Brutus left us last week.
April 17, 2015, at about 5:20 in the afternoon.
The little one, the black pug, Brutus had lived with us for almost seventeen years. Becoming “ours.”
When I announced his death, the well wishes and condolences for our loss poured in.
I am very grateful for the support of friends, family, neighbors.
But somehow I don’t feel sad. I am not feeling the loss as sharply as I thought I might. In fact, I almost feel a kind of lightness.
It certainly isn’t that I’ve forgotten about him. In fact, I find reminders of him—ghosts, phantom Brutuses—everywhere.
But not sadness.
This is my attempt to explain why.
Let’s start on the day in July, 1998, when Ruth circled the ad in the classified section of the Ann Arbor News for a litter of seven pug puppies for sale and made the call. Or the next day, when we parked our car in the driveway of a farmhouse in Grass Lake, Michigan, and got out to look at the six remaining pugs (one had already been sold). The seller, a nurse at the U-M hospital for whom the trek from Grass Lake to Ann Arbor was a short commute, held up a cardboard box with the three-week old pugs for us to inspect. Three of the hamster-sized lumps of tan and black fur slept through the whole affair. One fawn-colored male jumped up and rudely stomped over the others in its excited rush to have a look at the new strangers. Gabriel found it too aggressive. A black-coated female meekly let herself be trampled without complaint; too passive. But a third, a black-coated male, nipped at the offending aggressor, then calmly walked over to the edge of the box to satisfy its own curiosity about us. This one came home with us and became Brutus.
For the next month or so Brutus kept the house in turmoil: a month-old puppy is as messy, unpredictable, and demanding as an eleven-month-old baby. But before long we settled into a routine. Or rather, a sequence of routines that changed as Brutus grew and, eventually, aged.
One predictable routine was feeding. Once in the morning, once in the evening. Plus whenever Brutus smelled food or suspected food-related activities might be going on. The thing about pugs is, they are endlessly hungry, always on the lookout for a snack, a scrap, a handout, a dropped crumb or morsel. In his first years, I joked that Brutus’s motto was, “Better eat it: it might be food.” Cut an apple or a slice of bread, and within seconds Brutus was sure to materialize at your feet from wherever in the house he had been, awake or asleep.
A second routine, in the early years, was the battle to keep Brutus off the furniture. He knew very well that he wasn’t allowed on the sofa or the couch. And I think that was exactly why we would almost always come back from a long day at the office or an evening out to find Brutus jumping off the forbidden furniture. In his dog’s mind, I think, doing the prohibited was the only way he could express his disapproval of our being away from him too long. Perhaps, too, he thought that getting into minor trouble would bring us running back to scold him.
At first, Brutus slept at night in a puppy crate, the method of house-training that had been recommended to us. It worked: within a month, Brutus was reliably holding it all in until he got outside. But even after he was trained, he stayed in the cage at the foot of Gabriel’s bed. At some point though (was it months or years? I can’t remember...), we let him sleep out of the cage, as long as he stayed in his tiny bed downstairs. Still, for years he would come bounding up the steps to stand at the foot of our bed, or even try to jump onto it, if he thought I was taking too long to get downstairs and take care of him.
The other daily routine we had was our walks, one in the morning, one in the evening, right after his meals. I did most of the walking with Brutus, and got to know the neighborhood and our neighbors—or rather, the few neighbors who made occasional appearances outside their houses—in the process. Except on days when I was on call to help get Gabriel to school or back, our walks were always long, and they got longer with the years. By the time Gabriel went off to college, we rarely walked for less than half an hour or less than a solid mile each time. We explored the greater neighborhood, crossing Monroe to go as far as Almendinger Park, or heading the other way, across Liberty and even over to Main Street a few times. You might not believe it, but we decided on these routes together. I’d steer Brutus in the direction I wanted to go, but he had his own ideas, and if he really wanted to go the other way, he’d let me know. And we’d go that way, unless I had some very compelling reason not to.
Eventually we settled on a favorite route: past Bach School, down Williams to the corner of Second where a retired woman who wished she could handle pets of her own regularly left out doggie snacks for every passing walker; then over to Jefferson and back home. Often on this route we’d run into Brutus’s good buddy, Rootboy, a Rottweiler who the first time we met him was a very young puppy, even smaller than Brutus. Within three weeks, Rootboy had grown bigger than the pug, and within the year he had reached his full size, as big as a Shetland pony and dangerous to look at, but as sweet and deferential as could be toward his smaller, older mentor.
That was the routine, for years. We were famous in the neighborhood, or at any rate Brutus was: on our walks, he would get shout-outs from people I had never met.
