the friend

2012 - 2025

Some things in this world feel ancient; turning your face towards the sun, kneading dough, rubbing someone’s back, walking in silence through the woods. I had an odd inclination, as I carried our elderly dog (why was he elderly, when I was not? when we had been young together, children together?) through my mothers home and out into a cold January day for the last time, that I was taking part in an important, ancient ritual. And if I had in some other life done this before, perhaps I could do it again, now, without it splintering me.

Cooper. The name I have hopelessly yelled into the woods the countless times he had run off to follow the scent of something decomposing and rotten. Cooper! The name that came to me when we saw him at the Humane Society when I was 12, when my mom and I had survived the hurricane of her divorce, and had not yet weathered the wildfire of my adolescence. I had never had a dog before, yet the memories of my childhood are wallpapered with them. Folders full of handwritten short stories about dogs, composition books with of lists of potential dog names, studies of various breeds, and tactics for convincing my parents to get one. At one point, I asked my mom to sit down on the couch, and presented her with a trifold presentation entitled Why I Should Get A Dog, which provided such damning evidence that eventually, a year or so later, she agreed.

I’m not sure what it was, maybe the fact that I was quite lonely — me with all of my siblings well into adulthood and being homeschooled at this point — but though she was overwhelmed with the responsibility of being a single mom back into the workforce for the first time in 20 years, we adopted a dour looking mutt of beagle and spaniel heritage.

Cooper’s Animal Refuge League headshot, circa 2012

For two people who hadn’t the slightest idea how to train a dog, he was pretty perfect. Very simple. Incredibly motivated by food. I snuggled him constantly which while slightly infuriating my mom (he was definitely not allowed to sleep in the bedrooms) was undeniably the reason he was such a sweet, lazy companion. He lived entirely for treats and to be physically close to you. The simplest of pleasures.

And that was how we spent the last 13 years, utterly unaware as Cooper curled up happily in the deepest recesses of our hearts, our souls even. His absence feels deeply wrong, a foreign object lodged in the windpipe. His final day was almost too difficult to bear — alone in the car as I followed behind my mom as we brought him to his vet, I had to stop myself from trying to arrange pretty little words and phrases to escape the pain of what was here, and now. The art of losing was hard to master. As if writing it would bring catharsis, or organizing the images of what transpired next would make them seem any less violent.

At the end of the day, he was simply just a dog. The fact is that every day, millions of us are intractably connected to these creatures that are simply all relatively the same. Same unalterable loyalty, same unreasonable bliss at seeing you at the end of the day, same perfect mix of characteristic uniqueness, but also consistently, generally dog-like. And it is the biggest piece of evidence towards humanity’s strain towards peace and joy that we continue to fill our lives with them for painfully too-short periods bookended by inconceivable joy and unfathomable suffering.

What makes it so worth it? Our dogs become members of our family, we treat them like children, like best friends — what makes us again and again open up our hearts to something so deeply guaranteed to be temporary and ultimately devastating?

The same questions can be posed for basically anything worth doing in life. Cooper, with his swollen, tumor-filled stomach, curled up like I remember him as a puppy after receiving that lethal dose of blue liquid. After, he was small everywhere but his big, cancerous belly, his little shoulders and small head calm and resting.

Losing Cooper has made me want to get a dog — I think my mother, who Cooper lived with since I left home, won’t feel the same for some time — but as gratitude and sadness swelled up inside me I remembered the euphoria I felt for my puppy. How lucky we were to know him, and to be loved by him for so long. Is it masochistic to generate this whole ridiculous arc of joy and pain and love gained and love lost again and again and again? Is there any way out of it, and if there were, would it make any difference?