A Legacy Project

“The good thing about a dog,” a friend said to me once, “is they teach kids about death.” 

I thought back to my teen years, remembering when Gus, the family dachshund, came up the stairs one morning walking crooked. He looked like a backslash on legs, like his rear end was pulling out to pass the front end. We’d had Gus eight or nine years. Someone had told us don’t expect him to last. You didn’t see many geriatric dachshunds. That morning, we couldn’t tell, on a scale of one to ten, what Gus’s pain level was. Maybe there was no pain at all. I remember he ate his breakfast. When we took him into emergency, the vet just shook his head. What had happened to Gus, a herniated or slipped disk, maybe more than one of them, could not be corrected. It was hard to tell if Gus was in misery, but the vet’s recommendation was to put him out of it. My dad asked my brother and me, Did we want to be there when the doctor gave him the shot? We did and we didn’t. I think we were.

When my wife and I became parents, the closest our kids got to experiencing loss like that was Aristotle and Socrates, two hermit crabs she grudgingly approved. (They wanted a dog. She said no. They wanted a cat. She said no. Gerbils, hamsters, guinea pigs, snakes, lizards: fortunately our kids expressed interest in neither vermin nor reptiles.) The crabs lived in a terrarium on the bay window ledge of the family room. They didn’t fetch or roll over or sit up and beg for table scraps. They just sat there and looked out the window. If you watched long enough, you might see one of them scuttle. We didn’t see an emotional connection between our kids and them forming. These were PG years, pre-Google. Hermit crabs, like children, did not come with an instruction manual. It would have been helpful if we could have Googled hermit crab care, how to approximate the hermit crab’s preferred climate. Perhaps, looking out the window all day like that, they were trying to tell us something. They were worried. In the dead of winter, after ten consecutive sub-zero days and nights, we realized one morning that Aristotle and Socrates had stopped scuttling. At first we thought they froze to death. Tizi claimed she saw evidence of hermit crab cannibalism. Whose job was it to feed them? 

A few weeks later, we brought home a compensatory pet. Down the road at the local market, we were fast friends with a cook who called himself Chef Carl. Our kids named the goldfish Fish Carl, a name that, unlike the names of Greek philosophers, evoked warm feelings. Fish Carl lived a short but happy life. He was loved. He wagged his tail. When he kissed at us, we kissed back. His demise was not unexpected. Our kids got through it okay. Fish Carl completed the pet period in their upbringing.