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

“When it happens,” I asked, “will she be in pain?”

“Possibly, yes,” Bruce said.

“For a moment, for minutes, how long?”

“There’s no way to know.”

I asked him one more question that might have seemed odd to him, though he gave no indication that it was. “Will she cry out? Will she cry out in pain?”

“She might, yes.”

In her life, this stoic little dog had endured serious physical maladies followed by four surgeries and four recuperations, without a single whimper or protest of any kind. If she cried out in pain and fear, her cry would shred my heart, and Gerda’s. But it was not Gerda or me about whom I was concerned. I didn’t want this brave dog, this creature of such fortitude and fine heart, to hear her own cry as the last sound she knew of this Earth. In her final moments, I meant to help her be what she had been during her entire life: an embodiment of quiet courage, unbowed by suffering.

Little more than half an hour later, at two o’clock Saturday afternoon, Bruce returned, carrying his medical kit. With him was a vet technician: David, who had advised me not to drive recklessly on my way to the specialty hospital eight days earlier, and who had said, “God is with her.”

In my view, in the case of a human being, a natural death is death with dignity. Animals are innocents, however, and we serve as stewards of them, with the obligation to treat them with mercy.

So there on her favorite couch, on the covered terrace, where she could breathe in all the good rich smells of grass and trees and roses, we opened for her the unseen gate, so that she could walk again not on her now weak legs but on the still strong legs of her spirit, walk beyond that gate, an innocent into a realm of innocence, home forever. As her mom cradled Trixie’s body and told her she was an angel, I held her sweet face in my hands and stared into her beautiful eyes, and as always she returned my gaze forthrightly. I told her that she was the sweetest dog in the world, that her mom and I were so proud of her, that we loved her as desperately as anyone might love his own child, that she was a gift from God, and she fell asleep not forever but just for the moment between the death of her body and the awakening of her spirit in the radiance of grace where she belonged.

LOVE AND LOSS are inextricably entwined because we are mortal and can know love only under the condition that what we love will inevitably be lost. That afternoon on the terrace, Gerda and I felt hammered by our loss, and broken.

Bruce Whitaker, whose work had brought him to many such moments, wept with us, as did David, who said, “She was such a very special dog.” Later David would write us to say, in part, “Trixie had a special place in my heart. Normally, I am able to maintain a certain amount of detachment. In her case, this was simply not possible for me.”

Together, Bruce and David wrapped Trixie in a blanket, and David carried her to the SUV in which they had arrived. Arms around each other, Gerda and I followed them through the downstairs and into the garage, where our golden girl’s tail slipped from the folds of the blanket and trailed behind her, as if her spirit lingered just long enough to arrange this final farewell.

We could have buried Trixie on our property, but we didn’t want to leave her remains there if the day ever came when we lived elsewhere. Her ashes will be with us wherever we might go. The pet cemetery that would conduct the cremation remained closed through Wednesday, for the long Fourth of July holiday. Bruce would keep her in his freezer until Thursday morning.

In the house once more, Gerda and I were lost. We didn’t seem to belong there anymore. Every room was familiar yet as different as a room in someone else’s house. We did not know what to do, did not want to do anything, but could not sit idle because, in idleness, the ever-pressing grief became crushing, suffocating.

Then Gerda was so shaken by the sight of one of Trixie’s dog beds that she wanted to collect them all-many of them new-from every room, strip off the covers, wash and dry them, and put the beds away in a storeroom until they could be offered to employees and friends who had dogs. We gathered up the plush toys, as well, scores of them, because they were no longer merely toys but also needles in the heart.

All our lives, work had been our refuge and redemption. Now only work could prevent despair from overwhelming us.

I called Mike and Mary Lou Delaney, Linda, and only a few other people who knew Trixie best, who had spent much time with her and who thought of her as something more than a dog, though a dog itself is a glorious thing to be. I couldn’t bear to call many people, because each time that I told the story of her death, I broke down as I had never done before. Gerda could speak to no one about it for days, to no one but me, and as so often in our lives together, we were for each other the rock that gave us footing.

We took comfort in the knowledge that God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.

THE PET CEMETERY covered a considerable tract of land. Most of the hundreds upon hundreds of granite markers were decorated with real or artificial flowers, flags, dog toys, and balloons. Judging by these displays, this place was more frequently visited than any burial ground where human beings were interred.

The crematorium was in a garagelike structure behind the main building in which business and services were conducted. We were led there to see the body Thursday morning, because we wanted to be certain that Trixie’s remains did not go into the fire with others.

During the half-hour drive from home, we steeled ourselves for the likelihood that this moment would be grotesque. After all, the body had been frozen since Saturday, had been brought here only this morning; it could not have fully thawed.

Instead of a grisly sight, we came upon a scene of stark truth and beauty. The crematorium was a plain rough space: dark rafters, chipped concrete floor, intricacies of shadows in the corners, hard light falling through the open door and directly upon the cremator, reality as Andrew Wyeth might have captured it in a painting. The cremator was a solid brute of iron and concrete, old and scarred by years of use, and the air smelled of a purifying heat. On a wheeled cart was a pallet, and on the pallet lay the body of our girl. Before the body was frozen, Bruce Whitaker or David had been so kind as to position it so that Trixie appeared merely to be sleeping, curled with her head resting on her paws. Her eyes were closed, her face serene. Her fur was cool and soft to the touch.

“She was so beautiful,” Gerda said, “so beautiful,” and in fact it seemed that this golden girl was more beautiful than I remembered, that only five days could steal from memory some of the full glory that was this dog.

During the first half of the 150-minute cremation, Gerda and I sat side by side on a couch in the waiting area of the mortuary. We paged again and again through Life Is Good , Trixie’s first book, which contained so many photographs of her. In the cremation vigil, this was a way to celebrate her life.

Thereafter, we walked the cemetery, where the headstones were carved with expressions of love, devotion, and gratitude. In those grave markers were enough stories to keep a novelist in material for a lifetime.