SONOMA, CA-

Like every summer, my brother and I drove up to visit our dad’s grave. And like every summer, we waited to see if the dog would show up again.

It’s not the kind of thing we talk about with a lot of people. What could we tell them? “Well, sometimes my dad comes back as a dog.” No, they don’t want to hear that. It makes them uncomfortable. And they never know what to say. “Oh… how nice… well, when you see him again, tell him I said hi.”

My dad died of a massive heart attack in 1999, brought on, the doctors told us, by an enlarged heart. The cause of death inspired some people, usually well-meaning outsiders, to put a positive spin on our tragedy.

“He died as he lived,” they’d tell us. “With a big heart.”

They were just trying to make us feel better, I suppose, but it only managed to piss us off. We didn’t want to be cheered up. My brother and I stopped telling people about the enlarged heart and began announcing that he had, in fact, died from bowel cancer. Try to make a sentimental aphorism out of that.

“He died as he lived, with irritable, inflamed bowels.”

We buried him in a small cemetery in northern Michigan, near our summer home, and invited only a few close friends and family members to join us. Nobody knew quite what to say. We just stood there and stared quietly at the grave. There seemed to be no point in comforting each other. We were angry and numb and nothing would make any of this okay.

And then a beagle showed up.

At first, we thought it must be somebody’s pet. But he had no tags of any sort, nothing to indicate who he might belong to. For a stray, he seemed unusually friendly. He moved from person to person, pressing his wet nose against their legs. He took a particular interest in our mother, trying at one point to climb her and lick her chin. He sat and watched intently as my brother and I lowered our dad’s urn into the ground. And at the end, he accompanied each person to their cars and waited for them to drive away.

We left the cemetary feeling strangely uplifted. And for a family of mostly agnostics, a little confused. Nobody wanted to admit what we were all clearly thinking; that the dog was our reincarnated father. That didn’t make any sense, we told ourselves. It was silly, really. Did this mean we were Buddhists and never realized it? But even as the logical sides of our brains dismissed it as poppycock, there was a small part of us that wanted to believe, that needed to believe, our dad had come back for one final goodbye.

The next morning, the dog was still the hot topic of conversation. Even the smallest detail took on special significance. We noted how the dog and our dad shared the same color eyes, and how at the funeral he had completely ignored our aunt, who, even in life, he considered to be something of a bitch.

“Did you notice how he smiled at me?” I said. “Dad always used to smile at me like that.”

We wondered if the dog might still be up there, lazily napping near his grave. We couldn’t help ourselves. We piled into the car and drove up to the cemetery. And sure enough, the beagle was waiting for us. But something was different about him this time. He wasn’t the same lovable mutt from yesterday.

He was, well, kind of a jerk.

He snapped at our hands when we tried to pet him. He tore at our pant legs and pushed us to the ground. As we looked on in horror, he began digging at the grave, threatening to unearth our father’s remains. We jumped on him and tried to pull him away, but he easily slipped from our grasps.

“Oh sweet Jesus,” my brother whimpered. “Is he doing what I think he’s doing?”

He was. The beagle was licking his balls. Right in front of us. Right next to the tombstone! We tried to shield our mother’s eyes, but it only made the absurdity of the situation all the more apparent.

“C’mon, dad,” I screamed at him, regretting my words even as they left my mouth. “I know you’re single now and everything, but show some respect for your widow.”

We could think of two possible explanations:

1) The dog was not, and never had been, our dad.

2) Our dad, at least in the afterlife, was an asshole.

We never talked about it again, but we knew we had only ourselves to blame. One spiritual moment should have been enough for anybody, but no, we had to press our luck. If we’d just left well enough alone, we’d still have a pleasant fantasy to shelter us from the grief. But we were greedy, and got exactly what we deserved.

We still return to the cemetery every year. Sometimes we’ll wait around for hours, jumping every time we hear a twig snap, gasping when any forest creature happens to catch our eye. Seven years have passed without a sign of our beagle. Some days, we convince ourselves that there was nothing magical about that dog after all. His owner probably moved out of town years ago. But that hasn’t stopped us from looking, and waiting, and hoping against hope that he isn’t gone forever.

And then, this summer, he finally returned.

We saw him in the distance, running through an open field a good ten yards away. My brother and I both spotted him at once, and started jumping and waving our arms, trying to get his attention. The beagle stopped and looked at us, tilting his head uncertainly. We waited for him to gallop towards us and into our open arms. But instead, he turned and began running in the opposite direction, ignoring our cries.

“Let’s get him,” my brother said.

We jumped into the car and chased after him, following him through dusty back roads at frightening speeds. It never occurred to us to wonder what we might do if we actually caught up with him. What were we expecting? Did we intend to kidnap him? Throw him into the back seat and bring him home with us? And what then? Did we seriously think we could adopt our dead dad? And wouldn’t too more exposure to this beagle just prove what neither of us wanted to find out, that he was an ordinary dog, and we’d just been fooling ourselves all these years?

What we really wanted, I suppose, was a proper goodbye. If he’d done it once, he could do it again. And we’d get it right this time. We’d let him lick our faces and comfort our mom, and we’d tell him all the things we never got a chance to. We wanted our lasting memory of him to be something special, something that we could tell his grandkids about someday. Not some stupid farce with an obnoxious beagle gnawing at our calves and cleaning its junk. We deserved more than that, dammit!

My brother and I said nothing, just stared at the dog as it disappeared from view. ‘Dad, don’t do this,’ I whispered. ‘Just give us one more chance. That’s all we want. One more chance. Just one more. One more. One more.’

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 12:39 am and is filed under Death, Family, Pets & Animals, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.