This is the anniversary of a freak Spring blizzard, when over two feet of lovely white stuff suddenly covered the yard and buried shrubs. It started as a gift day, a Monday where no one went to work. I enjoyed a warm fire with my husband and toddler. It didn’t feel like the day on which our youth would end abruptly. It didn’t feel like a time when my dog would teach me how to live.
After Joseph went to bed and Jeff went out shoveling, the phone rang. It was Bill’s father. Bill one of our closest friends in college, he gave the toast at our wedding reception, and we had spent most New Year’s Eves since school with him. We were an unusual but happy threesome, and Bill occasionally joked that we would have side by side by side rocking chairs at our old age home.
That night, Bill’s father opened the conversation by saying simply that “Billy” had died in a car accident while trying to drive to work. The car had skidded and gone into a tree. Bill had died before anyone found the car. Because I could not believe Bill was dead at 39, I stupidly asked him to repeat what he said. Then nausea hit and I realized it was no illusion, Bill was dead, and I had made his elderly, gentle father say it twice. Bill’s father and sister (we had driven to his mother’s funeral only a month before) honored us by asking us to stand with them on the family receiving line.
Months later, we drove south en route to a Summer visit with our families and stopped to visit Bill’s dad: the two of us, our hyperactive, nonverbal toddler, and our sweet but limping, chronically ill dog who traveled everywhere we did.
When we got there, Teddy bounded out of the van and trotted, tail wagging happily, to the kitchen door. He greeted Bill’s father and sister, neither of whom he had previously met, and eventually settled at Bill’s father’s feet.
After lunch, Jeff and I sorted through things in Bill’s old bedroom that his family thought we might like to have— actually one sorted while the other one chased Joseph. Teddy contentedly stayed with Bill’s dad, who rubbed his ears and murmured to him as if they were old friends.
When we were back in the car, I tried to explain how odd it seemed that Teddy settled so quickly in an entirely new place, that he had even napped on the floor of Bill’s bedroom while I went through books. Jeff said it had seemed odd to him until Bill’s father had taken out Bill’s old high school jacket, which Bill had worn from September to June when we were in school together, opened it, and held it out for Teddy to sniff.
Then Jeff said, he realized why Teddy, who had loved Bill and been much loved by him, was so content. For Teddy, Bill WAS there— in all the smells of things brought home from his apartment and the things that had never left his childhood home.
The memories of that day are still sharp for both of us, a day of honest emotion without embarrassment, of a love and sense of community that was as present as the last of the lilac bushes’ scent. The memories will never tarnish, never fade, those memories of Bill, and Teddy, and my little boy with his then undiagnosed but crippling problems.
I remember them a bit as Teddy experienced them, not in the sadness of loss of a person and a chapter of life, but as an immersion in the smells and sounds and fabric of someone loved very much. Teddy, the dog therapeutic for my autistic child, my first dog, the center of my heart, died 4 years after that long ago day at Bill’s childhood home.
If Bill died young, Teddy died younger, only 7 years old instead of the 14 we expected, of raging autoimmune disease that neither all the drugs and nutritional supports available nor all the love a boy could have for his dog could stop.
When I remember the early Summer day we visited Bill’s home and he wasn’t there but was in everything there, I realize neither Teddy nor Bill is gone. They are loved, and alive, and safe in my heart. I need to see life more often through the eyes and nose and memory of my dog.
Elizabeth Coolidge-Stolz, MD