We buried Dexter's ashes today, celebrating his life and the many years our lives were enriched with him. I posted this entry on October 13 but am posting it again to note that he's now a permanent part of Bisbee, where nearly everyone knew him and still asks after him. We miss him.
The things we miss are in the absences, the gaps in our glances. We get out of the car and find ourselves looking and not finding him. We turn around at the pantry expecting him behind us and he isn’t there. We pull away from the house to visit friends or a restaurant and his solemn face is not at the door, watching, waiting, hoping.
The things we miss are in the silences, the shuddering sound as he shakes himself in the night, waking us up to go out; the bark at the door that announces his readiness for return; the sound of him slurping at the water bowl that goes on forever, the whimpering as he dreams.
The things we miss are in the loneliness: gone is his constant presence, his palpable joy that filled so many of our moments. Left is the empty room, the morning walk that is only exercise, the vacant porch without his regal watching. No longer will heads in a crowd turn, smiles break out, hands reach down as we three walk through the small farmer's market.
Life for him was meeting. Friends at the door brought a frenzy of twisting delight. A trip to the grocery brought a breathless race to the car door and a trembling waiting, nose one micron from the metal. A drive in the country with the head out the window was bliss. The journeys to all our new places, back and forth across the country so many times, his head at our shoulders anxiously watching from the back seat, waiting, and then the moments at the end as he runs ahead sniffing out the new yards, sussing out new spaces, looking for signs of new people he will greet.
He knew who he liked, the people he was okay with, and the person he adored, and he adored only one person in the world. He was glad to see me when I arrived at night or showed up after a trip but when Carole was gone he was disconsolate, depressed. Sometimes after she had been gone for a day or two on a trip, he would disappear and I would find him down the street searching the neighborhood, frantically looking from house to house. He would lunge at the leash when a familiar car passed that he thought might be bringing her home. He would listen for the door slamming in the driveway.
He had his own ceremonies, his own confidence in who he was. A retriever is supposed to retrieve but frankly a turn or two with the ball was about all he could take. Then he would put the ball down well out of our reach and wait for the next thing. He wasn’t one of those foolish dogs that keeps on chasing the ball until the sun goes down.
He was not ashamed to be frightened or fearful. Thunder and lightening terrified him. A trip to the vet would often produce constant shaking or a frantic attempt to return to the car.
Yet in the examining room with a gentle veterinarian or attendant he was patient and willing. More than anything, he aimed to please, even strangers.
He could have taken his mind reading act on the road. He knew before we did when we were leaving the house and promptly plopped down in front of the door; only over his dead body could we leave without him. He had become hard of hearing and one eye had a cataract, yet he always knew when I was in the crackers long before he could hear or smell it. When I came back hiding my findings, his waiting look told me that he had my number and that he wanted his cut.
When we got him from our daughter, he was only a year or so old. Valerie named him Dexter for Dexter Gordon, the jazz saxophonist. Dexter was handed over to me in San Diego by Valerie’s Italian boyfriend, a physician who daily had romped with him in the Pacific ocean in Laguna Beach. It broke their hearts to lose him but work took them away from home too much and he was lonely. As a young dog, he had roamed the Laguna Beach hills , becoming well known to the animal control staff.
And then he was carted off to the Arizona high desert, to an old mining town, Bisbee. Driving from San Diego, Dexter rode in the back seat of the rental car for six hours looking out the back window, waiting to catch a glimpse of his friend who was surely coming to rescue him.
How could we, how could I, be anything but a letdown, a mistake?
But for Dexter withholding love and affection was not an option and soon we were in his heart and soon nearly everyone in town recognized Dexter, and he was in heaven again. Strangers in the street often stopped and said, ”Your dog is smiling.” He was okay with other dogs and sometimes would race around with them, playing. But he preferred the company of people and the joy of greeting them each new day.
When I ran for mayor, a man told me, "I'm not voting for you but I will vote for your dog," and sure enough Dexter got a write-in vote. Despite being a newcomer I won; how could anyone that Dexter and Carole lived with be anything but okay?
Dexter made room in his life for Harry, our Bisbee cat. Dexter weighted 70 plus pounds and Harry, 14, but Harry was not intimidated. Every now and then Harry backed Dexter off and Dexter took it. In the end they became pals, played with each other, slept near each other, comfortable in each other’s company. Harry would often go to sleep on Dexter’s bed at night and Dexter would sleep a few feet away, never complaining.
When morning came, Harry would be on the bed with us and Dexter was back in his own bed, his 70 pounds curled up in the smallest circle. My favorite memory of him is asleep and content, taking up such a small space for such a large soul, on the bed we cannot now bring ourselves to put away.
He was curled up that way on the floor in the vet's office when I last saw him.
About six months ago his health began to change. He was 13, old for a retriever and he had a nervous stomach for years. He kept his smile but he was struggling.
He often couldn’t keep his food down, was always hungry. We tried different diets, went to the vet again and again. They thought it was something like humans have, acid reflux, when gastric juices are constantly flowing in the wrong direction. His stomach rumbled at night, waking Carole up. We feared that it was the stomach cancer that had killed Molly, our first retriever.
After living in Bisbee for10 years we moved back to North Carolina, and then we returned to Bisbee this year, where he had spent most of his years. He knew where he was and he was occasionally his old self but his condition was headed in the wrong direction and we were holding our breath.
The vets here found the problem at last—something impossible to fix—some enlargement of his esophagus that trapped food and water, leaving it sitting there, not moving on to his stomach, causing him to often vomit a slimy gooey mess almost the consistency of jellyfish, leaving him constantly hungry and thirsty.
We tried to compensate. We fed him on an incline and he went along with it. We put him on a gruel-like diet. He ate it but his vomiting got worse. We were frightened.
He kept smiling but he seemed wearied.
And then in a brief day and a half, we learned how really sick he was. I got up one morning and the walk in front of the house was filled with vomit and he lay on the porch in the drool of acid from his stomach. He moved to the yard and I watched him arc his body into a rigid spasm, trying to expel the alien pain.
I thought he was dying on the spot.
We then took Dexter on his last trip to the veterinarian. Dr. Kroger laid it out for us: he could make him comfortable for a few days or maybe longer but it was not going to get better. It was going to get worse.
I couldn’t stay with him for the final moments. I had done that before with our first retriever, Molly. I couldn’t do that again.
In the end, like Dexter I wasn’t ashamed to be frightened.
But Carole, his great love, stayed with him, and they went through it together. He was curled up beside her, his head on her legs when I left the room. The doctor gave him a sedative and gave them some time together. And then Carole came out into the waiting room, crying, and it was over.
Death is not an event in a dog’s life, not really, but I cannot help but believe that Dexter knew as he suffered how distraught and frightened we were and this was for him a kind of death too.
And the days afterward have been silent and empty, as we are endlessly surprised at all the places his golden self is not, the spaces that he doesn’t fill—beds, under tables, behind chairs, in doorways, front porches, yards, back seats, pantries—vacancies catching us unawares, holes in our lives that we will somehow have to fill with 12 years of memories. Harry paces back and forth waiting to fill the same emptiness.
What dogs want is other dogs, someone once said and I guess that we and Harry were Dexter’s other dogs, which is another way of saying that life itself is life together—if we know what’s good for us.
Dexter was what was good for us, and he still is.
Dexter Gordon Beauchamp, May 11, 1995 to September 25, 2008.
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