...by Eddie Vidmar I have been writing these little chapters of my life for "The Book That Will Never Be Published And Nobody Would Care Enough To Buy It Anyway If It Was" for quite some time now. They have ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime to the accidentally funny. This one isn't so funny. I want to take a few pages to talk about my dog. I'm very angry with him right now. This little Wheaten Terrier, named Digger, who once lived in the woods in a pit filled with leaves that he dug for himself, was taken in by my wife and turned into a prince. After spending an unknown time living in filth, his golden coat matted with mud and leaves, my wife found him, cleaned him up, and nursed him back to health. He was coddled, pampered, generally spoiled and pretty much given the life of a prince. We fed him nothing less than the healthiest dog food. We made sure he had plenty of fresh, cold water at all times, sometimes even bottled water. (What else for a little yuppie dog?) I took him to the park (Well, it was really a schoolyard, but HE thought it was a park.) every night after work, sometimes before I even got into the house. He went on vacations with us, to Maine last year, often went to Florida on camping trips, and rode along with us on almost every errand we had to run. He slept between us on the king sized bed. I played with him on the floor, wrestling and slap fighting. We rubbed his belly every time he flopped over onto his back. And you know what that selfish, ungrateful little bastard did last week? He died. Somehow, when we weren't looking, he got old. And he died. Nobody told him he could die. He didn't have my permission to die. And if he had asked, I would have told him "No", not that he would have listened, and not that I could ever say "No" to him about anything. I was only in his life for 3 of his 12 years, and that was not nearly long enough. Of course, the mock anger directed at nature for taking both its course and my best buddy is the point of this piece. I loved that little dog with every square inch of the oversized heart inside my oversized chest. As I stood there looking down at him lying on that table, knowing I was seeing his innocent little face for the last time, I had to find a way to choke out a goodbye to my best friend through the tears. To say it's been hard would be like understating that Fort Knox is a little bank in Kentucky. Everybody grieves in his or her own way. Some choose to bury themselves in work. Some turn to alcohol. Some just take the cavalier path and say, "If I don't think about it, it won't bother me". Well, I am having a hard time working. I won't turn to alcohol since that would result in the pain still being there and a hangover on top of it. And I can't stop thinking about him. I won't. I don't want to. I want to remember how I smiled every day about something he did. I have decided that the best way for me to deal with my grief is to remember all the happy things about him. That's easy to do, because there weren't many sad or bad things to remember. He was a great pet, a good friend, and truly a treasured family member rather than a family possession. He was a sensitive, compassionate dog. Just one of many examples of this compassion occurred when I was laid up with a case of the shingles, a nasty little condition related to the virus that causes chickenpox. One manifestation of this virus in my case was a series of sores on my right upper chest. As I was laying in bed resting my terribly aching back (another symptom) Digger walked over to me, saw that I was not well, noticed those sores, and to help me heal he licked them the way a dog licks his own wounds to heal himself. I remember laughing at Digger bouncing around like a puppy in the large dog-running field where we vacationed in Maine. I remember laughing at how he would come down the stairs and burst through the door to meet me after work every day. I remember the restaurant in Bar Harbor that welcomed our cute, unassuming little guy onto their outdoor dining patio. He lay at our feet through the whole meal, sipping his water; patiently waiting for the little bites of table food he knew were forthcoming from his softhearted parents. Suddenly though, he decided it was time for his terrier roots to come forward and they found out why he was named Digger. They were such pretty flowers, too.... I remember a time I was sick with the flu and home in bed. He and our other dog, Twiggy, sensed that I was not feeling well. They both got into bed and stretched themselves out in a way that between them they were pressed against the whole length of me to warm me, somehow deciding that this called for a team effort and that they had to keep their daddy warm so he'd get better. I remember how, when my wife would lie down on the floor for her daily exercise, he would lie down next to her and raise his paws up like he was stretching with her, responding to the Tony Little-like prompting to "Get those paws up!" I remember how proud he was of himself as he learned new things. It's been said repeatedly that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but that's not true, and Digger proved it. As I spent more and more time in his life and worked with him, he learned plenty of new tricks. They weren't tricks in the popular sense of the word, I mean, they weren't in Harry Houdini's repertoire, but for a dog, they were pretty good. I remember, painfully and reluctantly, both noticing and ignoring that he was getting old and slowing down. And I'm not laughing. I could go on and on about how much fun this little guy was, and thanks to word processing software, I will be adding things as they come back to me. For now though, I'll just continue to miss him. I'll remember that even though he knew that there were more vacations to go on, more car rides to take, more parks to play in, more treats to eat, more belly scratches to be had, he went ahead and died anyway, leaving a long list of people who's lives he touched to mourn his passing. The selfish, ungrateful little bastard. [return to top]