Here? Smack in front of the picture window? 3 страница

After fifteen minutes I peeled off my coat and

paused to catch my breath. After thirty minutes I

John Grogan

was in a sweat and not yet down two feet. At the

forty-five-minute mark, I struck water. The hole

began to fill. And fill. Soon a foot of muddy cold

water covered the bottom. I fetched a bucket and

tried to bail it, but more water just seeped in.

There was no way I could lay Marley down in that

icy swamp. No way.

Despite the work I had invested in it—my heart

was pounding like I had just run a marathon—I

abandoned the location and scouted the yard,

stopping where the lawn meets the woods at the

bottom of the hill. Between two big native cherry

trees, their branches arching above me in the gray

light of dawn like an open-air cathedral, I sunk

my shovel. These were the same trees Marley and

I had narrowly missed on our wild toboggan ride,

and I said out loud, “This feels right.” The spot

was beyond where the bulldozers had spread the

shale substrata, and the native soil was light and

well drained, a gardener’s dream. Digging went

easily, and I soon had an oval hole roughly two by

three feet around and four feet deep. I went inside

and found all three kids up, sniffling quietly. Jenny

had just told them.

Seeing them grieving—their first up-close ex-

perience with death—deeply affected me. Yes, it

was only a dog, and dogs come and go in the

course of a human life, sometimes simply because

Marley & Me

they become an inconvenience. It was only a dog,

and yet every time I tried to talk about Marley to

them, tears welled in my eyes. I told them it was

okay to cry, and that owning a dog always ended

with this sadness because dogs just don’t live as

long as people do. I told them how Marley was

sleeping when they gave him the shot and that he

didn’t feel a thing. He just drifted off and was

gone. Colleen was upset that she didn’t have a

chance to say a real good-bye to him; she thought

he would be coming home. I told her I had said

good-bye for all of us. Conor, our budding author,

showed me something he had made for Marley, to

go in the grave with him. It was a drawing of a big

red heart beneath which he had written: “To Mar-

ley, I hope you know how much I loved you all of

my life. You were always there when I needed you.

Through life or death, I will always love you. Your

brother, Conor Richard Grogan.” Then Colleen

drew a picture of a girl with a big yellow dog and

beneath it, with spelling help from her brother,

she wrote, “P.S.—I will never forget you.”

I went out alone and wheeled Marley’s body

down the hill, where I cut an armful of soft pine

boughs that I laid on the floor of the hole. I lifted

the heavy body bag off the cart and down into the

hole as gently as I could, though there was really

no graceful way to do it. I got into the hole,

John Grogan

opened the bag to see him one last time, and posi-

tioned him in a comfortable, natural way—just as

he might be lying in front of the fireplace, curled

up, head tucked around to his side. “Okay, big

guy, this is it,” I said. I closed the bag up and re-

turned to the house to get Jenny and the kids.

As a family, we walked down to the grave.

Conor and Colleen had sealed their notes back-to-

back in a plastic bag, and I placed it right beside

Marley’s head. Patrick used his jackknife to cut

five pine boughs, one for each of us. One by one,

we dropped them in the hole, their scent rising

around us. We paused for a moment, then all to-

gether, as if we had rehearsed it, said, “Marley, we

love you.” I picked up the shovel and tossed the

first scoop of dirt in. It slapped heavily on the

plastic, making an ugly sound, and Jenny began to

weep. I kept shoveling. The kids stood watching

in silence.

When the hole was half filled, I took a break

and we all walked up to the house, where we sat

around the kitchen table and told funny Marley

stories. One minute tears were welling in our eyes,

the next we were laughing. Jenny told the story of

Marley going bonkers during the filming of The

Last Home Run when a stranger picked up baby

Conor. I told about all the leashes he had severed

and the time he peed on our neighbor’s ankle. We

Marley & Me

described all the things he had destroyed and the

thousands of dollars he had cost us. We could

laugh about it now. To make the kids feel better, I

told them something I did not quite believe.

“Marley’s spirit is up in dog heaven now,” I said.

“He’s in a giant golden meadow, running free.

And his hips are good again. And his hearing is

back, and his eyesight is sharp, and he has all his

teeth. He’s back in his prime—chasing rabbits all

day long.”

Jenny added, “And having endless screen doors

to crash through.” The image of him barging his

way oafishly through heaven got a laugh out of

everyone.

The morning was slipping away, and I still

needed to go to work. I went back down to his

grave alone and finished filling the hole, gently, re-

spectfully, using my boot to tamp down the loose

earth. When the hole was flush with the ground, I

placed two large rocks from the woods on top of

it, then went inside, took a hot shower, and drove

to the office.

