Scenes of My Life in Five Dogs
Michael Corsini (artist). Saint Francis. [Painting]. Retrieved from https://michaelcorsini.com/shop/saint-francis.
Used with permission from the artist.
The Psychotic Dust Mop
I was always the one he loved to hate. The ungrateful little thing didn’t realize that if it were not for me, he would still be in the miserable condition we found him in. My mother always wanted a Yorkie. She had been saying so for a long time, ever since the dog of my childhood left our lives.
Dancer was named for his habit of running in tight circles when he got excited. He was a rescue. Mom and I figured it came from him being kept in a cage or crate most of his life, so he got used to not having a lot of room to move. His pedigree was as long as your arm. Unfortunately for him, he exceeded the standard measurements for an AKC Maltese. The average person would never guess this by looking at him, but to those who knew, he was simply too big to be a show dog. For this, he was treated like crap.
The rescue where Mom got her “giant Maltese” (as we came to call him) was not very far from where I was going to college. I learned this when my mother told me the address of the place where there was a dog she wanted to visit. I did not visit any other dogs with her, and I don’t remember now that she ever mentioned any other candidates in her dog search. I came home and we went together. The lady who was fostering Dashiell (his original name) knew only snippets of his tale of woe. Mom and I were both moved; it seemed kind of amazing that he had not been left to starve or thrown out a car window on the freeway late at night, that’s how awful the rescue lady described this poor little thing’s circumstances.
When Dashiell finally made his first appearance, he was pitiful. His fur, which should have been long and flowing, had been buzzed. Even his ears. The rescue lady explained that when Dashiell came to her, he was infested with fleas. The short hair made it easier to give him the multiple medicated baths each day he needed to kill off the little bloodsuckers that tormented him. He came toward us wearily. He was particularly weary of me but jumped right into my mother’s arms. Only then could we see that he had absolutely no fur from the underside of his tail, past his butt, and down the back of his rear paws. He had rubbed it all off, the rescue lady explained, trying to get rid of the fleas. His eyes were cartoonishly large; that look melted my mother’s heart.
I am an only child and my parents divorced when I was seven. My mother had recently retired thanks to two events that worked nicely together for her when I started college. Her work husband, as we would call him today, who she had worked for and with ever since going back to work after the divorce, recently retired. Her parents, Nana & Papa, had also recently died, eleven months apart, and left her enough money to not work if she so chose. All of this worked in Dancer’s favor. My mother was a strong and single-minded single mother for the last eleven years. I, her one and only charge, was in the process of successfully launching into adult life. Dancer needed, really needed, someone to care for him and my mother wanted someone to care for. Yes, for now, there would be no Yorkie.
Dancer was in many ways an ideal companion for my mother. She had the time and desire to nurse him back to full health. He rewarded her with his undying affection and mostly easy-going temperament. Her home became a mutual admiration society of two. They went everywhere together. He even made it into the church pictorial directory with Mom. When my mother redid the house, which was a model home for the mid 70’s even though it was then the late 80’s, she commissioned a not-very-good artist to paint Dancer in the entryway hall. By that time, his coat was the envy of any of his right-sized siblings or cousins on the show circuit.
Mom and I figured that it must have been a teenage boy or boys that tormented Dashiell in puppyhood. He had no problem with women or girls of any age. Little boys and mature men likewise didn’t bother him a bit. But my friends and I always made him very uneasy. Whenever I went in to give my mother a hug or a kiss, there was a growl from the floor. If he was close by, he would often nip my heels. It was not hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to hurt.
The summer before I moved out, my mom and her twin brother went on a two-week trip. I house—and dog—sat. With Mom out of the picture, Dancer became my best friend. He followed me around, well, like a puppy. He always greeted me happily and with lots of kisses when I came back into the house. He whined to let him up on my bed at night and I quickly learned why my mother bought a bigger bed after Dancer came into her life. Most surprisingly, he growled at other people when they got too close to me! When Mom walked into the house after their trip, Dancer did his ecstatic dance all the way into her arms. When I followed to embrace her, he growled at me. “You little trader!” I laughed.
In retirement, my mother learned to cook gourmet meals and rekindled her enthusiasm for entertaining; Nana was a consummate entertainer back in the day. My friends and I were often guinea pigs for new recipes; we never complained. One once commented, “Man, how come you’re not like 400 pounds? Your mom is a great cook!” Before I could get a word out, she said with a huge grin, “Oh no. This isn’t the food he grew up on!” One time, a large group of us were sitting all over her living room, some of us cross-legged on the floor. Dancer had warmed up enough to one of my friends to have fallen asleep on his thigh. At a lull in the conversation, Dancer shifted his weight slightly and fell, all six inches, to the floor. He started, growling and teeth bared, certain that he had been pushed. Everyone laughed. He received his nickname of “The Psychotic Dust Mop” on the spot.
