What a Dog Knows About Love

I have been thinking about my dog, Buddy, and what he has taught me without ever meaning to teach me anything. There is an old observation that dog is God spelled backward. I know it is only a coincidence of the English language, and I would never offer it as evidence of anything. Still, the older I get and the deeper my faith becomes, the more it makes me smile. There are qualities I have spent much of my life trying to understand through faith that seem to come naturally to a dog.

Buddy has been particularly important to me since my son Justin died. There are moments in grief when words become almost useless. People want to help, and most of them mean well, but human beings have an instinct to do something. We search for the right words. We offer advice. We try to make sense of things that do not make sense. Eventually there comes a point when there is nothing left to say because there are some things in life that cannot be explained or fixed.

Buddy never tried.

In some of my darkest moments he has simply been beside me. I have held him, or he has curled up next to me, and nothing more was required of either of us. He did not need to understand why I was hurting. I did not have to explain it to him. There was no awkward silence because silence is not awkward to a dog. There was just his warmth, his breathing and his steady presence beside me.

I have come to think there is something we can learn from that. We underestimate the value of simply being there for another person. We think love requires an answer. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the greatest thing we can do for someone who is suffering is to resist the urge to fix what cannot be fixed and sit beside them instead.

Dogs seem to understand a number of things that human beings make unnecessarily complicated. Buddy doesn't know what I have accomplished or failed to accomplish. He doesn't know how much money I have, what I do for a living, whether somebody considers me important or whether somebody else has decided I am not worth their time. These distinctions that consume so much of human life mean absolutely nothing to him.

I can leave the house for fifteen minutes and return to a celebration. As far as Buddy is concerned, something wonderful has happened. I came home. There is something almost embarrassing about how little it takes to make a dog happy when you compare it with how difficult we make happiness for ourselves.

We carry yesterday into today. We keep score. We remember who called last, who disappointed us, who has more, who has less, who owes an apology and who failed to give one. We measure ourselves against other people and other people against ourselves. We can sit in a perfectly good day worrying about a day that has not happened yet. A dog wakes up and seems to accept the day he has been given.

The more I think about it, the more I see qualities in Buddy that my faith asks me to practice myself. Forgiveness. Loyalty. Trust. Joy. Love without constant calculation. Being present. None of these things is complicated to understand. Living them is another matter.

There is, however, a cruel part of loving a dog that every dog owner understands from the beginning. Their lives are shorter than ours. If things happen in their natural order, we will outlive them. We know this when we bring them home, even if we would rather not think about it.

That is an extraordinary bargain when you stop and consider it. We willingly bring an animal into our home knowing that we are probably beginning a story whose ending will break our heart. We feed him and care for him. We learn his habits and he learns ours. We talk to him even though he cannot answer. He finds his places in the house and eventually those places become his. Without noticing exactly when it happened, we stop thinking of him as an animal living in our home and begin thinking of him as family.

All the while, the clock is running.

One day, if I am fortunate enough to live longer than Buddy, I will walk into my house and he will not come running. The place where he slept will be empty. There will be no ridiculous celebration because I disappeared for fifteen minutes and somehow managed to return. I know that day will hurt. I knew some version of that day was waiting for me when I first decided to love him.

And I chose him anyway.

Losing Justin taught me something about this that I wish I had never needed to learn. When you have loved someone deeply and lost them, you discover that love and grief are not opposites. They belong to each other. Grief exists because love existed first. The depth of the pain tells you something about the depth of what was there.

Justin's death stripped a great deal of nonsense out of my life. Things that once seemed important became much smaller. I began looking differently at people, at time, at God and at what it means to love another human being. I learned that there is no safe way to love deeply. If someone truly matters to you, you have given life something it can use to hurt you.

But I would never trade the love to escape the grief.

I would never erase Justin from my life to erase what happened when I lost him. The proposition itself is absurd to me. The years, the memories, the laughter, the ordinary days, the arguments, the movies we saw together, the things only the two of us would understand, all of it was worth having. The ending cannot be allowed to reach backward through time and take ownership of everything that came before it.

Perhaps that is another thing a dog can teach us. We know the ending is coming, and we love them anyway. We accept the bargain because a life spent refusing to love anything we might someday lose would be a very safe life, but I cannot imagine it would be much of a life.

Buddy, of course, knows none of this. He is not lying beside me thinking about mortality. He is not worried about how many years he has left or how many I have. He doesn't know that someday one of us will leave the other behind. He knows I am here now.

There may be wisdom in that.

We spend so much of our lives somewhere other than where we actually are. We revisit things that cannot be changed and anticipate things that may never happen. Meanwhile the dog beside us has somehow figured out the only moment either of us has ever actually possessed.

This one.

So maybe God spelled backward being dog means nothing at all. It probably does. But when I look at Buddy, I still find myself thinking about the coincidence. This little creature asks very little of me and gives back love, forgiveness, loyalty, joy and presence as though these were the easiest things in the world.

They are not. At least not for us.

I don't know how much time Buddy and I will have together. I hope we have many years. I also know what waits at the end of loving anything in this world. Eventually we lose it, or it loses us.

That used to sound to me like a reason to be afraid.

Now I think it may be the reason to pay attention.

Buddy is here today. So am I.

For now, that is enough.