Lessons from a (Mostly) Good Dog: #9, Time Swiftly Passes By

Dog years are a devastating phenomenon, if you have a dog you love. Seven years to our one, is the formula. That means my sweet little girl-puppy, nearing 12 years old, is really almost 80 now. It also means that a single day is, for Brooklyn, somehow seven. Yes, each day is a week, each week is nearly two months, each month is more than half a year. Oh, for time—for life—to move this quickly, galloping so relentlessly on.

We humans are not immune to this version of time. Indeed, that one year suddenly becomes seven: This is the nature of our lives, too, is it not? Certainly, it did not take forty-nine years for me to become forty-nine. Time skips and lurches and falls away—great gulps of it are swallowed up—and then, impossibly, here you are.

There are very few months that so exemplify this slipping away of time like September. It’s funny, too, because September can be so still, the quiet heat, the hum of insects. It has all the relaxed laze of summer, and yet just beneath it, there is the crisp in the air of winter to come. You can sense the seasons at work, the great groaning shifting of the planet’s gears—and in the pit of your stomach is a hollow, a gulp of emptiness, a pang for things lost, all those summers gone. 

In some senses, September is the saddest month, but its reminder—to be aware of the too-swift tumbling of time—offers opportunity too. That coolness of September’s shadow, it can awaken us, if we let it. 

***

It’s impossible to know what dogs think about death, if anything. When they lie there looking sad, with their chins on their paws, is it the Great End they are pondering? Apparently, dogs can smell cancer on your breath—but whether they know what that means, who can say? We do know that dogs don’t like departures—how they howl and bark and stare longingly out the window when you leave if only for a minute—and death is nothing if not the most devastating and permanent of departures.

Still, I’m not sure it’s an awareness of death that drives my dog Brooklyn’s love of life. To inspire her to live life to its fullest, such ruminations seem superfluous, if not counterproductive. Indeed, for her, death is sort of besides the point—life itself seems motivation enough. Life is meant to be lived, after all, not just because one day we will die but simply because life is to be lived! Yes, even if existence somehow went on forever, I still don’t think Brooklyn could ever get enough of it. That’s just who she is, and who all dogs are, somehow—creatures of intense, instinctive exuberance. They love being alive. 

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Brooklyn rushes around seizing the day in a blur of fur—though she does that sometimes too. Instead, it just means that whatever she does, she throws herself into it completely. Discovering something smelly (and potentially dead), she rolls around in it with great gusto. She barks at the mailman viciously, and with great devotion. She seeks out good places to lie about in the sun—or, if it’s hot, in the shade, or on the cool of the kitchen floor—takes a nap, has a good snore. She cuddles my son, Ollie, with absolute adoration. Oh, I guess you could point to a dog’s life and say they are squandering it—all that lazing about and barking—but I don’t think they themselves would agree. At the end of each day—a day that for her is seven—I get the sense she wouldn’t have done anything differently. Each day, Brooklyn lets no opportunity pass her by, and she needs no reminder to awaken. My dog is awake already.

We humans, on the other hand, well . . . not so much. Oh, we rush around, and we do and we do and we do, but it feels sometimes like we’re doing it all half-asleep. To fully awaken to our lives, we humans, it seems, need to be respectfully reminded that time moves swiftly, and that these lives of ours will not go on forever. 

To fully awaken to our lives, we humans, it seems, need to be respectfully reminded that time moves swiftly, and that these lives of ours will not go on forever.

Or, let me be more specific: This human might need this. And, sure, it makes a certain amount of sense—that without an awareness of death, we can sometimes forget to really live—but the strange thing is, I myself have been more or less conscious of my mortality ever since I was a teenager, and I’m not so sure it’s actually made much of a difference. Over the years, my dad died, my mom died—grandparents, friends, aunts, uncles—and still, here I am, not fully living, not the way I imagine I should be. Shit, there were numerous times I thought I was going to die, and that didn’t result in any real change, either. Maybe it’s because I never truly embraced the reality of death—still, part of me clings stubbornly to the delusion that I’ll somehow live forever, that there will always be more time—but maybe the real truth is that my focus on the whole death thing has had the opposite effect: Instead of inspiring me to truly live, it’s mostly just distracted me from it. Yes, maybe my mind’s been in the wrong place: bent on death, rather than open to life. I mean, is it really so surprising that having death hang over you like a cloud would put a damper on things? 

But dogs, perhaps, are free of this. Maybe this is why they move so lightly, bounding through life with such joy. Nothing is hanging over them. There is only this moment before them, green grass to run through—and when heaven’s right in front of you, why would death even be a thought?

***

I can’t imagine, don’t want to even consider, losing Brooklyn. It will be the heaviest, most devastating loss. But whether I want to face it or not, time has already begun to work its dark magic on her. Oh, she’s still chock-full of puppy—she wags her butt, her nails click on the floor in excitement—but she has odd bumps beneath her fur in places, and her hips are tight and arthritic, and when she overdoes it chasing the ball, she limps around a bit. The other week, the vet removed a mass from her jaw. At night, she whines to be carried up the stairs, rather than bounding up them two at a time, the way she used to do. I pick her up and am aware of how tenderly I need to carry her, how fragile she is: just this sweet little old dog. Oh, there remains a brightness in her eyes, but also sometimes there is instead a kind of dim distance, her eyes glazed over with the smoked glass of age. 

“Life is very short, and there’s no time for fussing and fighting, my friends.” Yes, life is very short, as the Beatles remind us, and there’s no time for any of the nonsense, in the end—and oh, man, there’s so much nonsense. All the petty arguments, all the unnecessary seething and stewing, all the needless worrying, all that small, immense anger—all that insignificant shit we obsess over—all that is proved so stupid, in the end, so not worth it, such a squandering of life, such a waste of time. Indeed, when you finally realize how brief life is, there’s only just enough time for the important things—actually, perhaps the point is, there’s not even enough time left for those.

Which makes me wonder if perhaps the Beatles line could be shortened simply to, Life is very short, and there’s no time.

Again, Brooklyn probably doesn’t ponder these “wisdoms”—she’s a dog, and I don’t know if that’s how her mind works—but she does embody them. She knows instinctively what matters—making people happy, playing outside in the sunshine, enjoying a good cuddle. Actually, truth is, I’m not so sure Brooklyn really even differentiates between what matters and what doesn’t. To her, everything she does matters—even the stupid stuff—and perhaps this, too, is the point. Perhaps, in her mind, it was all important, every moment of her life. After all, that mailman may not have actually posed too much of a threat, and, sure, maybe she didn’t need to bark at him quite so viciously—but boy was it fun when she did.

I’m pretty sure Brooklyn will not look back on her life with much remorse. Regret, too, after all, is such a waste of time.

***

There are things to be envied about the dog-year telling of time. Each hour-long dog nap refreshes like a full night’s sleep. Each nine-minute cuddle is sixty-three minutes of true love.

Each season, too, stretches on and on. Winter lasts almost two years—all those beautiful snow days—and so does spring, and fall, and summer: Oh, to have summers that would last that long. . . .

Still, I have a feeling that even for a dog, summers always go too fast.