In the days immediately after we buried Marley,

the whole family went silent. The animal that was

the amusing target of so many hours of conversa-

tion and stories over the years had become a taboo

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topic. We were trying to return our lives to nor-

mal, and speaking of him only made it harder.

Colleen in particular could not bear to hear his

name or see his photo. Tears would well in her

eyes and she would clench her fists and say angrily,

“I don’t want to talk about him!”

I resumed my schedule, driving to work, writ-

ing my column, coming home again. Every night

for thirteen years he had waited for me at the door.

Walking in now at the end of the day was the most

painful part of all. The house seemed silent,

empty, not quite a home anymore. Jenny vacu-

umed like a fiend, determined to get up the buck-

etsful of Marley fur that had been falling out in

massive clumps for the past couple of years, insin-

uating itself into every crevice and fold. Slowly,

the signs of the old dog were being erased. One

morning I went to put my shoes on, and inside

them, covering the insoles, lay a carpet of Marley

fur, picked up by my socks from walking on the

floors and gradually deposited inside the shoes. I

just sat and looked at it—actually petted it with

two fingers—and smiled. I held it up to show

Jenny and said, “We’re not getting rid of him that

easy.” She laughed, but that evening in our bed-

room, Jenny—who had not said much all week—

blurted out: “I miss him. I mean I really, really

miss him. I ache-inside miss him.”

Marley & Me

“I know,” I said. “I do, too.”

I wanted to write a farewell column to Marley,

but I was afraid all my emotion would pour out

into a gushy, maudlin piece of self-indulgence that

would only humiliate me. So I stuck with topics

less dear to my heart. I did, however, carry a tape

recorder with me, and when a thought came to

me, I would get it down. I knew I wanted to por-

tray him as he was and not as some impossibly

perfect reincarnation of Old Yeller or Rin Tin

Tin, as if there were any danger of that. So many

people remake their pets in death, turning them

into supernatural, noble beasts that in life did

everything for their masters except fry eggs for

breakfast. I wanted to be honest. Marley was a

funny, bigger-than-life pain in the ass who never

quite got the hang of the whole chain-of-

command thing. Honestly, he might well have

been the world’s worst-behaved dog. Yet he intu-

itively grasped from the start what it meant to be

man’s best friend.

During the week after his death, I walked down

the hill several times to stand by his grave. Partly,

I wanted to make sure no wild animals were com-

ing around at night. The grave remained undis-

turbed, but already I could see that in the spring I

would need to add a couple of wheelbarrows of

soil to fill the depression where it was settling.

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Mostly I just wanted to commune with him.

Standing there, I found myself replaying random

snippets from his life. I was embarrassed by how

deep my grief went for this dog, deeper than for

some humans I had known. It’s not that I equated

a dog’s life with a human’s, but outside my imme-

diate family few people had given themselves so

selflessly to me. Secretly, I brought Marley’s

choker chain in from the car, where it had sat since

his final ride to the hospital, and stashed it beneath

the underwear in my dresser, where each morning

I could reach down and touch it.

I walked around all week with a dull ache inside.

It was actually physical, not unlike a stomach

virus. I was lethargic, unmotivated. I couldn’t

even muster the energy to indulge my hobbies—

playing guitar, woodworking, reading. I felt out of

sorts, not sure what to do with myself. I ended up

going to bed early most nights, at nine-thirty, ten

o’clock.

On New Year’s Eve we were invited to a neigh-

bor’s house for a party. Friends quietly expressed

their condolences, but we all tried to keep the

conversation light and moving. This was, after

all, New Year’s Eve. At dinner, Sara and Dave

Pandl, a pair of landscape architects who had

moved back to Pennsylvania from California to

turn an old stone barn into their home, and who

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had become our dear friends, sat at one corner of

the table with me, and we talked at length about

dogs and love and loss. Dave and Sara had put

down their cherished Nelly, an Australian shep-

herd, five years earlier and buried her on the hill

beside their farmhouse. Dave is one of the most

unsentimental people I have ever met, a quiet

stoic cut from taciturn Pennsylvania Dutch stock.

But when it came to Nelly, he, too, struggled with

a deep inner grief. He told me how he combed

the rocky woods behind his home for days until

he found the perfect stone for her grave. It was

naturally shaped like a heart, and he took it to a

stone carver who inscribed “Nelly” into its sur-

face. All these years later, the death of that dog

still touched them profoundly. Their eyes misted

up as they told me about her. As Sara said, blink-

ing back her tears, sometimes a dog comes along

that really touches your life, and you can never

forget her.

