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My favorite weather appears for a limited time annually, and as far as I have seen, it only shows up in Arizona. At the opposite end of summer, when the brutal heat feels like a memory, a strange little winter descends on the Copper State. Obviously there’s no snow, but the colder regions to the north makes themselves known. The dry air doesn’t retain heat, so the landscape chills under the spin of a shorter day, all while an impenetrable overcast blankets the Phoenix valley. I love it.

Whenever I visit my grandparents who live there, I always excuse myself from watching football or playing card games just so I can get out and experience this weather. My relatives probably think I’m either taken up smoking or become psychotically committed to my step goal. Perhaps both. They may have their theories, but the truth is, in addition to the weather, their retirement community fascinates me.

It teeters on being alarmingly quiet, which is understandable. But it’s also surprisingly colorful. Pastel accents and antique lawn art sprinkle the community. The brutalist churches at the community’s perimeter act as a sort of gateway, a mid-century membrane to pass through while flamingos with sunglasses stare at you from the neighbors’ stoops. These colors and shapes paired with the chill of winter always made me feel like I’m breaking in to waterpark during the off-season. The community mandate preventing any permanent residents under the age of 55 also adds to that feeling of sneaking around.

If the outside of the community is lined with churches, it seems both apt and ironic to have one of the only central open spaces (that isn’t a golf course) used as a cemetery. The grounds are split between two sites, but only one of them houses human remains. The smaller site is used for pets. I’d never seen something like this before. Hundreds of headstones for cats, hamsters, dogs, ferrets, snakes, and birds populated a lawn less than a block from my grandparents’ house.

Not that I was looking, but I couldn’t find any headstones for animals larger than a dog. This prompted a larger but unanswerable question about where remains for, say, a horse may wind up. A mystery for a different day.

If you find this all sounding a little callous, know that I agree with you. However, the only thing worse than a man in his twenties trying to disguise gallows humor as pathos is that same man trying to lecture you about grief, and nobody (least of all me) wants to read that. We can all agree that the former is better than the latter. Besides, I only feel like I’m “allowed” to speak in these terms because I have the minimal prerequisite experience to do so. I’m part of a family (check), that family had two dogs (check), and now we don’t (check).

Perhaps you’re also a member of this group. Maybe instead of dogs, it’s cats and ferrets, or birds and parrots. Regardless of the specific animal, it’s the same journey of gradual decline leading to that inevitable destination. It’s the path of the dying pet.

A Short Cultural History of Dead Dogs

The experience of losing an animal companion is rooted in the history of humanity itself. The first generations of cave people who had wolves hanging around their campfires probably felt bad when older members of the pack stopped showing up. That bad feeling is a complicated one. Like most complicated feelings, it becomes an opportunity for self-expression, for art.

The contemporary origin point for the inclusion of what I’m calling the “Dead Dog Effect” (DDE) appears to be two novels from the 20th century: Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows. From there, a Cambrian Explosion of dead dog stories descended on readers. A user on Goodreads created a list with 361 titles that include dogs or other animals getting their tickets punched. Where the Red Fern Grows and Old Yeller are both there, so is Marley and Me, War Horse, Cujo, and Pet Sematary (the latter two on technicalities). I Am Legend, another famous story from the fifties, received a contemporary adaptation in 2007 - ensuring that kids growing up in the aughts got their required helping of dead dog via 20th century literature.

In 1973, the Harvard class-clown to SNL cast member pipeline known as the National Lampoon reinvented what a dead dog could be: advertising. Their infamous January ‘73 cover shows a dog named Mr. Cheeseface with a hand holding a gun to the side of his head. Beneath the hand reads “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.” The cover and the pre-digital viral reaction it created went on to become a little piece of media history. But like any media frenzy, the postscript is both more interesting and more depressing.

Someone actually shot Mr. Cheeseface. His owner allowed him to roam freely on land in rural Vermont, and one day he just didn’t come back. It took a few weeks to discover, allegedly, that a local hunter got him. The circumstances surrounding the incident are, of course, topics of debate concerning hunting laws and pet owner responsibilities. Life may imitate art, but now it always seems to do so in a way that causes arguments online.

The 2010's saw a return to traditional use of the DDE with Brian’s death from Family Guy. However, a case could be made (cartoon logic aside) that “dying” is different than being “killed off”. Regardless, the writers decided to reverse that decision soon after due to audience backlash. That’s the power of the dead dog for you. A show that supposedly pulled no punches couldn’t get away with permanently killing the dog.

Perhaps most famous from this period is the dead dog in John Wick. This represents an innovation in DDE storytelling because it is used as an inciting incident, not the narrative climax or a shock-value magazine hook. This usage kicks off events in the first of a series of four films (number five is supposedly in development), a spin-off film, and another spin-off TV series. When combined, they have generated over $1.1 billion at the box office, making it inarguably the most successful dead dog franchise ever.

I read Where the Red Fern Grows in 5th grade English class. Other than the dying dog, I’ve forgotten everything else that happens in that book. It’s all been distilled into that one plot point. Ask someone you know who has read it what they remember. If they say anything other than that the dog dies, they are lying and never actually read it when their teacher assigned it. You now have permission to reprimand them and make them stay after class for detention.