Shawn
Prior to the divorce, mine was a picture-perfect nuclear family: a dad, a mom, a little boy, and his dog. The dog, a Cockapoo, was named after my kindergarten best friend, Shawn. I don’t remember anything about the young human Shawn, but I do remember the canine one. He was the love of my young life, especially after we moved when I was six. I did not like being “the new kid.” I think it was partially Shawn that gained my acceptance into the tribe of kids in my new neighborhood. One of his cool “tricks” was to pull me around on my roller skates; think an Alaskan musher with a team of one. It was the 70’s and everyone had roller skates. He refused to do this for anyone else. I worried that this might be perceived as cruel or abusive to my beloved pooch, but he always got excited when I put my roller skates on, wagging his cropped, tater-tot tail as fast as it would go.
Sometime after Dad moved out, I accidently broke a window in my bedroom by sitting on the sill. It was just me and Shawn until my mom got home from work. I spent that seeming eternity trying to figure out a way to put the blame on my innocent, four-legged friend. I was sure my mother was going to kill me. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), I’ve never been a good liar, so I was completely distraught by the time the garage door went up and Mom drove in. Obviously, I survived that day, and Shawn never held my trying to throw him under the bus that day against me.
After me, Shawn was the next victim of my parent’s separation. Shawn had grown up having people at home. We made the switch to me going to school from me being home all the time with Mom, which happened before the move and before my parents split. What became intolerable was my mother going back to work and Shawn now being by himself from 7:30 am to 3:30 pm, Monday to Friday. Whether it was necessity, displeasure, or a combination of both, one of my daily tasks upon getting home from school was to clean up his “messes” in the house. Later, I got a new chore before leaving for school (Mom left for work about 30 minutes before me): banishing Shawn to the garage. Nobody was happy with this arrangement.
I don’t remember how long this went on. It became clear that Shawn was no longer the happy-go-lucky pup of my earlier childhood. He was not the same, even when Mom and I were home. Everyone was sad, even my father, who now only saw Shawn occasionally. One day, Mom broached the subject that broke her heart and mine. Shawn should go, deserved to go, somewhere he would be happy again. We both cried. Although I didn’t like it one bit, I knew she was right.
The next day, when I got home from school, the garage was empty.
My Brothers
Shawn Tu came into my dad and Gloria’s home after they began living together. He was an energetic, playful, affectionate, and oh-so-cute Shih Tzu-Lhasa Apso mix. Talk about dust mops: his primarily brown coat perpetually looked like it needed a trim, and he was in constant motion. Learning the new puppy’s name was the first indication I had that my father remembered, and even mourned, Shawn One going out of my life about a decade before. He had never said anything about it directly, either when I was a boy or when I was an adolescent.
Shawn Tu was not, like me, an only child. Mutley, a stately toy Poodle mix, was already firmly established. I do not remember exactly when Mutley came along, but I think it was either during or shortly after my father’s short-lived second marriage to Dorothy. He was a perfect pet: smart, attentive, and energetic but not hyperactive. One of my first memories of Mutley was traveling with him. He was very calm and peaceful in the car, even as a puppy. Dad and I (or Dad, Dorothy, and I; I don’t remember) were driving up to the Seattle area for our annual visit to Grandma & Grandpa. We had stopped for the day at a motel; we were putting our bags in the room. Mutley had been put up on a bed so he could not run away, and he let loose a flood of urine. Since he was a puppy, and an awfully cute one at that, we couldn’t be mad at him, at least not for very long. I took him outside to let him finish the job, while Dad sopped up the mess and got a new bedspread and towels.
Dad and Gloria had known each other for many years, perhaps decades. Gloria was twice widowed. They were in the same corporate vanpool that took its workers from the Wine Country area to their offices in downtown San Francisco. I remember her saying after we met that she saw me grow up in the pictures my dad had shown her (and probably everyone else in the van) over the years.
Gloria’s second husband, like so many American servicemen who served in Vietnam, survived the conflict with deep emotional and psychological wounds. After his horrid death from acute alcoholism & PTSD and my father’s harrowing second divorce, they began seeing each other. They took it slow. They seemed so very good for each other, and this slow pace at the beginning only seemed to strengthen their bond. To this day, I refer to Gloria as my stepmother because she and my dad were together for so long and it made her presence easy to explain. I was happy that they had found happiness with each other.
Like my mother, my father took an early retirement. Unlike my mother, his was due to unfortunate as well as fortunate circumstances. My father was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS when he was 55, within six months of his own father dying of the same disease after only eighteen months. Dad’s first symptoms (and as it turned out, his only symptoms for many years) were losing the use and feeling in his thumbs. Around the same time, his long-time employer was offering better-than-usual retirement packages to its senior middle managers. After his diagnosis, he began looking out for an attractive package and took one within a year.
