BY CARLA KELLEY
Ginger was a bouncy, happy wheaten terrier. Her fur was silky white, and she had perky pink and white ears. We had owned each other since she was a puppy. I was in the habit of confiding in Ginger whenever we were out walking. Ginger was my free doggie therapist, the best listener ever.
Ginger was diagnosed with a blood disease when she was eight years old. She did well for a while, but the disease caught up with her. After a bad night with a very sick dog, my partner Andy and I took her to an emergency clinic.
The clinic offered some phenomenally expensive treatment but warned that Ginger’s condition was incurable. I dreaded answering the phone each day: “Ginger’s medical charges for today come to $1125.00. Do you wish to pay by credit card?”
This could not continue. So after the bills mounted to almost $13,000, we declined further treatment and took Ginger home.
A few days later, Ginger went out to the backyard to do her morning rounds. We were sipping our coffee when she just keeled over sideways and did not get up. We rushed her back to the emergency vet, but after one look, they ushered us into their bereavement room.
We were devastated. As our tears streamed over her thin white body, an employee suggested that we might benefit from a grief counseling session. Free of charge, he said.
We signed up.
We arrived a little early for our group therapy session. We watched as a lot of people, maybe 15 or 16, crowded into a room barely big enough to hold us all. We took seats around a table where a therapist sat at one end. There was hardly room for all the chairs. Once we found seats, we were hemmed in on all sides.
The therapist asked someone to shut the door. It closed with a thud.
I noticed that most people clutched pet photos. Many had notebooks. Some had thick sheaves of handwritten notes. One couple had a huge diary, photographically illustrated. I elbowed Andy and whispered, “We didn’t bring any props.”
The therapist invited us to share our pet loss grief, one at a time. She started the process at the far end from where we were sitting. Other than making soothing noises at appropriate moments, she was silent.
The other grievers, however, had a great deal to say. One by one, each described the heart-breaking loss of their perfect, beloved pet. At length. Sometimes at great length.
The second speaker, for example, described in detail the long agony of his beloved dog’s demise. He read to us from copious notes. He had pictures to show. He talked and talked and talked. I muttered, “How long is he going to talk!” Andy made a shushing noise.
After a half hour had elapsed and many tissues had been soaked with tears, we got around to the demise of the third pet. I began mentally counting mourners and multiplying by minutes. My calculations were clear: we were never getting out of there.
The third guy began to talk about the loss of his cat. He had notes. He had photographs, in an album he wanted to pass around. I was still computing how long we would be there and only half listening when I heard him say that his beloved cat had died at age two. Two? He had owned this pet for less than two years. What was this?
He began to weep. When he could speak again, he referred to the last two grief sessions he had attended, right here in this room. The last two of the many sessions he had been attending since the cat gave up his kitty ghost, three years ago.
I looked at Andy. We both looked at the door. Shut and inaccessible from where we were sitting. We were trapped.
Andy squeezed my hand. We settled in for the long haul, a very long haul. The protocol was to let the grieving pet owner talk for as long as they wanted. The two-year-old cat’s owner was in the minority of folks who had been attending these sessions for years, but he was certainly not the only owner of a dead pet who had been coming for many, many months.
I began to realize that this pet grief therapy was really people therapy. For many of the folks here, this might be the only therapy they could afford (free!) or perhaps, for the men, the only therapy they would not be too embarrassed to seek.
Pet therapy was fulfilling an important function that had very little to do with pets and a whole lot to do with human loneliness and isolation.
The session felt like it lasted at least a decade but eventually it was our turn. I described Ginger, briefly. I was chagrined to have no photo to show of the most beautiful wheaten terrier that ever lived. I said we were very, very sad.
I made a little joke: “I loved Ginger so much, I even bought her a timeshare on the Oregon Coast, her favorite place.” Then I described how I convinced the developer of a new resort to include a dog-friendly unit, in which I bought a share.
I sat down. No tears came. Andy did pretty much the same, maybe with a tear or two. Total time elapsed for Ginger: 7 minutes.
We were pretty near the end of the line. The last grieving pet parents were a nice young couple. They had brought pictures (of course!) of their wonderful Corgi, now deceased. The wife got through with her description and then turned to me and said, “We bought our Corgi a timeshare on the Oregon Coast too!”
The session finally ended, and we broke for the door. Once outside and able to breathe again, we chatted with that nice couple next to us and decided to go out for a beer. We went to the Lucky Lab Tavern.
“Where is the timeshare you bought for your dog?” I asked our new friends. Pacific City, said the Corgi’s owner. “So is ours,” I said. We compared notes. We had in fact bought shares in the same unit in the same timeshare.
We laughed, the kind of semi-hysterical laughing people do when they have survived an ordeal. As we parted, we said what a pity it was that we would likely never see each other at the beach, since we owned shares of the same unit. They had already put down a deposit on another Corgi puppy.
It took two years before we were ready to get another dog. Sumatra the Labradoodle is a wonderful dog, but Ginger is still my main confidant, particularly when I go walking. Ginger took my heart and kept it.
When Sumatra passes away, I’ll get my grief counseling from Ginger. One-on-one.
