Two Hours and Fifty Dollars

I went to Home Depot last week and bought six bags of cement and some boards for about $50. I dug a trench along the fence on one side of my backyard, filled it with cement then reinforced the fence planks by nailing the boards horizontally across the bottom. It took me about two hours.

I knew this needed to be done months ago. Had I done it any time before last Thursday, then our puppy, Scrappy, would have been there at the backyard slider, jumping five feet into the air to greet me when I came home that day. He always did that, but not that day.

When I came home that day, we went into the backyard and noticed a hole beneath the fence big enough for him to fit through, right into the neighbor’s yard where they have two very large dogs. I looked over the fence, called for him and saw and heard nothing but his dogs barking at me. My neighbor wasn’t home yet.

I walked the neighborhood with my daughter, following the sounds of distant barking, while we talked about animal shelters and posting flyers. I hid from her, and from my own thoughts, the horrible suspicion that I knew exactly where Scrappy was.

We adopted Scrappy-Doo in the spring when my niece was looking for a good home for him. My wife and I told ourselves that he was the luckiest dog in the world to have found his way to our home with four animal-loving children. He completed our menagerie of a cat, a bearded dragon and fish.

His name was fitting. Scrappy was high energy with a pugnaciousness that belied his 15-pound Chihuahua-like frame. (We don’t know his breed, but I would happily entertain anyone’s guess.) I quickly began to enjoy our walks together, learning how to read other dog walkers and cross the street when necessary. I felt like a new member of a club.

He seemed to bark more aggressively at, shall we say… particular people. We joked that this betrayed his affinity for a certain political figure.

Scrappy had a strange preference for a cluster of bushes in front of a nearby school. He would lift his butt high into the air and decorate the bush with his poop like little Christmas tree ornaments on a miniature tree. Then he would turn 180 degrees and kick mulch all over the sidewalk, convinced that other wolves would now be deterred by his ferocious primal display.

We bought and displayed a “Beware of Dog” sticker for our side gate, mostly ironically.

We chided Scrappy for his seeming lack of intelligence, even though I had to jerry rig the stairway gate three times, the last time with a ridiculous looking array of bungee cords. The rabbit fence I put around the raised garden bed was also useless. I know he didn’t like to eat them, so I’m convinced he just showed up looking through the slider with one of our lovely green peppers in his mouth just to show me who was outsmarting who.

When the neighbor finally returned home, he asked me to come over and he gave me the terrible news in the twilight at the foot of his driveway. He was beyond apologetic, nearly in tears and offering to pay for a cremation if we chose to. I shuffled back to my house. My wife wailed and my daughter cried, but my son was mostly just speechless, like me. My step children would find out the next day.

I accepted my neighbor’s offer.

The next day I gathered Scrappy’s things: his favorite sloth stuffed animal; his leash with his harness still attached; and his half empty jars of treats. But I left his favorite blanket – the one he would promptly pull right through his crate when we covered it every night – on the couch where he would often nap, as if I expected to see him make another one of his hilarious, ill-timed jumps into the side of the cushion. I put them all into a pile in the garage, sat down next to them and broke down completely.

My hands are 44 years old and they’ve seen some shit in life, but I was taken aback at their unsteadiness as I scribbled his name across the box.

Perhaps it was this relentless, godforsaken year that has felt like a gut punch after a gut punch that finally burst a valve in me? Or maybe it was something else?

I sealed the box and it’s still sitting there in the middle of the garage.

As I told friends and family about what happened, I was surprised to realize that my feelings never even approached anger. It was only sadness and a resignation, both completely unmitigated by any imaginary thoughts of retribution or dispute.

Lately, I spend my days chasing white supremacists with a loaded M-4 in my backseat. The other day I helped arrest a sex trafficker of minors at gunpoint. I at least like to pretend that I have a healthy appetite for confrontation. Perhaps it is sated.

Or perhaps it was that my neighbor was indeed very remorseful. And maybe it is also that his dogs simply did what I thought they might do someday if I didn’t do more than just plug the holes that Scrappy dug with rocks and loose bricks I found around the yard.

Suffocating with guilt, I confessed it to my kids and reminded them that Scrappy’s safety in the backyard was my responsibility, and no one else’s. I wanted them to understand that accepting responsibility is hardest when you’ve failed in it.

The death of a beloved pet offers a host of lessons for children, the most valuable, I believe, regard the fleetingness of love and loss. These lessons can be muted if they are not articulated into meaningful words.

So I told them to always remember how they feel right at the moment I told them Scrappy died. And to always embrace all the good and the love they find in the world, wherever and however small, because you could turn around one day and never see it again.

Sobering lessons for them, as well as for me, a grown man who perhaps thought he didn’t need such a reminder.

Many people like to say “live life with no regrets.” I am not one of them.

There is a strong inclination in everyone to avoid cognitive dissonance associated with regret. The desire to feel better about what happened takes hold and suddenly there is some kind of net gain. You learn a lesson, so it was worth it.

I want my kids to know that it’s okay to regret.

In the grand scheme of tragedy I know I should consider myself fortunate in life, but the “things could always be worse” logic can only go so far to assuage one’s conscience.

“Dog Parents.” I used to scoff and laugh quietly at the term. I labeled such self-described people as overly sentimental and I was comfortable that being a parent to real humans gave me some grand and unassailable perspective on love, life and companionship.

I know I wasn’t about to buy Scrappy a dog stroller or throw him a birthday party, but what do I now make of the fact that I see him everywhere? He is still peering in at the backyard slider stained with his paw marks. He is still running to me when I hit the ice maker, waiting for the one cube I would toss for him. He is still basking in a ray of sunlight beaming through the window, creating one of his perfectly cozy napping spots on the carpet.

I’ve cried so much now that I have to wonder, am I being overly sentimental? Did I become a dog parent, if even for a short while? And will my children learn as much from Scrappy as I did? I am not certain I know the answers to these questions.

But what I know for sure right now in my grief is a simple regret; a realization now that I would surely give far, far more than $50 of my money and two hours of my time just to have my dog back.