In 2017 a lady selling puppies texted me a photo, of a wrinkly, tiny, brand-new little sad-eyed Boxer puppy sitting on a beat-up dog bed, looking right into the camera. What I thought, sitting alone on my porch, and probably muttered out loud, was, "Aw, look at that little porkchop." And that became his name: Chop. Later I learned that I had inadvertently and embarrassingly given him the same name as the protagonist's pet Rottweiler in the video game Grand Theft Auto V, but by then it was too late. He'd fully inhabited the name, and that's who he was: Chop, Chopper, Choppeez. And at any rate what I mostly called him was "little buddy." As in, "C'mon little buddy," and "Hi little buddy!" and, when he would put his paws on my shoulders and lay down on my chest, face to face, "Oh, little buddy."
When we met him (as well as the puppy we named Grover and also took home), he tried to scramble up into my lap where I sat on the lady's couch, but he was too small. I scooped him up—it took one hand; he was so little—and he immediately and with intense purpose began licking my face. You would have thought he was performing CPR. It was like he was making up for all 37 of the years I had spent not having my face cleaned by him. He was so happy to be doing it, ears laid back, nose snuffling loudly, his entire back half fully a-wag, like this was a music recital he'd been rehearsing for all (10 weeks of) his life. To stop him would have been unkind, so I didn't, and so he kept at it, with brief interruptions, for seven years. He and I were, if not literally inseparable, then only grudgingly separable and for as briefly as possible.
He had been the runt of his litter; he was small for a Boxer, painfully gentle of disposition, and unsure of himself in the world; when we sent the four dogs for intensive boarding-school obedience training, the trainer reported virtually no progress with Chop and grave doubts that he would ever pick up the commands—until my wife and I took up the work, at which point we discovered that Chop knew the commands perfectly well and obeyed them without hesitation, so long as they were coming from those he trusted. To the trainer's surprise (and even, I think, a little bit of wounded chagrin), Chop quickly far surpassed all three of the other dogs' grasp of this new language. In fact, from then on, his only problem with obedience was an excess of it: We'd command him to remain on "place" and he would sometimes refuse to move even when enthusiastically and theatrically freed. Why chance it, when he already knew he was doing something good?
Chop's inclination toward closeness and affection was total. All he required was someone to be close to, and only ever put aside his rigorous self-containment and caution when in pursuit of that. It was the organizing principle of his life, the sense that the world made to him. When there wasn't anything else going on he would sit on—on top of—big placid Grover, his lifelong companion. He would fold himself into black-hole density to fit between my son and my wife on the couch, so that he could sleep with his head in her lap. In bleary early mornings I would curl up on the couch and read; if Grover beat Chop to the spot behind the L of my legs, Chop would gingerly, with utmost care, climb on top of my upper body, and flop down, and go to sleep there, strings fully cut, ragdolled, utterly content, for as long as I would let him.
One afternoon a few weeks ago, as my kids were walking up the driveway from the school bus stop and he was excitedly going toward the door to meet them, Chop fell down, hard and completely, for no apparent reason. When he got back up, he wobbled and lost his balance and laid back down, this time under his own control. We took him to the overnight vet. In the early morning hours he went into cardiac arrest for two minutes, and then again a few hours later, and had to be resuscitated both times. A little while later we said goodbye, on the floor of the vet's office, with Chop curled into my wife's lap and my face pressed into his as he died. Something like 16 or 17 hours had passed since he fell over—since I'd had no reason to suspect that the last time I'd dislodged him so that I could get up and make coffee had been the very last.
I like the world a little bit less now that it has been the kind of place where my simple little buddy so abruptly lost his simple little life. That is silly and childish and true: I just kinda hold a somewhat lower opinion of the world than I did before, and I am aware on some level that this is a choice and maybe even a contemptible one in a world so filled with so many cruelties and losses, but I am making it anyway, on principle. The world had my little buddy in it for a while and he loved simply and absolutely and then one afternoon his heart stopped working and now he doesn't ever get to be in it anymore, and for the time being I am allowing myself to hold that unkindness, however small, against the world. He was a good and kind dog and if I ever stop being sad to have lost him, it will be because my heart is not as good as his was.
