Marlowe
When I began my PhD, the world felt very uncertain. I was living away from home, away from my partner, most of my friends had moved from our tiny college town. It was 2016, and, I thought, things could not get much worse (the height of hubris in retrospect, I know.) I was feeling distinctly unmoored. So, in a fit of foolishness, the kind of thing that happens when you have grown up money but a child’s brain, I went to a local animal sanctuary with the great and good Kennis Forte, and brought home an eighty-dollar dog. He was, I was told, eight years old and beagle-ish: he had the requisite floppy ears, the white-dipped tail, the ever-unsatisfied nose. His proportions were wrong, though. He had a too-long body and a too-small head, and feet that did not fit his stubby legs. I called him Little Big Foot for a while as a result. I named him for Phillip Marlowe, the main character from The Big Sleep, because surely every hound ought to be a detective, sniffing out clues.
At first, we did not get along. He was, at best, ambivalent about me, caring only for his walks and inspecting every single individual blade of grass he encountered. He peed on my floors, nearly every day, for about six months. I spent a fortune in vet bills trying to figure out what was wrong. After that agonizing six months, the vet finally figured it out, and Marlowe became a much happier dog very suddenly. Who could blame him? You don’t feel like making friends when you’re sick. Now he would follow me around the apartment, and deigned to sleep in the dog bed I provided, next to my bed, instead of on the floor in the living room. A typical old man, he snored like a freight train.
Our walks became joyful. Still slow and painstaking, but pleasant. He learned to sit, not to bay at 7 am, to come when called (mostly), and walked like a gentleman on his leash. He also learned that the local video rental store had dog biscuits behind the counter, and so whenever we took a right turn out the front door and began to make our way down to the lake, heading in the direction of said store, his pace would increase significantly, ears swaying, ignoring sights and smells. He was a dog on a mission. The walk home was a different story: now tired, having had his treat and faced with a walk that was entirely uphill, he dragged his paws and stopped to sniff literally anything. The walk home could be twice as long as the walk down.
He took the move to Quebec with us like a champ, evidently delighted by all the new smells and adapting better than I did to a new city. He made friends with the dog across the hall, and as he grew older, he enjoyed trips to the park in a wagon, sitting like a pharaoh on his blanket, his head tilted to smell the air, a regal expression of disdain and ambivalence at the people who exclaimed over him.
He died here. It was hardly a surprise: he was old, had been old when I got him, and for as long as I had known him, he’d had trouble with his kidneys, his pancreas, his spleen, with arthritis in his shoulders. His once rusty head had gone snowy-white: I called him sugar-faced, trying to push away the dread that filled my stomach when people commented on his age. We were told what to look for and when to go to the vet. Just as spring was ripening into summer, my husband woke me in the night, voice urgent and low. It was time.
We were very lucky. It didn’t feel like that at the time. It felt like I would never be happy again, like I would never stop crying. But the vets were kind, and we were able to bring him home to spend time with him and say goodbye. It took me months to sleep normally again, without the sound of his snoring.
That was three years ago now. We still don’t have another dog. Sometimes I see a lady in our neighbourhood walking her cheerful little beagle, barely out of puppyhood, and a horrible part of me wants to warn her: that this dog, this sweet little dog whom she loves so much, will die and break her heart. That, like Stuart McLean says,
“We do this thing. We open our hearts to the world around us. And the more we do that, the more we allow ourselves to love, the more we are bound to find ourselves one day…standing in the kitchen of our lives, surrounded by the ones we love, and feeling empty, and alone, and sad, and lost for words, because one of our loved ones, who should be there, is missing. Mother or father, brother or sister, wife or husband, or a dog or cat. It doesn't really matter. After a while, each death feels like all the deaths, and you stand there like everyone else has stood there before you, while the big wind of sadness blows around and through you.”
Marlowe was a great dog and a better friend. He cost me eighty dollars and utter heartbreak. I’d pay it all again in a moment.
Jennifer