That weekend I took a long walk through the

woods, and by the time I arrived at work on Mon-

day, I knew what I wanted to say about the dog

that touched my life, the one I would never forget.

I began the column by describing my walk

down the hill with the shovel at dawn and how odd

it was to be outdoors without Marley, who for

thirteen years had made it his business to be at my

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side for any excursion. “And now here I was

alone,” I wrote, “digging him this hole.”

I quoted my father who, when I told him I had

to put the old guy down, gave the closest thing to a

compliment my dog had ever received: “There

will never be another dog like Marley.”

I gave a lot of thought to how I should describe

him, and this is what I settled on: “No one ever

called him a great dog—or even a good dog. He

was as wild as a banshee and as strong as a bull. He

crashed joyously through life with a gusto most of-

ten associated with natural disasters. He’s the only

dog I’ve ever known to get expelled from obedi-

ence school.” I continued: “Marley was a chewer

of couches, a slasher of screens, a slinger of drool,

a tipper of trash cans. As for brains, let me just say

he chased his tail till the day he died, apparently

convinced he was on the verge of a major canine

breakthrough.” There was more to him than that,

however, and I described his intuition and empa-

thy, his gentleness with children, his pure heart.

What I really wanted to say was how this animal

had touched our souls and taught us some of the

most important lessons of our lives. “A person can

learn a lot from a dog, even a loopy one like ours,”

I wrote. “Marley taught me about living each day

with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing

Marley & Me

the moment and following your heart. He taught

me to appreciate the simple things—a walk in the

woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter

sunlight. And as he grew old and achy, he taught

me about optimism in the face of adversity.

Mostly, he taught me about friendship and self-

lessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty.”

It was an amazing concept that I was only now,

in the wake of his death, fully absorbing: Marley

as mentor. As teacher and role model. Was it pos-

sible for a dog—any dog, but especially a nutty,

wildly uncontrollable one like ours—to point hu-

mans to the things that really mattered in life? I

believed it was. Loyalty. Courage. Devotion. Sim-

plicity. Joy. And the things that did not matter,

too. A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes

or designer clothes. Status symbols mean nothing

to him. A waterlogged stick will do just fine. A

dog judges others not by their color or creed or

class but by who they are inside. A dog doesn’t

care if you are rich or poor, educated or illiterate,

clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give

you his. It was really quite simple, and yet we hu-

mans, so much wiser and more sophisticated, have

always had trouble figuring out what really counts

and what does not. As I wrote that farewell col-

umn to Marley, I realized it was all right there in

John Grogan

front of us, if only we opened our eyes. Some-

times it took a dog with bad breath, worse man-

ners, and pure intentions to help us see.

I finished my column, turned it in to my editor,

and drove home for the night, feeling somehow

lighter, almost buoyant, as though a weight I did

not even know I had been carrying was lifted

from me.

C H A P T E R 2 9

The Bad Dog Club

❉

When I arrived at work the next morning,

the red message light on my telephone was

blinking. I punched in my access code and re-

ceived a recorded warning I had never heard be-

fore. “Your mailbox is full,” the voice said.

“Please delete all unneeded messages.”

I logged on to my computer and opened my

e-mail. Same story. The opening screen was filled

with new messages, and so was the next screen,

and the one after that, and after that, too. The

morning e-mail was a ritual for me, a visceral, if

inexact, barometer of the impact that day’s col-

umn had made. Some columns brought as few as

five or ten responses, and on those days I knew I

had not connected. Others brought several dozen,

a good day. A few brought even more. But this

morning there were hundreds, far more than any-

John Grogan

thing I had received before. The headers at the top

of the e-mails said things like “Deepest condo-

lences,” “About your loss,” or simply “Marley.”

Animal lovers are a special breed of human,

generous of spirit, full of empathy, perhaps a little

prone to sentimentality, and with hearts as big as a

cloudless sky. Most who wrote and called simply

wanted to express their sympathies, to tell me

they, too, had been down this road and knew what

my family was going through. Others had dogs

whose lives were drawing to their inevitable ends;

they dreaded what they knew was coming, just as

we had dreaded it, too.

One couple wrote, “We fully understand and we

mourn for your loss of Marley, and for our loss of

Rusty. They’ll always be missed, never truly re-

placed.” A reader named Joyce wrote, “Thanks

for reminding us of Duncan, who lies buried in

our own backyard.” A suburbanite named Debi

added: “Our family understands how you feel.

