Blessed Soul

I have heard there are two kinds of Labrador, the English and the American variety. The English variety, big-headed and stalky, is what Bud was. Our five-year-old lab Shoe is apparently the American variety, a field dog with smaller head and body and a more wiry temperament. Shoe was hard to get used to at first after Bud, but at five years old, Shoe is obedient, adorable, and perpetually happy. This story, however, is about his predecessor.

Bud was eleven weeks old when we moved together into my new house in West Berkeley. The house was sagging and badly in need of renovation, and I slept on a futon on the living room floor while I helped the contractors and painters jack up, support, and paint the house. Every morning at five, Buddy would rise and whimper until I too rose and took him out for a walk. And every morning as his head towered above the futon, I swear my pup’s skull had grown another two inches in the night.

Bud was five months old when he accompanied me on a solo trek in the Desolation Wilderness. His five-month old legs were so tired when we reached our first night’s destination that he curled up in the one level spot in our camp and did not move even when I pitched the tent on top of him. That night as I crawled into my sleeping bag, he stood outside the tent with his head inside the opening, waiting to be invited in. I patted the floor of the tent, and he curled up against my down bag.

The next day when we hiked farther into the wilderness, eventually lost the trail and wandered scared in the woods, arriving back in camp eighteen miles later in the near dark, I discovered the fundamental truth about our dogs: they will follow us to the ends of the earth or until their own deaths, whichever comes first.

Buddy’s pads had rubbed raw somewhere in those eighteen miles, but he limped with me to the end. Twelve years later he spent an entire Sunday afternoon running between two guys throwing a frisbee on the beach. (In all his years he never lost hope that with his short legs he might catch one.) The next morning, with acute tendonitus in a shoulder and knee, hip displasia, and unbeknownst to us, cancer in the lungs, Bud decided to trek back toward Capitola in hopes of rekindling his day on the beach. Despite having lost his cajones years earlier, Bud, his legs too short to jump a fence, dug his way under our gate to pursue his wanderings. That Monday morning he delivered the newspaper to the front porch, and seeing no action coming from the house, headed down the block to his favorite dumpster behind Tacos Morenos. Returning long enough to bury a package of tortillas in the back yard, he observed that there was still no action coming from the house and headed off toward Capitola.

When the SPCA picked him up in the afternoon, he was within blocks of his destination at Potbelly Beach. Blue drove to the SPCA to retrieve him. Blue arrived just as our dog was lapping from a bucket of cool water and accepting a biscuit from the SPCA employee who escorted him to his jail cell. We had hoped for a more stringent prison life for our escapee, but the only punishment went to us: a fat fine to bail him out.

That summer when we took our annual family vacation to Huntington Lake, I noticed what I had not in the chaos of home life, that Buddy had lost a lot of weight. His ribs were showing, and when we arrived in the mountains, he lay down outside the car and didn’t move. The altitude was too much for what turned out to be the mastosis covering his lungs, and I took him down the mountain to the vet in Auberry, where he was immediately more comfortable.

Monday morning the vet called me to confirm what she had suspected about his red blood cell count, and asked if I would consider putting him to sleep.

“If you’re sure he’s going to die,” I said.

“I’m sure,” she said.

It was a blessing to have a week in the mountains to say goodbye to a beloved friend. I drove back down to Auberry remembering the night Bud was a pup, and he slept in my lap on the drive back home across the Bay Bridge.

The vet told me dogs sometimes let out a moan or a sigh right before they die, but Bud in his typical fashion laid his head between his paws and waited while she injected him. I could still feel his heartbeat when she said he was gone. Too mellow to make a sound, he passed into death without a fight, and I stood outside his cage sobbing and calling his name, as if by calling up who he was I could bring him back.

Blessed souls die quietly, the breath just stopping, a Buddhist text says, and Buddy was blessed.

A year or two before he died, Buddy lost his hearing, and I learned to communicate without spoken language. When it was time for a walk I whistled, he lifted his head, I patted my side, and he came. Words of the Bible, the text I deem sacred, do not fit the spirit of the animal: spiritual in the unspoken.

A week after Buddy died, I packed his ashes in the bicycle bag and rode along the cool windy coast to Potbelly Beach, where my family was waiting for me. Together with some of his canine and human friends, we spilled his ashes into the ocean. "Spread" is the not the word for what the ashes really did. They bunched in the bag, blew back at me in the wind, and clung to my legs. So it was that Bud stayed with me, messy and gristly and sticking to the salt water on my legs.

When we remove a pup from the litter and bring him home, we become his pack. Our dogs are always there. Bud was such a regular part of the school in Oakland where I taught that the staff dedicated the yearbook to him. "In all humility," they wrote, "we dedicate this yearbook to Bud Tatum." They quoted Hermione Gingold, who said this:

“To call him a dog hardly seems to do him justice, though
in as much as he had four legs, a tail and barked I admit he was,
to all outward appearances. But to those of us who knew him
well, he was a perfect gentleman.”