however, they let them loose in one of the many cemeteries in Brooklyn, where the dogs revert to their wolf-like tendencies, running in packs, getting into mischief and, too often, getting themselves killed — either because they become rabid and have to be put down or because they get hit by a car or truck on the cemetery grounds. Suffice to say that, at a minimum, it’s pretty thoughtless.
   Annie’s brother, Steven, works as a mechanic at one of the cemeteries and he’s seen too many of these dogs come to a bad end. He took a liking to this scrawny, German shepherd mix and eventually took her home to his apartment.
   For the next five months, he tried to convince us to take in his new puppy — which he initially named Swirly, because of her brindled coloring, but changed to Honey because that’s just what he started calling her.
   We resisted — our dog Benny was about 11 at this point and we were unsure if introducing a puppy into the house would be wise — until he brought her to our house in February 1998. She never left — until Monday, that is.
   Honey was a troublemaker and would get into anything and everything. She liked tissues, liked all kinds of paper, liked to get into the garbage, to do things to remind us that we shouldn’t have been leaving her at home by herself so much.
   We learned this shortly after taking her in when she literally destroyed our bedroom, tearing up magazines and picture frames, shredding a sketchbook that I kept on my nightstand. Once, she got into our spice rack, somehow opened the little bottles and ate the spices (I won’t describe the mess we found when we got home).
   We’d tell people about these things and they always asked why we kept her. I don’t know that we had a good answer back then, but I know now that giving her up would have been like giving up my left arm.
   To say that the house now seems a bit less than whole may seem a cliché. But cliches become cliches because of their familiarity and accuracy. There is an emptiness that Annie and I now feel that will take some time to fade, as the habits we’d developed during our 10-year love affair with our little moosh of a pup (we probably had more pet names for Honey than for each other) slowly lose their force.
   As we were finishing breakfast on Tuesday, less than 24 hours after we put Honey down, Annie went to hand Honey the scraps of her toast, an automatic reaction that just reinforces how much our little Mookie (another pet name) was a part of the fabric of our very existence.
   I still feel a bit stunned, myself. I don’t think I fully understood the possibilities when we realized she was sick and we — Annie, her sister Susan and I — packed her into the car on Sunday night to take her to the emergency veterinarian in Hillsborough. I just didn’t think it was possible that she’d never make it home.
   Making the decision to put her down was one of the most painful either of us has ever had to make. But it was the right decision — the vets were fairly sure that she had hemangiosarcoma, one of the more aggressively malignant tumors a dog can develop. It affects the blood vessel cells and spreads quickly, meaning that surgery — the removal of her spleen — might only have added a few difficult months to her life. To subject her to that would have been irresponsible and selfish and, as difficult as it was to watch her take her last breaths, I know we acted in her best interests.
   That doesn’t make it any easier. But, as so many of our friends have reminded us, Honey will always be with us in some way. I know this is true, because I still occasionally feel the presence of our other dogs — Amstel, who was blind at the age of 2 and had to rely on her feel for the house to get around, and my big, bushy 85-pound lapdog Benny, who like Honey seemed to have a permanent puppy smile even as he reached his final moments at age 14.
   Honey’s toys remain where they were on Sunday, strewn across the house where she left them. We probably should clean them up, perhaps place them in a box in a corner where we still can see them (this was my mom’s suggestion — a good one), but I don’t think either of us are ready to do that. It’s still just a bit too raw, too fresh and painful.
   The poet Mark Doty, author of the memoir “Dog Year’s,” told the Lambda Book Review earlier this year that “dogs offer us so much permission to feel.” He’s right.
   That permission also allows us to be our better selves, to return their unconditional loyalty and love with an unconditional embrace of our own.
   Vaya con Dios, my sweet pup.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. He can be e-mailed by clicking here. His blog, Channel Surfing, can be found at www.kaletblog.com.