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What Buddy Taught Me About Life and Death

Allison Lee
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Allison Lee, Gary Lee

Allison Lee and her father Gary Lee on a hike with Buddy.

Since we adopted him as a puppy, Buddy was a sleepy dog. He slept on the patio; he slept in his doghouse; he slept in our mudroom. When we tried to go into the garage, we sometimes stepped on him accidentally because he was napping against the door. However, there were certain activities for which he became wide awake. If you said the word “walk” or anything that rhymes with it, he would start zipping back and forth in the backyard. During his later years, he liked taking walks at Galveston Beach with my dad and me, where we let him off the leash and he followed us. He would sometimes get distracted, licking strands of seaweed or chasing a hermit crab, but when he noticed that he was lagging behind, he would gallop straight to us, jumping over ditches and sometimes falling into them.  

A few days after one of these beach walks, nine-year-old Buddy got sick. He had trouble getting up and he was sleeping even more than usual. We took him to the vet, thinking that it was just mild food poisoning or something along those lines. 

The vet said that he had been poisoned by eating a penny. We thought this couldn’t be true, so we took him to a different vet. It turned out that he really did swallow a penny, and he was having multiple organ failure. The zinc from the penny had absorbed into his body and interfered with his red blood cell production. The vet said it wasn’t likely that he would recover, so my parents decided to put him down.

I wasn’t with them while they were making the decision. I remember when my parents called me to tell me that they were going to put Buddy down. I cried and begged them not to. But I knew that it was useless. As I sat on the floor of the garage, I felt that I became my dog - lying on a table under bright lights, feeling suddenly a sense of forced calm, hearing murmurs in a half-intelligible language and then nothing at all. Death came for my dog that night.

Buddy was huge, a hundred pounds, and he had been healthy his whole life. He seemed to be able to recover from any incident - the grapes my little sister fed him without realizing they’re poisonous to dogs, the whole bag of chocolate chips we accidentally left in the garage, all the onion slices hiding in the leftover food we fed him. 

Although Buddy never showed any outward signs of pain through any of these incidents, I’m sure that if we had been more mindful, we could have saved him some discomfort. He had a habit of eating grass and then sometimes vomiting on the patio - he may have done that because he was trying to vomit out something bad that he had eaten. We shouldn’t have let him spend time alone in the garage, where there were tools, car oil (which he sometimes licked) and coins. This was probably where he had eaten the penny.

After Buddy died, I became scared of dying an early death, too. My giant mutt had been killed by a tiny penny. I realized how fragile my alive-ness was. For weeks after Buddy died, I found myself checking the traffic eight times before crossing the street. I was careful not to slip in the shower or fall from my bunk bed. My dad said to me, “Don’t be sad, my dear. The dog is at peace. Everything that is dead is at peace.” But that brought me no comfort; I did not want to trade the daily whirlwind of experiences for “peace.”

I began to wonder, if Buddy had understood that he would die one day, would he have lived differently? Would he have tried to be productive? Would he have misbehaved more or less? Would he have run away? But he seemed to be happy. He just wanted to eat and play. I guess he was sort of a hedonist. Then I got to thinking, What makes our lives so much more grand or important than that of a dog? The time difference between the 13-year-long life of a dog and the 85-year-long life of a person, in the face of infinity, is basically nothing. And all of our great feats of engineering -  the wheel, the aqueduct, the Internet  - are insignificant to an indifferent universe. A game of fetch, in the grand scale of things, is no more important than the invention of the lightbulb. Everything will perish. Everything will be washed away.

It is depressing to realize that in the long run, all will be as if you never existed, but I try to look at death from the perspective of the Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Here’s a quote from that book that I find comforting: “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.” I have begun to think of time as an infinitely long camera reel, each of our lives showing up on only a few transparencies.

On a few inches on the filmstrip of time, Buddy will always be running around, pooping on sandcastles, and I will always be bantering with my best friend about the Tragedy of Existence. The fact that our parts are small shouldn’t make them any less beautiful. Each person is an artist who has a finite amount of time to create an infinitely nuanced and colored piece of work: life.

A few months after Buddy died, we adopted a golden retriever puppy we named Mozart. This time, we were sure to make our house as safe as possible for him. We made sure that there were no sharp objects or dangerous chemicals within his reach, and we looked up a list of foods that dogs should never eat including chocolate, grapes, onions, garlic, milk and fat trimmings. Now, we keep all of our pennies and coins off the floor and in a jar, and we pay close attention to what Mozart puts in his mouth. We will always take all precautions to help our adorable puppy live a long, healthy life.

I still miss Buddy - my best childhood friend - and it still makes me sad to think that his life could have been longer and better. If you have pets, please remember how much they mean to you, and do your research about what safety measures you should take. You wouldn’t want something as seemingly benign as a penny or a bag of chocolate to hurt your furry companion.

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