By the time I was in high school, I was only spending one weekend a month with my father. Unlike the more frequent weekends with him for the roughly two years he was with Dorothy, I enjoyed and mostly looked forward to my time with Dad and Gloria. Gloria always made me feel welcome in her and their homes. Dorothy, on the other hand, had made me, a boy of about 9-11, feel like a barely tolerated interloper. Mutley and Shawn Tu were also big draws; I thoroughly enjoyed being around dogs again. As far as they were concerned, I was part of the pack. Sweetly, Shawn Tu seemed to have a soft spot in his heart for me; because of this and because of his name, the feeling was mutual.
One of the things that always irked me was when Dad referred to Mutley and Shawn Tu as my brothers. I know intellectually that he meant it positively: I was part of his new and successful family. My father, unlike my mother, had difficulty in accepting the reality that I was growing up, that I would soon be an adult. Emotionally, it felt like he was reducing me to the level of his dogs, one of his pets. I never successfully communicated, or he was never able to hear, how much that association hurt me. The only way I could retaliate was to subsequently address him by a nickname he loathed, Pop or Pops; sadly, he never quite got the connection.
Dad had a great run of twelve years after he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s; for most of them, the usually cruel disease was an inconvenience rather than a hardship. This is remarkable since the mean life expectancy after an ALS diagnosis is two to five years. He died of respiratory arrest in the final minutes of Father’s Day the year I turned 29. One of my clearest memories of the next morning is sitting in their living room, amusedly watching two of my friends tripping over each other attempting to help Gloria prepare some food, positioned between Mutley and Shawn Tu, now senior pups, one snuggled up on each side of me, with a hand on each of their warm, furry, and still little backs.
Maybe you were right after all, Dad.
The Dream Dog
Mom did get her Yorkie. About a year before my father died, Mom was diagnosed with liver cancer. She did the full round of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. She came through it all like a trooper. She celebrated when her oncologist told her that she was in remission. As she told people later, “When I found out that I wasn’t going to die, I decided to get my dream dog.” She found a breeder of Yorkshire Terriers in the same city Dad and Gloria lived in. It turned out to be less than a mile from their house, but I never mentioned that.
Like Dancer, Little Bo Peep XXIII had a pedigree bigger than she was and Mom had the paperwork to prove it. We found out Bo, as she was called, was the twenty-third of her name upon receiving back her official registration with the American Kennel Club. Her status in the high-end dog world was icing on the cake. By both temperament and training, she turned out to be the sweetest, most loving, and most non-yippy little Yorkie any of us had ever encountered. Mom’s finest bit of training was that she got Bo to sit peacefully on her lap at the kitchen table (but never at the dining room table) without so much as a furtive, sidelong glance at hers or anyone else’s meal.
Bo looked every bit a show dog and got compliments on her good looks and immaculate grooming everywhere she went. Her beauty regimen was far more extensive than her owner’s. Her bow collection (to keep the hair up and out of her eyes) was extensive and glamorous. She was also complimented for her good behavior. The one thing I was always afraid of when my mother talked about Yorkies was the seeming necessity, based on every Yorkie I had ever met, that it would be a yippy, neurotic little thing. Not Bo: she was well adjusted, friendly, and, except for answering the doorbell and playing with her toys, very quiet.
Bo loved the attention lavished on her by two frequent visitors to Mom’s house: my uncle, her twin brother, and me. (Speaking of my uncle, my two favorite pictures of him involved dogs. One is of Shawn giving him a Wet Willie while he is trying to open a Christmas present, the other is of him holding a sound asleep puppy-Bo in one arm, casually leaning against Mom’s kitchen counter.) Mom insisted that my uncle and I both learn how to “properly” brush Bo. It occurred to me later that it must have been in the back of her mind that if the cancer came back and took her life, one of us would get Bo; Mom thought ahead. Unlike Dancer, who often protested when anyone other than my mother brushed his luxurious coat, Bo was patient and even gave the substitute groomer an occasional kiss on the hand.
Along with my mother’s rich social life and occasional travels, Bo made the last two years of my mother’s life everything that she wanted. Bo was her faithful companion in health and in sickness when the cancer eventually returned. She fought long and hard. Toward the end, even though she was physically ill much of the time, she was determined to live as much life as possible. I am certain that Bo was no small reason for her tenacity.
To her doctor’s and my great relief, Mom finally announced that she was ready for hospice care. She was a slight woman and lost weight quickly during the last months of her life. One of the jobs her best friend took on herself was to buy Mom new clothes that fit. I remember another friend visiting, about a week or two before her death, and exclaiming, “You look fabulous!” Without missing a beat and with a twinkle in her eye, Mom replied, “Just because you’re dying is no excuse not to look your best.”
