His Dogness

This column appeared in the “Winston-Salem Journal” on March 29, 2010:

We put His Dogness to sleep.

When my friend Mike found Buster, as His Dogness was known around the house, standing on the side of the road in Stokes County, the vet estimated that Buster was 1 to 1½ years old. Add that to the 16 years that he was with me and he was at least 17 — an impressive run for a 50-pound dog.

Buster was a good friend.

When he came into my life, I was in a rough patch and looking for a dog, in part, because I thought taking it on serious walks might make me feel better. Mike knew that, and, when he saw Buster looking as if he was waiting for a bus, Mike picked him up and called me.

“I found your dog,” he said.

He had indeed.

I was glad that Buster was a boy dog because I wanted to be able to name my dog after Buster Keaton, the comedian whose movies had made me laugh during an earlier rough patch. Having Buster around made a big difference. When I came home from work, he would give me a first-class greeting at the door, and we would go for a walk in Old Salem.

Buster was an idiosyncratic dog. When he saw a vapor trail, he would bark and bark. My neighbor, Mr. Whitfield, liked to joke that an alien space ship had accidentally left Buster behind and he was barking to get their attention.

At some point, Buster decided he would no longer drink water inside the house. If he was thirsty, he had to go out and drink from the stainless-steel bowl that birds liked to use to bathe.

Mostly, though, he was remarkably easygoing. Sometimes on walks, when he stopped to sniff something, I would start looking at the clouds. After a minute or two, I might come back to Earth to find Buster patiently standing there, waiting for me to finish my reveries.

I always thought it was too bad that Garnet, Sparkle Girl and Doobins never knew the young, carefree Buster. By the time they came along, he was struggling — stiffness in his hips, deafness, failing eyesight. Kidney failure was the big one. Eventually, the build-up of toxins in his system led to what looked a lot like dementia.

Sometimes, I would come upon Buster standing in the corner, staring at the wall. Other times, he would flip out, frantically scratching at the front door as if he hadn’t been out in hours and hours, even though, minutes ago, we had just come in from a walk.

Even though dealing with him after he got sick could be trying, Garnet, Sparkle Girl and Doobins came to love him, too. When Buster was in distress, Doobins took a lot of responsibility for trying to make things better for him, and Garnet was a sucker for those moments when he would come up and burrow his head into her looking for a scratch.

As his condition worsened, I spent a lot of time fretting about whether the misery he was experiencing was offset by the times when he was enjoying his life.

After a particularly bad day during which he could not find comfort, it was clear that it was time.

My friend Mike died some months back, and Buster being gone made me feel the loss of Mike even more acutely. I would have liked nothing more than to drive up to Stokes County and sit with Mike on his porch.

It helped when my friend Lauren said she liked to imagine Mike and Buster taking a walk together in heaven.

Garnet and the kids took Buster’s loss harder than I expected. In pondering that, I came to think it had something to do with self-centeredness, somehow thinking that nobody else appreciated him as much as I did.

Doobins and I were in the car one day when, without preamble, Doobins said, “I wish I was in heaven with Buster.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with that. Deflecting it a bit seemed like a good idea, so I said, “What did you like about Buster?”

“I liked that I loved him,” Doobins said.

I had expected something more mundane, and, at first, his statement struck me as nonsensical.

You don’t just love something — you have reasons for loving it.

The more I thought about it, though, the more profound it seemed.

Although we may be able to name this or that reason, in the end, we care about something because of what it brings out in us — joy, a sense of satisfaction, love.

I miss Buster. At the same time, I am grateful that I have Garnet, Sparkle Girl and Doobins to share that loss. When Buster came into my life, I didn’t know that such a gift awaited me.