It's not the kind of thing we've talked about with a lot of people. What could we tell them? "Well, sometimes my dad comes back as a dog." No, they don't want to hear that. It makes them uncomfortable. And they never know what to say. "Oh... how nice... well, when you see him again, tell him I said hi."
My dad died of a massive heart attack in 1999. It was brought on, the doctors told us, by an enlarged heart that'd gone undiagnosed for too many years. The cause of death inspired some people — usually well-meaning friends and distant relatives — to put a positive spin on our family tragedy.
"He died as he lived," they'd tell us. "With a big heart."
They were just trying to make us feel better, I suppose, but it only managed to piss us off. My brother and I didn't want to be cheered up with idiotic aphorisms that put a positive spin on our father's medical condition. So we stopped telling people about the enlarged heart and began announcing that he had, in fact, been killed by a colon parasite.
"He died as he lived," we'd tell them, "with irritable, inflamed bowels."
LIFE IS SHORT. MIGHT AS WELL KEEP ON READIN' WHILE YOU STILL CAN.
We buried him in a small cemetery in Michigan, just a few blocks from the house where he raised us, and invited only a few close friends and family members to join us. Nobody knew quite what to say. We just stood there and stared quietly at the grave. There seemed to be no point in comforting each other. We were angry and numb and nothing would make any of this okay.
And then a beagle showed up.
At first, we thought it must be somebody's pet. But he had no tags of any sort, nothing to indicate who he might belong to. For a stray, he seemed unusually friendly. He moved from person to person, pressing his wet nose against their legs. He took a particular interest in our mother, trying at one point to climb her and lick her chin. He sat and watched intently as my brother and I lowered our dad's urn into the ground. And at the end, he accompanied each person to their cars and waited for them to drive away.
We left the cemetery feeling strangely uplifted. And for a family of mostly agnostics, a little confused. Nobody wanted to admit what we were all clearly thinking; that the dog was our reincarnated father. But that didn't make any sense, we
told ourselves. It was silly, really. Did this mean we were Buddhists and never realized it? But even as the logical sides of our brains dismissed it as so much hooey, there was a small part of us that wanted to believe, that needed to believe, our dad had come back for one final goodbye.The next morning, the dog was still the hot topic of conversation. Even the smallest detail took on special significance. We noted how the dog and our dad shared the same eye color, and how he'd completely ignored our aunt, who, even in life, he considered to be something of a bitch.
"Did you notice how he smiled at me?" I said. "Dad always used to smile at me like that."
We wondered if the dog might still be up there, lazily napping near his grave. We couldn't help ourselves. We piled into the car and drove up to the cemetery. And sure enough, the beagle was waiting for us. But something was different about him this time. He wasn't the same lovable mutt from yesterday.
He was, well, kind of a jerk.
He snapped at our hands when we tried to pet him. He tore at our pant legs and pushed us to the ground. As we looked on in horror, he began digging at the grave, threatening to unearth our father's remains. We jumped on him and tried to pull him away, but he easily slipped from our grasps.
"Oh sweet Jesus," my brother whimpered. "Is he doing what I think he's doing?"
He was. The beagle was licking his balls. Right in front of us. Right next to the tombstone! We tried to shield our mother's eyes, but it only made the absurdity of the situation all the more apparent.
"C'mon, dad," I screamed at him, regretting my words even as they left my mouth. "I know you're single now and everything, but show some respect for your widow."
We could think of two possible explanations:
1) The dog was not, and never had been, our dad.
2) Our dad, at least in the afterlife, was an asshole.
We never talked about it again, but we knew we had only ourselves to blame. One spiritual moment should have been enough for anybody, but no, we had to press our luck. If we'd just left well enough alone, we'd still have a pleasant fantasy to shelter us from the grief. But we were greedy, and got exactly what we deserved.
We still returned to the cemetery occasionally. Sometimes we waited for hours, jumping every time we heard a twig snap, gasping when any forest creature happened to catch our eye. Some days, we convinced ourselves that there was nothing magical about that dog after all. His owner probably moved out of town years ago. But that didn't stop us from looking, and waiting, and hoping against hope that he isn't gone forever.
A year later, our mom called and announced that was finished with grieving. She wanted all traces of Dad out of the house so that she could get on with her life. "I
can't be a widow forever," she told us. She insisted that we come home immediately and haul away whatever we wanted from his belongings; the rest, she warned us, would end up in the nearest dumpster. So my brother and I flew back to Michigan for an impromptu excavation. We took everything we could grab, clinging to the minutiae of his life like archaeologists at a dig. We hoarded pens, stationary, watches that no longer worked, expired batteries, anything that wasn't nailed down. We wondered aloud what we intended to do with all this junk. My brother, giddy from lack of sleep and emotional exhaustion, suggested that we create a mannequin in Dad's likeness and dress it with his clothes, still stinking of his sweat and DNA. And then we'd force our future children to treat it as a living, breathing grandparent.