Side note: After skimming the synopsis on Wikipedia, I am shocked to remember that this book is actually about two dying dogs. A young boy’s two dogs rescue him from a mountain lion attack. The first dog dies from wounds, and the other dies a few days later because, apparently, she loses the will to live. The titular red fern then grows out of the dogs’ graves. Fifth grade. They could have cleaned the carpets with the amount of tears flowing from those classrooms.

I’m willing to give a very generous benefit of the doubt to whoever may have decided to include that book on an English class curriculum. I’m not a parent or a teacher, but I imagine loss and grief are best introduced to a child as concepts in a book rather than raw experiences that can spring on you in the wild. The boy lost his two dogs so you could better process how it feels when you lose something you care about.

I traveled down the path of the dying family dog for the first time in elementary school. I couldn’t say it was unexpected. She (a chocolate lab named Caymus) had all the indicators of a dog in old age, but with me being a pre-teen, those indicators served as data points with no real deeper context. Other than my parents asking me to not take her on long walks anymore, things didn’t change all that much. Until they did.

The second time (a black lab named Angus), was less abrupt, but that was because I was older. College age. Having been through the rigamarole of pet grief already made the reality of an aging dog less of a theory and more applied practice. I saw in real time how not abrupt the process can be.

The conditions that affected him did so gradually and without much change to his mobility or comfort. He was no stranger to surgeries, but the conditions those surgeries were performed to help could only do so much. I was living across the country as most of this took place, so every holiday season when I would visit, “catching up” would mean noticing all the new markers of his age.

The patches of grey fur around his eyes and mouth would expand. The tk-tk-tk of his claws walking on hardwood would be punctuated by him slipping around a corner as his legs lost their strength. There’s no way to know if he notices these things too. All you can do is notice for him and do everything possible to convey that what’s happening isn’t some sort of punishment. He’s still a good boy.

I visited him each year around the holidays. He was a creature of routines, and one of the routines he famously kept for 4 consecutive holiday seasons was not dying. My sister and I always gave him a bit more attention before leaving because, well, we didn’t think there would be a next time. We were saying goodbye, not just saying goodbye. Imagine our surprise when we would call our parents only to hear about how the little menace was on a new diet or demolished a toy he’d never shown any attention to before.

My mom called with the actual news a few months after that Christmas season. Summertime. Complications arose and quality of life plummeted. In the interest of ensuring the pain he experienced was minimal, my parents decided to feed him a steak sandwich and put him to sleep in his favorite bed. He went out on top.

Pet euthanasia typically consists of two steps. First, veterinarians will deliver a tranquilizing agent to relax the animal, usually by injection. They then deliver what the American Veterinary Medical Association calls a “death-inducing” drug. This causes the brain and other organs to cease functioning. The process is painless.

In the strangest of coincidences, my cousins and two very dear friends also needed to put their dogs to sleep within a few weeks of Angus. Is three dead dogs in one summer abnormal? It’s an odd coincidence, but it can’t be too uncommon, right? Moving to conclusions too quickly and not thinking this through must make it seem odd, even conspiratorial. Is someone poisoning the dogs I know?

People probably fall into conspiracy theories this way. You hear the same song playing in three different restaurants, and a week later you’re googling “ring cam crop circle footage Reddit” because you didn’t give enough credence to the mathematical probabilities of a top-40 radio mix.

Then again, turning to the stars and their occupants for guidance isn't too unreasonable. The brightest star in the night sky is Sirius — better known for its work in the constellation Canis Major (Greater Dog). Go figure.

Historically, it’s a very important star. Sirius and its constellation re-appear in the night sky during the summer, hence the term “dog days of summer”. While modern interpretations of the term tend to conjure visions of melted popsicles and shadows of sweat left on friends’ couches during summer break, the original use carried a heavy seriousness.

Sirius’s annual reappearance signaled the beginning of flood season in ancient Egypt, where massive rains could wash away huge swaths of farmland. These floods were crucial for agricultural practices and the overall health of the soil, but try telling that to the Egyptian farmer watching her house float down the Nile. The dog days brought change, but that change presented itself as chaos. Repetitive, inevitable chaos.

As my family reconvened for the first holiday without Angus, I thought a lot about that pet cemetery back in Arizona — particularly of a burial plot belonging to Snubby (1947 - 1963). Snubby belonged to a burial plot that relocated from a different cemetery. I didn’t know cemeteries could do that. They can reposition their assets like a car dealership? The mechanics of which seem strange, but I grew to love that concept as a representation for change. There’s movement in everything, even in death.

Sirius and the stars in the night sky are moving too. Not just because of our rotation, but because their paths across the universe are influenced by the gravity of their neighbors. They are pulled in infinite directions, and the resulting travel means that the stars we see are gradually getting brighter as we come closer, or slowly fading away as they migrate elsewhere. Sirius is traveling towards us, and will continue to do so for thousands of years. Here’s the adorable twist: It’s actually two separate stars. Astronomers call it a binary system. The larger star has picked up a smaller star in its orbit and they now travel together. The Dog Star is bringing us a ball.

I can't think of a better metaphor for the journey never really being over than moving the remains of beloved pets from one patch of land to another, especially when that same Arizona dirt used to rest at the bottom of an ancient ocean and will continue to lay under an ever-changing night sky. From endings can come beginnings. From dead dogs, beautiful red ferns can grow.