LET ME TELL you about my first pets. And then my last. It all began with Skeeter, a battle-scarred tomcat who sauntered into my childhood home and gamely tolerated my affections. That is, until the fateful afternoon when he sauntered back out—and never returned. Then came Snoopy. We’d moved into a house at the very end of a windy road in Sullivan, Indiana, surrounded by fields of corn stubble. Snoopy was the type of pooch you’d expect to find hanging about such a place: a wildly, exuberantly vicious farm dog who didn’t have many friends. Only a select few, including me, could safely lay a hand on him. I liked that. It made me feel like I belonged to an exclusive club.
The only bad thing about Snoopy—at least to me—was that he didn’t live long enough. But that’s the deal we make when we live with pets. The part of the contract we don’t talk about. Each time I lose one, I swear I will never face that pain again. And each time, after the worst of the mourning has lifted, I rediscover that the decision is never really mine to make. Because I don’t seek out my animal companions. They find me.
Gracie, a terrier mix I encountered by chance, proved that. My elderly neighbor’s collie needed ear mite drops, but the weather was bad, so I offered to pick the drops up. A shelter was running an adoption event at the store and Gracie, sharing none of my practiced indifference, barked at me from her cage until I finally walked over—just to quiet her down, of course. She lived to 18, an excellent run for a dog, though not nearly long enough. After her came Trudy, a stray cattle dog mix who wandered into my yard as a puppy. It was easy to ignore the fact of our eventual parting as it was so far down the road. But her allotted 14 years were gone in a flash.
Trudy’s passing forced me to face an unwelcome truth: I wasn’t young anymore. The thought of loving and then having to say goodbye to another companion was unbearable. So I declared, with somber finality, that I really was done.
Specifically, I declared this to my ex-wife, who nodded knowingly but said nothing. Some days later, she casually mentioned she had something she wanted to show me. “Something” turned out to be kittens living under a shrub beside her house. She placed a black and white puffball in my hands. When she asked me if I wanted him, I immediately said no with the conviction of a man who absolutely meant it.
But it wasn’t up to me: The kitten promptly curled himself up in the crook of my arm. Today, Arthur still curls up, making sure he’s touching me, every night. And Lenny—his shrub mate—sleeps nearby.
I didn’t go looking for them. I never do. But pets keep finding me, as if they know something I forget in the grief of every farewell: that love doesn’t stop just because it hurts. And maybe that’s the quiet blessing of all the animals who have wandered through my life. None of them stay long enough, but every one stays long enough to matter.
