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Mourning Electra Losing A Beloved Pet Can Be A Painful Wound For A Family |
 Electra, dressed up for Easter, checks out a basket of delights. She had a thing for candy. |
Loving a pet can teach you
how to open up your heart
for TheColumnists.com
When our youngest child left home for college, my former
boss gave me my first puppy. I had shown an extraordinary,
almost maternal interest in his own new pup, Astro, even bringing
it home to spend afternoons with me. So, he got one for me, too.
"Oh, Mom," my daughter said, "Now you're replacing
us with a dog."
My husband, Bill, who unsentimentally anticipated years of demanding
care, wondered what I'd done on the job to deserve such retribution.
Neither reaction matched my own when I received my tiny, wriggling
silky terrier whom I named Electra. I was absolutely smitten.
She would grow up to carve her own place in the family and teach
me what an eye-opening human experience a relationship with a
pet can be. She would show me how roles do get usurped
in unexpected ways and expand my heart in the process.
When Electra lay stretched out and dying on our living room floor
a few weeks ago, I realized that, like a member of the
family, she had an important legacy for me. This
was it.
I had always scoffed at people who regard their pets as stand-ins
for the humans who should be in their lives--friends, children,
a loving spouse. I've been blessed to have all three, so
I regarded our family pets as creatures to cuddle, play with,
and eventually put outside in the garage or back yard. They had
their place and we had ours. The two were basically separate. It
was by our grace that they entered and stayed in the house.
Propriety--my sense of how things should be--ordered that animals
get affection; only humans get love.
For Bill, who grew up on a farm in the Colorado desert, dogs
and cats served as workers who lived out in the barn where they
could bark away coyotes or consume mice. He swears they
were never allowed to come in the house to curl up at his feet
or beg under the table, except for Goldie the Perfect Dog, whose
obedience Bill upheld as a contrast to my puppy's intransigence.
He reminded me constantly that his Goldie would never leave the
spots on the carpet that my Electra did, sometimes
creating them right before my eyes.
Both Goldie and Electra were terriers. Goldie was a rat terrier
with short, gold fur. Electra's luxuriant black and blonde
fur certainly earned the "silky" classification within
her breed. At a grown-up weight of seven pounds she
was a notch or two bigger than a Yorkshire terrier but the same
kind of yappy little dog. I trimmed her fur to fluffy curls
around her square little face. No bows in the hair.
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enjoys a romp on the lawn one nice day. |
My daughter Julie, who had golden curls as a toddler, was wrong in thinking that a dog could take on a child's role in our emptied nest. Didn't she know by then that her mother tends to look ahead, savoring and incorporating the past rather than attempting to relive it?
Teenagers don't pay attention to such fine points. When she went off to college she left behind Target, the Cat from Hell. I had rescued Target from the pound--his owner was in jail for setting fire to the hotel where the two of them lived--and given him to Julie as a gift for sixth grade graduation. Since Target never got over his dislike for
human beings in the dozen years he lived with us, it was hard and sometimes dangerous to connect with him. The cockatiel and tortoise which were also part of our children's pet legacy also could be hard to understand.
In my own growing up years I had a fluffy female tabby cat whom I named Corky. She delighted me with litters of fluffy kittens to play with when things went wrong. Eventually she had about 80 kittens--clearly she was a poster cat for any spay campaign. Corky also took on the role of watch dog in my social life. If I was parked too long in front of the house at the end of a date, she would jump on the hood of the
car and peer in the window. She knew what males could bring if you let them hang around. When I got married and moved out-of-state, I left her behind to keep my parents company. I no longer needed a feline guardian and comforter. As for Corky, clearly I had never been a major interest in her life.
Electra was different.
She preferred a walk with me to a plate of dog food. Spayed early on, she wasn't too interested in other dogs and was very loyal to me instead. Her instincts as a pack animal led her to see me as lead dog in her life, but I had a hard time fulfilling that role. I was an erratic disciplinarian. I named her after Cathy's pup in the comic
strip "Cathy" because they were so much alike. When I met the strip's creator, Cathy Guisewite, at a book signing, I told her about the namesake. She replied that she based the strip's Electra on her own pup.
"We failed obedience
school together," she laughed.
Since Electra was a small dog, I didn't fear the dire consequences
of failing at discipline as I would have with my own children. Moral
character was not at stake. I'd say I was successful with
the kids, which is where it really counted. They more or
less came when called and were housebroken early on. And they
produced perfect grandchildren
who, like Corky's kittens, can be a wonderful salve.