This past Labor Day we had to put our golden re-

triever Chewy to sleep. He was thirteen and had

many of the same afflictions you named with your

dog. When he couldn’t even get up to go outside to

relieve himself that last day, we knew we couldn’t

let him keep suffering. We, too, had a burial in our

backyard, under a red maple that will always be

his memorial.”

Marley & Me

An employment recruiter named Monica, own-

er of Katie the Lab, wrote: “My condolences and

tears to you. My girl Katie is only two and I always

think, ‘Monica, why did you go and let this won-

derful creature steal your heart like this?’ ” From

Carmela: “Marley must have been a great dog to

have a family that loved him so much. Only dog

owners can understand the unconditional love

they give and the tremendous heartache when

they are gone.” From Elaine: “Such short little

lives our pets have to spend with us, and they

spend most of it waiting for us to come home each

day. It is amazing how much love and laughter

they bring into our lives and even how much

closer we become with each other because of

them.” From Nancy: “Dogs are one of the won-

ders of life and add so very much to ours.” From

MaryPat: “To this day I miss the sound of Max’s

tags jingling as he padded through the house

checking things out; that silence will drive you

nuts for a while, especially at night.” From Con-

nie: “It’s just the most amazing thing to love a

dog, isn’t it? It makes our relationships with peo-

ple seem as boring as a bowl of oatmeal.”

When the messages finally stopped coming sev-

eral days later, I counted them up. Nearly eight

hundred people, animal lovers all, had been

moved to contact me. It was an incredible out-

John Grogan

pouring, and what a catharsis it was for me. By the

time I had plowed through them all—and an-

swered as many as I could—I felt better, as though

I was part of a giant cyber-support group. My pri-

vate mourning had become a public therapy ses-

sion, and in this crowd there was no shame in

admitting a real, piercing grief for something as

seemingly inconsequential as an old, smelly dog.

My correspondents wrote and called for another

reason, too. They wanted to dispute the central

premise of my report, the part in which I insisted

Marley was the world’s worst-behaved animal.

“Excuse me,” the typical response went, “but

yours couldn’t have been the world’s worst dog—

because mine was.” To make their case, they re-

galed me with detailed accounts of their pets’

woeful behavior. I heard about shredded curtains,

stolen lingerie, devoured birthday cakes, trashed

auto interiors, great escapes, even a swallowed di-

amond engagement ring, which made Marley’s

taste for gold chains seem positively lowbrow by

comparison. My in-box resembled a television

talk show, Bad Dogs and the People Who Love

Them, with the willing victims lining up to

proudly brag, not about how wonderful their dogs

were but about just how awful. Oddly enough,

most of the horror stories involved large loopy re-

trievers just like mine. We weren’t alone after all.

Marley & Me

A woman named Elyssa described how her Lab

Mo always broke out of the house when left alone,

usually by crashing through window screens.

Elyssa and her husband thought they had foiled

Mo’s wandering ways by closing and locking all

the ground-floor windows. It hadn’t occurred to

them to close the upstairs windows, as well. “One

day my husband came home and saw the second-

floor screen hanging loose. He was scared to death

to look for him,” she wrote. Just as her husband

began to fear the worst, “Mo all of a sudden came

around the corner of the house with his head

down. He knew he was in trouble, but we were

amazed he was not hurt. He had flown through the

window and landed on a sturdy bush that broke

his fall.”

Larry the Lab swallowed his mistress’s bra and

then burped it up in one piece ten days later.

Gypsy, another Lab with adventurous tastes, de-

voured a jalousie window. Jason, a retriever–Irish

setter mix, downed a five-foot vacuum cleaner

hose, “interior reinforcing wire and all,” his own-

er, Mike, reported. “Jason also ate a two-by-

three-foot hole in a plaster wall and backhoed a

three-foot-long trench in the carpet, stretching

back from his favorite spot by the window,” Mike

wrote, adding, “but I loved that beast.”

Phoebe, a Lab mix, was kicked out of two dif-

John Grogan

ferent boarding kennels and told never to return,

owner Aimee wrote. “It seems she was the gang

leader in breaking out of not only her cage but do-

ing the favor for two other dogs, too. They then

helped themselves to all kinds of snacks during

the overnight hours.” Hayden, a hundred-pound

Lab, ate just about anything he could get his jaws

around, owner Carolyn reported, including a

whole box of fish food, a pair of suede loafers, and

a tube of superglue, “not in the same sitting.” She

added: “His finest hour, though, was when he tore

the garage-door frame out of the wall because I

had foolishly attached his leash to it so he could lie

in the sunshine.”