"Do we have to?" We imagined our children howling in protest. "It's creepy."
"You march up those stairs this instant," we'd screech back at them, "and you sit on your dead grandfather's lap and you tell him you love him! If I catch you sneaking out the window again, there's no Disneyland for you!"
We laughed so hard at our ridiculous, vaguely sinister predictions. We never said as much, but it felt like we'd made an unspoken pact, agreeing that having kids of our own would be a futile gesture. What, after all, would be the point? How could we look at a baby's face without seeing a reflection of what we'd lost? Bringing another human being into the world would be acknowledging that life begrudgingly went on. And we were having none of that. (My brother would eventually break our pact, joining the procreating status quo and fathering a monosyllabic midget. But at least for one afternoon, we were on the same page.)
When reality doesn't fit your expectations, sometimes you have to give it a gentle nudge in the right direction. For the first year after my father's death, I would lay awake almost every night and stare at the ceiling and concoct elaborate conspiracy theories about how he'd probably faked his death. I had the entire pulp fiction scenario worked out, from how he'd bribed the coroner to fill his urn with pepper to his ties with a nefarious criminal empire — why else would a loving father abandon his family if it wasn't to pay off a debt to the mob? I wasted afternoons daydreaming about his mysterious second life, and my tireless quest to find and capture him, like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive, eventually spotting him in an airport and pursuing him through the streets of New Orleans, only to lose him in a crowded Mardi Gras parade.
It wasn't like my head was stuck in the sand. I'd gone through four of the five stages of grief: denial, drinking heavily, writing terrible poetry with overbearing existential themes, and listening exclusively to Morrissey albums. Sure, I was taking my time getting to the whole "acceptance" part, but it wasn't like he'd be any less dead if I waited a few years.
"Do you think he's still up there?" my brother asked, as we sat on the floor of our dad's office and did snow angels on a pile of his old sweaters.
I knew exactly what he was talking about.
"I don't know," I said, my eyes brightening. "You wanna go check?"
We couldn't help ourselves. Without telling Mom, we slipped out of the house and drove the short distance to our dad's final resting place. We'd barely pulled into the cemetery's dirt road when my brother spotted him.
"Holy crap," he exclaimed, slamming on the brakes. "There he is!"
He was a good twenty yards away, running through an open field like a convict that'd busted lose from a chain gang. We jumped out of the car and started yelling and waving our arms, trying to get his attention. He stopped and stared back at us, his head tilted uncertainly. We waited for him to gallop towards us and into our open arms. But instead, he turned and began running in the opposite direction, ignoring our cries.
"Let's get him," my brother said.
We jumped into the car and chased after him, following him through dusty back roads at frightening speeds. It never occurred to us to wonder what we might do if we caught up with him. What were we expecting? Did we intend to kidnap him? Lure him into the back seat and bring him home with us? And what then? Did we seriously think we could adopt our dead dad? Were we ready for the responsibility and inherent weirdness of taking care of a pet that's possibly inhabited by the spirit of a departed parent? And was it possible that our reincarnated dad-dog might already have another owner, who rubs his belly and feeds him delicious doggie treats and picks up his poop? My brother and I both loved and missed our dad, but I'm not sure if we necessarily loved and missed him enough to pick up his feces.
There were just too many ways this could go wrong. We'd learned already how just a little scrutiny can end in disappointment. It's easy to convince yourself that every floor creak and zigzagging shadow is evidence of a haunting, but turn on the lights and the ghosts usually evaporate. Wouldn't too much exposure to this beagle just prove what neither of us wanted to find out, that he was an ordinary dog, and we'd just been fooling ourselves all these years?
What we really wanted, I suppose, was a proper goodbye. If he'd done it once, he could do it again. And we'd get it right this time. We'd let him lick our faces and comfort our mom, and we'd tell him all the things we never got a chance to. We wanted our lasting memory of him to be something special, something that we could tell his grandkids about someday. Not some stupid farce with an obnoxious beagle gnawing at our calves and cleaning its junk. We deserved more than that, dammit!
My brother and I said nothing, just stared at the dog as it disappeared from view. 'Dad, don't do this,' I whispered. 'Just give us one more chance. That's all we want. One more chance. Just one more. One more. One more.'
1 comments:
You should approach NPR with this as one of the listener essays on All Things Considered. It's really good.
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