Bo was my mother’s constant companion in her final weeks. At some level, that smart little cookie understood that all the people coming in and out of the house were there to make Mom more comfortable and happier, so she not only did not protest, but welcomed them. When we were alone, she was by Mom’s side and always made her smile and brought her moments of joy as she transitioned to the next life.
Epilogue: The Gentle Giant
My uncle was also a fan of dogs. Around the same time my mother got Dancer, my uncle got a beautiful black Lab, a young retired seeing eye dog named Eli. Eli was a gentle giant. He was returned to Guide Dogs for the Blind because he got skittish in traffic, but he made a wonderful pet and companion for my uncle. Years before, friends of his had put his name on the long waiting list to get a retired seeing eye dog. Eli and Dancer got on well together, which was good, because my uncle visited my mom just about every week. Eli and Dancer’s favorite common activity was napping. It was pretty adorable to see the two of them curled up together. They were good influences on each other, too. Eli helped Dancer not to take everything quite so seriously; Dancer helped Eli to get out there and enjoy life.
When Mom died, my uncle took Bo. There was really no question. Toward the end, my uncle took primary responsibility in caring for Bo; she lapped it up and he did it lovingly and well. I joked with him after she died that it was a good thing that Mom did not live much longer, or she would have taken him to court for alienation of affection!
During that time my uncle and I were taking care of my mother, her house, and Bo full time, he took an early medical retirement at 67. Needless to say, our time in those months were focused on Mom and her care; I was very happy for his help, but it was clear he was emotionally struggling seeing his twin sister deteriorating before our eyes. I was losing my mother, just as they had, a decade and a half before, lost their parents in short order. It was clear that now, at 31, I was the lead caretaker for both siblings.
Eventually, I returned to my normal life; my uncle never did. He was always a quiet man, but after his sister’s death, he became a recluse. He just lived in his apartment day after day, year after year, taking care of Bo, and seeing only a very small number of people. He refused to travel, which he formerly loved to do, citing that he couldn’t take Bo and he wouldn’t trust her to acquaintances who had offered to babysit or, God forbid, to a kennel. Several personal milestones came and went in those years without any notice on his part. I really argued with him on one, but he would not budge. The only celebration he would allow was a dinner with me, which wasn’t too special because we had meals together whenever my schedule would allow.
About ten years later, Little Bo Peep XXIII, the center of my uncle’s universe, died. While I was sad that this wonderful little animal who had brought so much joy to my family was no longer around, I was secretly happy that my uncle was now free of his responsibility to care for her, which he did as much to honor his sister’s memory as he did for himself. I had recently moved out of state and convinced him to come out to visit me and spend some time away from home. He came and did everything that a dutiful, elder uncle was supposed to do with and for a middle-aged nephew he was proud of, but it was clear to me that his heart wasn’t in it.
A couple of weeks after he returned home, I got a call one afternoon from his financial advisor, who was also my grandparents’ as well as Mom’s. He told me, “Your uncle missed lunch. Your uncle never misses lunch.” I tried calling him and the one friend of his who’s number I had. No luck. The next morning, I called the local police department to request an elder wellness check. They called back, confirming what I suspected: my uncle was dead. He died in his sleep with no obvious signs of distress. He had been dead for so long in fact, that his body was beginning to decompose.
While driving back home, I called a former coworker of his, who I had also worked for recently. After giving him the news, I asked who my uncle’s friends were, who I should be calling. He thought a moment and in his thick Irish brogue said, “I don’t think there is a man who was more respected and less known than your uncle.” A picture formed in my mind driving through the vast Bonneville Salt Flats: over the last third of his life, but especially in the past ten years, my uncle’s world had shrunk and shrunk. Indeed, at the end, the entire weight of it had been borne on the back of a twelve-pound Yorkshire Terrier.
My uncle died of a broken heart.
Intercessory Prayer
Good and gracious God, we thank you for the beauty of creation, and especially for the animals that share and enrich our lives. May we always be proper stewards of your gifts. We ask you to bless all who are lonely, especially the elderly and chronically ill. May they know your love for them through the loving presence of family, friends, neighbors and pets. May all know and feel your great love. Through Christ our Lord.
St. Roch, patron saint of dogs and dog lovers, please pray for us and our canine companions.
About the Author:
Fr. Carl is a Dominican friar and priest of the Western Province and a California native. He attended the first Life-Giving Wounds retreat on the West coast. His parents divorced when he was 7. Although an experienced article writer, this essay is his first public attempt at autobiography. This story “came out” while on an extended retreat.
Reflection Questions for Small Groups or Individuals
What touched you most about this story?
What did you relate to in it? What parts overlapped, or had commonalities with, your story?
How have pets been important in your life or the lives of those closest to you?
How would you write your autobiography, as it relates to your experience as an ACOD?