Dean Koontz: A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog

I hasten to say that I’m not necessarily describing Trixie’s condition in correct medical terms. I didn’t ask Wayne Berry to proof the previous paragraph. I want to convey how his explanation sounded to me, an ignorant layman alarmed by even the most benign medical terms like “intravenous injection” and “Band-Aid,” because it made my heart heavy with worry. Spinal conditions, I thought, frequently brought with them the possibility of paralysis.

Short Stuff could not climb stairs without pain. Lately she had not been in a mood to chase a tennis ball, obviously because of the pinched nerve. At every toilet, she made multiple attempts at a bowel movement, awkwardly and repeatedly crabbing forward in her squat before at last making a successful effort, because straining at stool stressed the affected nerve. She required surgery to grind away the excess bone and allow the nerve free passage.

Gerda looked grim when she asked what might go wrong during such a procedure, and Wayne was admirably direct and succinct. If damage occurred to the spinal nerve during surgery, Trixie’s back legs might be paralyzed for life. Or she might be incontinent for life. Or both paralyzed and incontinent.

He gave us a moment to absorb those possibilities, and then with a quiet confidence that had about it no slightest quality of a boast, he said, “But neither of those things has ever happened to an animal when I’ve done this surgery.”

As we scheduled the procedure, they brought Trixie to us, fresh from her MRI. The difference between her condition after surviving Dr. Death and her condition after going through the same test under Wayne ’s care could not have been more dramatic. She was wide-awake and delighted to see us. She needed neither pantomime nor sound effects to convey to me how much she wanted the breakfast that she had been tricked out of seven hours earlier.

Wayne said, “In her condition, she’ll have moderate to severe discomfort through a wide range of motion. But you say she only cried out that once on the stairs.”

“And maybe once when she was chasing a ball the day before,” I remembered. “It was a thin, sharp sound, very brief. At the time, I wasn’t even sure it was Trix. But it was similar to the sound she made when she froze on the stairs.”

He shook his head. “She’s a very stoic little dog.”

I nodded because I could not speak. When we have the deepest of affection for a dog, we do not possess that love but are possessed by it, and sometimes it takes us by surprise, overwhelms us. As quick and agile and strong as a dog may be, as in harmony with nature and as sure of its place in the vertical of sacred order as it may be, a dog is vulnerable to all the afflictions and misfortunes of this world. When we take a dog into our lives, we ask for its trust, and the trust is freely given. We promise, I will always love you and bring you through troubled times. This promise is sincerely, solemnly made. But in the dog’s life as in our own, there come those moments when we are not in control, when we are forced to acknowledge our essential helplessness. To want desperately to protect a dog and to have to trust instead in others-even a fine surgeon-compels us to yield to the recognition of the limits of the human condition, about which we daily avoid consideration. Looking into the trusting eyes of the dog, which feels safe in our care, and knowing that we do not deserve the totality of its faith in us, we are shaken and humbled.

Again I think of lines from “East Coker” by T. S. Eliot: “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility.”

Within a couple of days of her second MRI, Trixie underwent spinal surgery. No complications ensued. She was neither left paralyzed nor incontinent, and she had no more pain.

She needed three weeks to convalesce, half the time required when she had surgery on the elbow joint. She couldn’t reach the dorsal incision, which meant she didn’t have to wear a cone.

Because I was working on a deadline to complete Odd Thomas , Trixie’s care fell mostly to Gerda through those three weeks. Odd Thomas is a novel about perseverance in the face of terrible loss, about holding fast to rational hope in a world of pain, about finding peace-not bitterness-in the memory of love taken by untimely death.

Trixie’s back was decorated with twenty-nine steel sutures, like a long zipper in a dog suit. I called her Frankenpuppy. She didn’t think that was as amusing as I did.

This surgery gave her years more of a high-quality life, during which she fully enjoyed the fenced acreage of our new house. As any dog is remarkably grateful for each kindness it receives, Gerda and I were grateful for every day this joyous creature graced our lives. The only wisdom is humility, which engenders gratitude, and humility is the condition of the heart essential for us to know peace.

OUR NEW HOUSE has a home theater with a large screen. The first time we settled there to watch a film, a Sandra Bullock comedy, we were surprised when Trixie leaped onto the seat beside Gerda’s before I could sit down. Trix took advantage of furniture privileges only where they were given; and we had not extended them to the theater.

Instead of telling her to get down, we granted privileges after the fact. She looked so cute sitting erect in a theater chair. And we were intrigued by her apparent eagerness for whatever experience might be offered in this strange new room.

I sat beside Short Stuff and pretended that I knew what I was doing with an array of touch-screen controls more complex than the cockpit panel in a 747. Much to my surprise, the lights dimmed, red-velvet curtains drew aside, and the movie appeared on the screen.

Warmed by a flush of pride, I told myself that if I could master this, then I might one day figure out how to use the coffeemaker. I have always had big dreams.

We assumed that after a few minutes, Trixie would become bored with the movie and get off the chair. Five minutes passed, ten, and she remained riveted by the images on the screen.

Gerda and I repeatedly looked past Trix, raising our eyebrows at each other, amused by her devotion to Sandra Bullock’s comical problems almost as much as we were by the-quite good-movie.

Perhaps the size of the images or the clarity of the projection transfixed our girl. She remained in the chair during the entire movie. Except for two five-minute periods when she chose to lie on the seat and rest her chin on the chair arm, she sat upright. And even in the down position, she kept her gaze on the screen.

The second time we used the theater, we ran another comedy, and again Trixie watched it beginning to end, sitting in a chair between her mom and me. I half expected her to ask for popcorn.

Instead of another comedy, we ran an action film on the third visit to our theater. We were eager to see it because some critics called it cutting-edge, maximum cool, and said the lead character was “a James Bond for the new and much hipper millennium.” The movie was XXX , starring Vin Diesel, and those critics had probably called Dumb and Dumber an intellectual triumph.

Again, Trixie sat between Gerda and me, attentively watching the screen. For about four minutes. Then she got down, settled on the floor, and stuck her head under the chair. She remained there for the remainder of the film, a more perceptive critic than those who had touted XXX.

In recent years, if a film didn’t shine in the first fifteen minutes, we knew from bitter experience that it would be a rusted tangle of junk to the end, and we gave it no more of our time. That worked for a while, but we began to resent those wasted fifteen-minute blocks of our brief sojourn on this world, which could have been better spent hanging by our thumbs.