Tim reported his yellow Lab Ralph was every

bit as much a food thief as Marley, only smarter.

One day before going out, Tim placed a large

chocolate centerpiece on top of the refrigerator

where it would be safely out of Ralph’s reach. The

dog, his owner reported, pawed open the cup-

board drawers, then used them as stairs to climb

onto the counter, where he could balance on his

hind legs and reach the chocolate, which was gone

without a trace when his master returned home.

Despite the chocolate overdose, Ralph showed no

ill effects. “Another time,” Tim wrote, “Ralph

opened the refrigerator and emptied its contents,

including things in jars.”

Marley & Me

Nancy clipped my column to save because Mar-

ley reminded her so much of her retriever Gracie.

“I left the article on the kitchen table and turned

to put away the scissors,” Nancy wrote. “When I

turned back, sure enough, Gracie had eaten the

column.”

Wow, I was feeling better by the minute. Marley

no longer sounded all that terrible. If nothing else,

he certainly had plenty of company in the Bad

Dog Club. I brought several of the messages home

to share with Jenny, who laughed for the first time

since Marley’s death. My new friends in the Secret

Brotherhood of Dysfunctional Dog Owners had

helped us more than they ever would know.

The days turned into weeks and winter melted

into spring. Daffodils pushed up through the earth

and bloomed around Marley’s grave, and delicate

white cherry blossoms floated down to rest on it.

Gradually, life without our dog became more com-

fortable. Days would float by without me even

thinking of him, and then some little cue—one of

his hairs on my sweater, the rattle of his choker

chain as I reached into my drawer for a pair of

socks—would bring him abruptly back. As time

passed, the recollections were more pleasant than

painful. Long-forgotten moments flashed in my

John Grogan

head with vivid clarity like clips being rerun from

old home videos: The way Lisa the stabbing vic-

tim had leaned over and kissed Marley on the

snout after she got out of the hospital. The way

the crew on the movie set fawned over him. The

way the mail lady slipped him a treat each day at

the front door. The way he held mangoes in his

front paws as he nibbled out the flesh. The way he

snapped at the babies’ diapers with that look of

narcotic bliss on his face, and the way he begged

for his tranquilizers like they were steak bits. Lit-

tle moments hardly worth remembering, and yet

here they were, randomly playing out on my men-

tal movie screen at the least likely times and

places. Most of them made me smile; a few made

me bite my lip and pause.

I was in a staff meeting at the office when this

one came to me: It was back in West Palm Beach

when Marley was still a puppy and Jenny and I

were still dreamy-eyed newlyweds. We were

strolling along the Intracoastal Waterway on a

crisp winter’s day, holding hands, Marley out in

front, tugging us along. I let him hop up on the

concrete breakwater, which was about two feet

wide and three feet above the water’s surface.

“John,” Jenny protested. “He could fall in.” I

looked at her dubiously. “How dumb do you think

he is?” I asked. “What do you think he’ll do? Just

Marley & Me

walk right off the edge into thin air?” Ten seconds

later, that’s exactly what he did, landing in the wa-

ter with a huge splash and requiring a complicated

rescue operation on our part to get him back up

the wall and onto land again.

A few days later I was driving to an interview

when out of nowhere came another early scene

from our marriage: a romantic getaway weekend

to a beachfront cottage on Sanibel Island before

children arrived. The bride, the groom—and

Marley. I had completely forgotten about that

weekend, and here it was again, replaying in living

color: driving across the state with him wedged

between us, his nose occasionally bumping the

gearshift lever into neutral. Bathing him in the tub

of our rental place after a day on the beach, suds

and water and sand flying everywhere. And later,

Jenny and I making love beneath the cool cotton

sheets, an ocean breeze wafting over us, Marley’s

otter tail thumping against the mattress.

He was a central player in some of the happi-

est chapters of our lives. Chapters of young love

and new beginnings, of budding careers and tiny

babies. Of heady successes and crushing disap-

pointments; of discovery and freedom and self-

realization. He came into our lives just as we were

trying to figure out what they would become. He

joined us as we grappled with what every couple

John Grogan

must eventually confront, the sometimes painful

process of forging from two distinct pasts one

shared future. He became part of our melded fab-

ric, a tightly woven and inseparable strand in the

weave that was us. Just as we had helped shape

him into the family pet he would become, he

helped to shape us, as well—as a couple, as par-

ents, as animal lovers, as adults. Despite every-

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