It never goes away altogether, the pain and the aching emptiness I felt after losing Thunder when he was two years, nine months old. There's never enough time, never enough, but to lose my brilliant, dominant, funny, beautiful dog before he'd even grown up to his potential was one of the hardest things I've ever had to deal with.
I look at his pictures now and the hurt comes back all over again. And I remember Kipling's bitter advice about never giving your heart to a dog to tear. But once you've had a German Shepherd Dog, it's not advice you can take. Not after you've had a dog as fine as he was.
There's a special pain to losing a dog. They're our children who never grow up even though they're adults of another species that has chosen to accompany us through life for some reason I have never been able to fathom. They are wise, as nature made them wise, innocent of our failings, beautiful in form, terrible in their strength, loyal beyond our understanding, finer than any other creature on earth. Once a dog accepts you as his master, he is yours unswervingly, faithfully, to death if it comes to that. The human animal seldom reaches a nobility he has as his birthright and once you've owned a German Shepherd Dog, you don't have to be told. Anthropomorphizing? No. He is what he is. We have to strive for it. Beneath our veneer of civilization, the ability to speak, the ability to think in ways a dog never could, we are animals, and seldom so straight or so true as the dog.
Dogs are more than our charges, they are our companions, our friends, undeserving as we often are. They fulfill their end of the bargain struck so long ago when their ancestors came out of the shadows beyond our fires and into our service. Sometimes we don't. Sometimes we can't. And when we can't, oh, how it hurts.
For while they live, they are our helpmeets, our pride, our protection from the bogies in the dark, our amusement; and when they go, even if it's only old age that claims them peacefully, they tear our hearts out. When they die young, slowly, with hope fading every day, the pain is exquisite.
Whoever wrote that poem about the Rainbow Bridge got it wrong. If there should be such a place, they aren't the ones who would have to wait and be reclaimed in order to pass. We are the ones who would need them to vouch for us, to pass us on. It speaks volumes for them that no matter how little we might deserve that loyal disregard for all our failings, few would cross without us.
Without them, the journey would not be worth it.
May your next journey be a better one, my sweet pup.
Thunder
2 September 1997
2 June 2000