Note: I wrote this while on a Disney trip that has really worn me out. It’s weird to want to write but to be too tired to do so. …so apologies for any typos or weird syntax.
This writing project/journal/blog that I started back in January started with the idea that I was going to choose a theme a month and write to that theme for the entirety of the month. January was all about grief and then February was going to be about “dogs and cats.” I had a few ideas I wanted to roll with during that month, one of which I’ve already done; the (fun to me, but incredibly stupid) post where I re-wrote Tupac’s Hit Em Up and Biggie’s Who Shot You? from the point of view of a feuding cat and dog.
I had another idea for one I want to do that is basically a Bill of Rights (of sorts) for dog and cat owners. Or maybe not a Bill of Rights, but a declarative document about the love we feel for our pets and how that love is just as real as any love we feel for any other human. It really bums me out when I’m talking to a non-parent dog/cat owner and they always feel like they have to qualify their statements with stuff like “I know it’s not the same as having a kid.” Screw that noise. Not to get all Lin Manuel Miranda up in here, but love is love is love. If you love your dog or cat, you love your cat or dog with your whole freaking heart. The love we feel in our hearts, minds, and souls is not pie to be divided up. It’s endless and neverending. Maybe I don’t need to do a separate post, after all. There it is.
But the other idea I had was… I really just wanted to talk about my dog Millie. I was looking through Facebook photos recently and it dawned on me that in just a few short weeks, it will have been a full year since we had to put our sweet Millie down. She suffered from Addison’s Disease, but we still don’t fully know what happened between the time she started showing signs of being sick in January and what stopped her kidneys from working in April. Her illness came in hard and fast, as they often do with dogs and cats.
But I’m getting slightly ahead of myself. We got Millie back in December 2018. We mainly got her to give Rocket a companion, but we also got her because it felt like the right thing to do at the time. Rocket is a dog that needs constant companionship at literally all hours of every day. In the before-pandemic times, when one of us wasn’t home most of the time, we could tell that leaving Rocket home alone during the day was stressing him all the way out. So in an effort to give Rocket some peace of mind, we got him a companion that could keep him company while we were out doing whatever it is that we did in those days.
Millie was jointly named by both of my kids. Chloe (then Parker) was a big Stranger Things fan and wanted to name her after Millie Bobby Brown. Logan was a big Spurs fan and had met Patty Mills at a basketball camp earlier that year. Ergo “Millie.”
Millie and Rocket took to each other really quickly and were basically inseparable. They slept side-by-side. They played during all of their waking hours. They ate side-by-side. They were less “friend” more “sibling.” Not all paired dogs bond in that way. I was grateful that they did.
Millie was a big dog who fancied herself a small dog. She had a big heart and her brand of companionship was to lie on us like she weighed 20 pounds instead of close to 70. She was also a dog who didn’t seem all the way there mentally. You put the big ol’ dog and the “is there anything happening behind the wheel” together and Millie could sometimes be a big ol’ frustrating dog. I don’t know that she ever really “got” house training. She pooped and peed outside most of the time, but judging from the number of accidents she’d have and the irregular nature at which she’d have them, I often wondered if her pooping/peeing outside was more of a function of routine than a “this is where we go” decision like it is with Rocket.
She was also prone to destroy… well… everything actually. Books I had on a bookshelf; gone. My cherished E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 20th Anniversary DVD box set; destroyed. An entire couch; wiped out. She even ate socks on occasion. We eventually learned to keep everything off the floor and to store stuff on shelves high enough that it’d be out of sight and out of mind for her, but no one is perfect and we’d often come downstairs to see her gnawing on everything from the furniture to XBox games. We loved her, so we kept her, but our patience was constantly tested with her. How could you look into those big eyes of hers and not love her immensely?
But few things Millie loved more (Rocket, too, actually) than a walk. If you said the word “walk,” she’d be sprinting for the pantry where we kept the leashes by the time you’d get to the “k” portion of the word. Whereas Rocket can be kind of a little wild with the leash, Millie was always such a good walker. She was always really attentive and eager to please in a way that produced as little stress as possible. Rocket likes walks because of the energy exertion side of things, but also because I think it feeds a side of Rocket’s brain that likes to “work.” It always felt like Millie liked walks because she liked being outside with me. I always loved that about her.
I was listening to a podcast earlier this year in which Brett Goldstein and Patton Oswalt talked about the afterlife (more of the pre-life state, actually) and Brett talked about the idea of a wooden box. The idea is, before each of us is born, the divine deities place a wooden box within each living creature. In this wooden box would be all of the lessons and all of the things we needed to learn on this life cycle go’round.
I like to think that in a human’s box, we have billions and billions of “need to learn” lessons. We need to learn communication. We need to learn about souls, both ours and others. We need to learn about what foods we like and which ones we don’t. We need to learn empathy. We need to learn about pain. We need to learn to laugh. So on and so forth times infinity.
A dog has three things in their wooden box. Get food, play, and teach the world what true unconditional love is. That’s it. That’s a dog’s wooden box. Humans are complex. Humans have to learn how to shade the black and white sides of everything with our own hues and shades. But a dog’s real purpose is simple and they show us that every single moment of every single day with every single tail wag. A cat’s wooden box is basically the same, but sub out “play” (although I’ve had cats that play), add in “teach humans boundaries,” and add in “teach the value of a good nap.” Cats always get a bad reputation on the unconditional love piece, but make no mistake about it; cats are nothing but love.
No dog frustrated me more, but no dog demonstrated that true unconditional love more than Millie. I miss her. Her illness came on hard and fast. We thought we’d have more time with her but it wasn’t to be. We could have had another decade and it wouldn’t have been enough time. When the vet came in and administered the drug that basically paralyzed her so that they could administer the final shot that would stop her heart, I accidentally nudged her leash. Upon hearing the familiar jingle of her leash, she lifted her head up, ready to go on one final walk. That is a dog. She loved walks because she loved being with Rocket and me. A dog’s wooden box, man. It’s a beautiful thing. She taught me a lot.
An open and shut book 
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