Every week, I ask readers to send me a brief description of their dead pet’s life in addition to a photo. I usually take this eulogy and run with it a fair bit, as even the most workaday pets deserve a war hero’s send-off. But a few weeks ago, a gentleman named Doug Nagy sent me a description so eloquent that I agreed to run it verbatim:
“Lucky wasn’t even my dog, and there’s a lot I never knew about him. But he was almost as much a member of my sister’s family as my niece Emma and nephew James (humans), not to mention Denny, her Irish curmudgeon of a husband. And Cathy loved him, well, like a dog.
“His table manners? This mutt—not a figure of speech, he was one—had none. I don’t think any dog does, and why should they? We always break down and give them the damn leftovers anyway, sometimes well before they’re left over. A dog’s real tableside knack is to beg without seeming to, when all along that’s the sole, tightly focused objective—and he had that down cold. Who needs luck when you’re just good?
“Lucky turned out not to be a misnomer, however. One day, the hyperkinetic pooch darted into traffic and got hit by a bus. The usual choice in such a scenario is put the dog down, but no one even considered that, pet insurance or no. When it’s a member of your family in question, what are you gonna do anyway: turn and walk away? And so, following a week or two of canine trauma care at no small cost, Lucky’s saga continued. He lived up to his name and was soon back to chasing squirrels.
“But as with most of us, pity for pity’s sake wore thin on him awfully fast. So he shed his hip cast, gimped around for a while—but soon required as much restraint as ever, charging up to intersections. He must have figured that if the darned bus didn’t kill him, nothing automotive ever would.
“I only learned that he had died some weeks after the fact. Hell, I don’t even know when he was born. He wasn’t mine, remember? All I can say is he brought a lot of smiles to a lot of faces.”
If you would like your deceased pet to be considered for this space, please send a high-resolution 4-by-6 photo and brief description of his or her life to petcemetery@seattleweekly.com.