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mess with Target, the cat--or that other peculiar member of the family--a rock that seemed to have legs. |
Until her last days as an old lady in dog years, Electra put her boundless energy and eagerness into everything she did. As a terrier she loved to bury things. One Christmas she seemed quite busy on her own while all of our family unwrapped gifts in the living room. Back and forth she went from our bedroom, out the flap of the dog door and into the back yard. Later that day we found wrappers from the small Hershey candy bars I'd used to fill the stockings. I had left the extra ones in the bedroom. She found them, ate a few, and buried the rest for later. She discovered that chocolate is not good for dogs, but I knew she'd do it again if she could.
Some people thought Electra and I were alike--both of us small, with relentless enthusiasm. In some eyes she became an extension of me.
When she died, Glenn, who gave her to me, said, "I'm going to miss that goofy little dog. She symbolized quite a bit about my feelings for you." Whenever he came to our home, he would always greet her first. I admit Glenn had a hard time training me--in our case it was how to use computers at work--but we did learn to appreciate each other and an unexpected close friendship grew between us.
I realized that Electra and I did indeed play off each other. I learned to appreciate the evenness of Electra's responsiveness and her steadfast nature, characteristics that are not always true of relationships with people. Another friend pointed out (speaking for
himself?) that many people are embarrassed to admit how dependent they become on their pets even though their own lives are filled with friends. His conclusion: "Our domesticated animals give more than they take and it's the rare human who does that for us."
The day Electra died, Bill and I had just returned from a short trip. We had left her in the care of a neighborhood girl who loved her. During the past few months my bouncy sidekick simply lost her pep for no reason the vet could discern. But when we got home Electra managed to bound into the house just like she'd done for the 13 years we'd had
her. Was she miraculously on the mend?
That night I went to a meeting. When I returned I found her stretched out on the living room carpet as if it were a hot day. She should have been upstairs on her favorite chair. She didn't even look up at me. As I looked at her, I willed myself to think that I saw her sides move slightly with faint breathing. But when Bill came to look he knew better.
He insisted we cover her
like a baby and tuck her in her basket. Then we went to
bed. When I turned out the light I said in the dark, "I
know Electra's dead." She was.
I still find myself glancing up to the top of the stairs, expecting
to find her poised to come down to see what I would be up to
next. I missed my mother in the same way when she passed
away after spending her last year living with us. As with
mom, Electra and I had absorbed a sense of each other's presence.
Bill's laconic attitude toward Electra also changed over the
13 years we had her. I'd catch him tossing her bits of
his lunch, just like he did with Goldie. He was the one
who insisted on taking her body up to our cabin in the Sierras
to give her a proper burial in the woods. Even now I catch him
looking reflexively around the yard for her.
For me, the way Electra had grown into my life was an outcropping
of a love that expanded far beyond pat-on-the head affection.
It refused to remain stuffed in a designated slot in a proper
hierarchy of love--the perch reserved for pets somewhere at the
bottom.
No love can stay put, despite
the best of proper-sounding intentions. Instead, it has
a tendency to spread like spilled ink at times and cross all
boundaries. When Electra would bounce into the house and
run figure-eights with excitement, there was simply no one else
who could delight me more.
Normally my love for my goofy little dog did not compete with
that for family, friends, or anyone else. For one thing,
there is nothing like the complex interplay of emotions and the
mental and spiritual delight of relations with our own kind. But
it claimed a special spot of its own in my heart without any
particular rank. In claiming that place, it made my heart
grow.
Because Bill says "no more pets, we're free at last!",
I look to my granddaughter Allyson to fill the need I realize
I have for a friend in the animal kingdom. This spring her
parents plan to buy her a Portuguese water dog because she is
allergic to most other breeds as well as to all cats. I
find myself planning to take the pup along with
Allyson and her sister Savanna to a Holy Ghost Celebration in
one of the coast side towns of the San Francisco peninsula. This
annual event is put on by the Portuguese community in honor of
their past in the Azores. Perhaps something deep in the pup's
genes will respond to the culture that originally bred his kind
to herd schools of fish. He might snatch a piece of linguica.
Through love of their pet, Allyson and her
sister might learn something of the human heritage that is part
of his blood.
They might come to appreciate how people and pets merge in unexpected
ways. Or maybe they already take that for granted.
As for me, I look forward to a whole new experience with my new
grandpuppy.
There is such a thing, isn't there?
© 2002 by Joyce Kiefer.
The photos are the property of the Kiefer family. All rights
reserved.
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