Harry

It’s time to write about Harry.  Harry was our Corgi who died last summer, of cancer.  I’ve been avoiding him as a topic because it’s still painful to think about losing him.  I miss him, like I used to miss my childhood nanny. He was a fixture in my life who I could always count on to be so very himself, this reliable comfortable presence who normalized my crazy world every time I walked in the door.  I love Hank and Charlie, but they’re young still.  Harry was eleven when he died so he essentially raised the kids with me.  His dying coincided with the end of their childhoods, and the poignancy of those two endings overwhelm me still.  We got him as a puppy when my youngest was not even two years old so he saw more of their daily lives over those eleven years than anybody else besides me, probably even including my husband.

Harry lived through a move and a remodel, the acquisition of another dog, a cat, and the various pets who followed.  He watched kids learning to ride bicycles and skateboards and scooters, would throw me worried glances whenever he heard yelps of pain.  He walked them to elementary school with me every day and listened to me chastise them for being late in the morning, ears back sympathetically as if I was yelling at him too.  He knew when it was a few minutes before three in the afternoon and would start fidgeting at the door if I didn’t look like I was getting ready to go.  When we got to school he listened to them chatter about their day, always waiting until the last child was in front of him, whether it was one of ours or not.  Corgis are a herding breed, and combined with his unusually sensitive nannying instinct meant that sometimes I would have to drag Harry home because he could still hear children playing and screaming when he knew full well school was over and they should be home safe.  When our babysitter had a baby, he would follow her around, licking the baby’s fingers as they trailed out of the car seat.  When she put the car seat down, he would guard the baby, lips curling menacingly and growling at any of the other dogs or pets that tried to come near in curiosity.

Harry was a tri-color, black, brown and white like Charlie, but much bigger and with a longer coat.  He had white fur around his neck that bled into his huge chest and made him look like he was wearing a white mink stole.  His eyes were lined in black as if a makeup artist had applied it, and looked at you with such intelligence and emotion that it was hard to treat him like a dog.  He didn’t act like a dog actually.  He acted like a sensitive person in a dog’s body.  He was very polite and only whined in dire emergencies, when he had to go out.  He

did howl at sirens though, head up and back like a wolf, a sight that never failed to make us giggle unless it was in the middle of the night.  We would shout down the stairs at him, telling him to be quiet, but he couldn’t hear through his howling.  We have wood floors that he didn’t trust enough to ever come upstairs.  He also chased flashlight beams like an idiot, and I would have to stop the kids from torturing him as he scratched at the ground trying to catch the spot of light.  But those were his only real foibles.

He loved the snow, bounding through it like a jackrabbit when he was young, and eating it in clumps like a child in wonder and delight.  He liked sledding too, I think.  At least he tolerated it.  Once when we were on vacation in Sun Valley and my older two kids were skiing at Dollar Mountain, I was waiting at the bottom with my youngest who was too young to ski yet.  My husband had to leave for a work trip in the middle of the vacation so I was solo with Harry. I had a sled that I was pulling my daughter around in, when I had the brilliant idea of tying Harry’s leash to the sled.  He tore around the bottom of the ski hill while my daughter squealed in glee, sometimes turning so sharply the sled tipped over and she fell out, cheeks red, but laughing hysterically.  It caused quite a commotion.  In fact the very next season there was a television ad for Budweiser that had a team of Corgis pulling a Budweiser sled.  I think Harry might have been the inspiration.  We used to go skiing at home every weekend in the winter, and at the end of the day we would let the dogs out of the car and the kids would take them sledding.  They put Harry in the sled because not only did he fit, but he wouldn’t jump out.  Sometimes the kids went with him, sometimes they sent him alone, and he would fly down that hill with his head up, retaining as much dignity as he could under the circumstances.

When he got sick it tore me apart.  I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to him so I put him through four radiation treatments to buy another 8-15 months of time, as well as acupuncture, mushroom supplements and changing his food to canned.  I got exactly 15 months, and it wasn’t the nasal carcinoma that killed him in the end.  It was prostate cancer.  I was driving my youngest home from camp when I got the call from the vet telling me the lab results. We went home and picked up my husband and other daughter and went to the vet to say our goodbyes.  My son was in Africa, unreachable.  As he lay on the table, while we sobbed and buried our faces in his fur, his eyes caught mine and it was as if he was asking me for permission to go.  He seemed to say, “I’ve lasted as long as I could.  You’ll be okay on your own now.”  I nodded, wiping away tears, not wanting to prolong his suffering.  “It’s okay, you can go now, Harr Bear,” I said, my hand on his head, gently scratching behind his ear where he liked to be touched.  The vet gave him the injection and within seconds his eyes closed and his spirit left, peacefully, quietly, in dignity even in his death.

I had him cremated so we could scatter his ashes together, when my son returned home.  The first thing he asked me when I was driving him from the airport after being gone for five weeks was, “How is Harry?”  When I couldn’t answer immediately because my throat had clogged up with tears, he said, “I knew I wouldn’t see him alive again.”  Grief flashed nakedly across his face before he turned his head and stared out the window, silently absorbing the loss.  Maybe we are crazy to care so much about our pets, but these animals steal into our hearts, giving so much, asking so little, and become part of the tapestry of our family.  Harry filled a big section of that tapestry, and though he’s gone now, the color that he wove in is still shining brightly, and we can admire the beauty of his contribution whenever we want, through our memories.