My family lost our four-legged friend Nala yesterday. As she aged it became harder and harder to ignore that she was reaching the end of her life with us. The hardest part about a pet is that they are with you — in some ways invisibly — every day doing what they do.
She came into our family at a time when my daughter needed a four-legged friend. We’d moved back to California over a year earlier and had lost two boxers, Whitney and Gurgi, to the cancer that haunts that breed. My wife and I had been putting off adding a new member — busy with work and parenting and life, and the responsibility of raising a puppy felt like more than we wanted to take on.
Then, driving home from a family vacation, a message on a mailing list caught our attention. Nala, a five-year-old Catahoula Leopard Dog, needed a good home. We met her, she was sweet, and my daughter connected to her immediately. So that was that. She joined our family and we became her pack.
She wasn’t perfect. She didn’t like being left alone and she was a master at finding unattended plates of people food. The only way I know this is that in photos from parties she can sometimes be seen in the background helping herself to a burger or hotdog within reach. She was an excellent trail breaker, and she made sure that any and all delivery vehicles were aware of the property boundaries — loudly and consistently — often much to my chagrin as I sighed and reached for headphones to keep the ruckus out of my meetings. Later, as she slowed down, she learned to charm the delivery folks into giving her treats. This was after she passed on patrol duties to the next generation.
The hardest thing about living a good life is accepting that there are hard, emotional parts during the cycle. It’s not just death that is sad. It’s watching the slow, inevitable decline of a body that struggles to do what it loves — trying to keep to a routine long after being mentally or physically able to. It’s hard accepting that there is comfort in having your family, your pack, assist and maintain that routine as long as possible. It is even harder accepting that a day will come and bring death with it.
But acceptance of the life cycle in its purest form is comforting on many levels. Life doesn’t stop. It moves ever forward, with or without us. And unique to humans, we carry our memories with us. In my memories of first experiences, pets loved, family ties and so much more, I’ve been lucky enough to add something — not quite pictures, not quite videotapes — of Nala that will move along with me as long as I walk my path. All I know is that I’m lucky enough to have a good life, and that the time with Nala and these memories are part of it. And that means accepting it.