The final routine—well, not really a routine, but a recurrent feature—was the rough play that Brutus seemed to need when the walks weren’t enough to exhaust his boundless energy. He was never one for playing catch or fetch: he wasn’t a dog for catching anything, and he could never understand the point of bringing back something that he had worked to chase down for his own. Outdoor games consisted mainly of throwing sticks and watching Brutus run after and proudly capture them. Indoors, for lack of other canines in the house, he would play-fight with me or Gabriel much as he would with other dogs when he had the good luck to spend an afternoon with a dog-friend. One favorite game was to wrap one of Brutus’s dog towels around my hand and make it bark like a dog. Brutus would play-attack it, and sometimes clamp down hard enough on his imaginary dog-friend that he would dangle from the towel when we lifted it up. It looked brutal, but he loved it.
Brutus in his salad days (Fall 2001, age 3)
In later years, the routines began to change.
First to go was the dog-play. In his elder years, he lost interest in the sticks, the towel games, even in spending time with other dogs. That was puppy stuff.
Next, the battle over the furniture ended. At some point, and I no longer remember how many years ago this was, we realized that Brutus was no longer able to jump onto the sofas or chairs. I threw out the covers that had protected the comfy wicker armchair (his favorite, and the only one he was allowed onto), vacuumed Brutus’s hair from the cushions for the last time, and returned it to human use.
Some time later, I got up late one morning and found Brutus waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs: he couldn’t climb them anymore.
Finally he wasn’t even able to jump onto the low futon that he had claimed as his bed in his later years. Even going out the front door and down the steep steps from the porch to the ground became a struggle; we would leave for his walks out the back door, or else I would carry him down—a humiliation Brutus forcefully resisted.
Next to fade away were the walks. Very nearly to the end, we continued our long walks, but as he paused longer and longer and walked more and more slowly, the time it took to walk the mile to Second Street and back grew from half an hour to 45 minutes and then a full hour. Then came the harsh winters, and Brutus no longer felt like walking at all. A quick nip out the back door to do his business and he was done.
Spring came, though, and as the glorious smells of last year’s decaying vegetation emerged from under the melting ice and mixed with new smells of life from the new year’s growth, Brutus was stirred to venture out around the neighborhood again. In the last year, though, these ventures rarely took us beyond our own block, though it still might take half an hour to go to the end of the block and back.
In his last spring, March and April of 2015, Brutus decided that he no longer needed the street at all. Puttering around his own back yard was enough.
Last to go was Brutus’s excitement about food. Even after he began to go blind—just a little bit, at first, from the cataracts that all old dogs get, and almost completely blind by the end; even after he lost his hearing—so gradually that we didn’t even realize he had gone completely deaf until his dog sitter pointed it out to us—he could still be counted on to come running whenever the smell of food was in the air, waiting expectantly for his slice whenever I cut up an apple. Slowly, in his last years, the run became a walk, and then in his last months, a sometimes confused lifting of the head from the bed he now spent most of his time in: is that food I’m smelling? He no longer begged for bread. He no longer chased crumbs. He was no longer able to digest apple slices, and I had to stop offering them to him. Kibbles that escaped him were left on the floor where they landed; I would have to gather them up and put them right under his nose for him to find. Some days he was barely hungry at all. He would look at his bowl through his clouded eyes and walk away. He was letting us know, it was time.
In his last days, Brutus got into the habit of lying down and sleeping in the oddest places: on the bathroom rug, by the foot of a chair in the living room, sprawled in the doorway to my office. Come to think of it, these places weren’t odd at all. They lay across the household paths he knew we walked every day. Even as he was leaving us, he wanted to be sure we saw him, and wanted to be able to tell by a smell or a rustling of his fur when we were near.
But he was leaving us, it became clearer and clearer as the end approached. By letting his old routines fall, one after another, by the wayside, he was letting go. And, at the same time, leaving ghosts behind. In the months or years since I stopped feeding him bits of apple, I have still imagined him there, in my mind, waiting patiently by my feet for his own diced share, though by the end he was more than likely still sleeping soundly in his bed. Whenever I walk past Second Street, he’s there by my side, pulling me toward the snack lady or frisking with Rootboy. Habits he let go of long ago.
Brutus doing what he did best in later years (Jan. 2014, age 15 1/2)
With so many familiar ghosts of Brutus around me, how can I feel sad at his passing? He has been letting go of us for months, for years, generously leaving memories behind.
Last week, he finally let go of the rest of life. I’m glad we had the strength to let go of him. To let him let go.
He slipped off peacefully, contented. His life was full.
I thank you for your concern, your condolences, your sadness for our loss.
But I don’t feel sadness, don’t feel a loss.
I feel—what? Fulfilled, perhaps.
Goodbye, Brutus. I still see you here.