On Alice

Alice died early Sunday. We think she was 11 years old, but we don’t know for certain. That was one thing we never learned about her: where she came from, and how. She’d come to us on September 30, 2011, through a vet friend who’d seen her in the clinic and said she was special and needed a new home. I was wary. We already had one rescue dog, and he was anxious and troubled, plenty to manage. But we thought it might help him to have a companion, so we made arrangements to pick her up. It was Brandon who brought her home.

Alice looked like a Muppet¹, and she was shy and sensitive, all traits she would never outgrow. She came to us crate-trained, and she’d put herself in her crate if the house got too full or noisy, if we put music on the stereo or switched on the kitchen exhaust fan, which sounded (and still sounds) like an airplane taking off. She was always better off-leash than on, but in the early days she was especially unfun to walk. It was like having an overcooked noodle at the end of the leash. I remember telling Brandon that it was too much, that we should have never gotten her. It took me a couple of months, a long time in dog years, to adjust.

But as soon as we were over the hump, I swung to the other extreme, dreading the day she’d be gone. The fact that her life would be necessarily short, as all dogs’ are, was never an abstraction to me. It was the shadow of how much I loved her. It was rarely far from my mind, the thought that she would someday die. I often wondered how it would happen and when. She aged, but she never looked old. You can imagine the thrill I got every time strangers mistook her for a puppy. People were always shocked by her age. I thought I was very clever: I told them she was the first immortal dog. It wasn’t just a dumb joke. A number of times over the years, I made a silent promise to the universe that if Alice could just be immortal, if she could somehow just wind up living forever, I wouldn’t tell a single soul. I definitely wouldn’t sell her story to the tabloids. It could be our secret.

Alice was a paradigm of what our vet referred to as ‘hybrid vigor.’ We once did a DNA test, and it said she was 50% lab, 25% miniature poodle, and 25% “mixed Asian breeds.” Whatever she was, she was an athlete. Just two months ago, when we had a huge snowstorm after Christmas, she spent hours out in it with us, racing down the street behind our sleds. She was that alive until a week before she died. I knew it was bad when she stopped wanting to eat breakfast, because Alice never missed a meal. We were still working on getting answers this past Saturday, when she suddenly began to seem weak and disoriented, stopped eating and drinking and being able to urinate. The only food she mustered was three pieces of leftover roasted broccoli. We found out that night that she was bleeding internally, that a cancerous mass on her spleen had ruptured. There was no question of what to do. There were three of us with Alice when she went — myself, Ash, and my mother — and we stroked her and crooned and kissed the soft pad of her forehead.

Alice chose her friends carefully, but once you’d been anointed, you knew. I was Alice’s best person for many years, until Ash joined me in the honor. Alice adored Ash. Whenever one of us was out and she heard our car pull up outside, she’d hop down from wherever she was, trot to the brass bucket where we kept her toys, and pick out something to carry to the door. She didn’t want to give the toy to us, or want us to play; it was how she expressed her pleasure at our return. She’d walk to the door with the chosen toy in her mouth and her tail wagging low, and then once we were inside and acknowledging her, she’d begin to moan and cry, these high high breathy whines. The more you talked to her, the more she’d weep. She didn’t jump up often, but she’d rub herself along your shins, push her weight into you. Then she’d leap onto the sofa and lie down with the toy still in her mouth, still crying. There were only a half-dozen of us who got the full cry treatment. Ash liked to sit down on the floor beside her when she did it, hugging Al around the neck and cooing into her ruff, “Really? Tell me more. Tell me,” and Alice would cry and cry and cry.

But she was maybe most affectionate in the mornings, when she heard us stirring from sleep. Alice didn’t like to sleep on the bed with us, because she needed a lot of personal space, but when she heard us wake, she’d trot in from wherever she was and leap up, wedge her way between us, and thunk down. If your arm or face or hair was in the way, she was undeterred; she’d put her 43 pounds on top of the errant body part. Morning was the only time of day when Alice would initiate a cuddle, and she’d lie there as long as we pet her. I loved to touch her paws especially, though I knew she wished I wouldn’t. I liked to hold a paw in my hand and go back to sleep like that, even for just a minute, if she’d permit it. I always slept so soundly then. I could feel my body settle differently into sleep when she was there.

After the morning snuggle, she’d follow us to the kitchen for food, and then, like all civilized people, she’d return to bed. There she’d perform her ablutions, licking her forearms damp and then using them to wash her face. The face-washing could get quite exuberant, usually turning into a procedure we referred to as “brushing her hair.” Alice had hair, not fur, so it grew continuously and required regular trims. She seemed to like to slick it with saliva and “brush” it forward, giving her a striking resemblance to Boris Johnson².

Alice was quiet and kept mostly to herself. She asked little of anyone. She loved a walk but never acted out if it didn’t happen. She had terrible teeth, and over the past few years, we’d had the front four pulled, so she had a small gap up top and on the bottom. We told her often that we loved her new smile — just like Lauren Hutton’s, but with double the gap. The last time I remember her smiling was on a walk last Tuesday, when she saw Rusty, a neighborhood dog she liked more than most. She leapt once toward him and then trotted on, and as we continued up the street, she turned back to look at us, grinning. Alice’s face always looked sad, devastatingly sad, except when it didn’t.

It is strange to notice, as I write about her, that she just sounds like a dog. Like, a special dog, but a dog. I know that’s what she was, sure; Alice was a dog. I have lost several beloved dogs in my lifetime, and I’ve never liked it, but I could accept it. I don’t miss those dogs anymore. I have even struggled to muster much feeling for others when they’ve lost dogs or cats, and I don’t think that’s unusual. The relationship we have with animals is profoundly intimate, deeply personal, difficult to read or understand from the outside. Listening to someone talk about their beloved dog is like listening to someone recount a dream; when it’s ours, it’s endlessly fascinating, but when it’s someone else’s, it’s hard to have much interest. But I want to write this anyway, a record of this relationship, however illegible it might be to anyone else.

Alice was real to us. We never got tired of nudging each other to look at how she’d styled her hair, or the way she slept, her perfectly square sit, or the triangle that her ears and beard made of her face. I will never get tired of thinking about Alice.

I don’t believe that dogs are sent to Earth for us humans. I don’t believe that their purpose is to serve us, or to teach us anything. Alice was a being of her own. She was an animal who lived in our house! with us!, miracle of miracles!, and it was the absolute best. She was our Al. We talked to her constantly, a rushing stream of verbiage and song. Ash told me last night that they’d sometimes be out in public somewhere with Alice, often Joann Fabrics, and they’d realize they’d been talking to her nonstop, full volume. It was like we were beaming out love at her all day long, without even noticing. It was a wonderful way to live.

1. Sprocket from Fraggle Rock, for instance. And also, a bit, Sir Didymus, especially around the eyebrows.

2. Her hairstyle.