SUNDAY SCARIES: The Brilliance of Dogs

Last week I wrote that Sunday Scaries would be back this week with “June supervising from the couch.” But our sweet June passed away on Monday afternoon. The liver infection we thought she was beating overwhelmed the rest of her organs faster than the medicine could follow. She was only 8 years old and Sunshine and I were with her right up to her last breath, but losing the closest thing to a child we have known has been utterly devastating.

So this week, in honor of Juney, I'm using this forum to share four things she spent her life teaching me in an attempt to work through my grief (and not because they're going to make you a better B2B marketer). Like most dogs, she was the best teacher I ever had.

1. Be the person your dog thinks you are.

Dogs will show us the person we can be by making us want to live up to the vision they have of us. They hold a picture of you that ignores all the daily evidence of mediocrity: the missed deadlines, the short tempers, the meetings you weren't paying attention in, when you were impatient, and when you were unkind. But dogs never once compare you to another owner. Because you're not their best option. You're their idea of what BEST means.

Every time we came home, June would wiggle her whole body along with her tail and prance in circles of happiness. She would bound between Sunshine and me, so ecstatic that we were both home and all together again.

Her “recall” was never perfect outside when there were distractions, but in the apartment, when I whistled, she came running as though I had hugely important news — every whistle, every time — and would arrive ready to save the world or jump onto the bed or both. Most of the time, I just wanted her near me. But no one has ever made me want so badly to be worthy of such attention.

We spend our careers managing a gap — polishing the deck, rehearsing the story, keeping who we are and who we present to the world at a safe distance from each other. June never saw the presentation, (though she slept through quite a few of mine). But dogs see the whole person and know you are worth the whole wiggle. They never revise the assessment.

Dog Wisdom: Somewhere in your life, someone holds a picture of you that ignores the evidence you worry about. Worry less about the faults and be worthy of that picture.

2. Love is mostly attendance

Dogs teach us that love is mostly showing up. Not the speeches, not the gestures — just being there, at the door, at the foot of the bed, at your side, every single time, for their whole life. Dogs always know when you're sad, but their entire treatment plan is close proximity. They know the rest is up to you.

June was an eighty-pound dog with no working theory of her own size, which meant she was a lap dog, and the lap's opinion was not solicited.

She made beds all over the apartment, but her bed next to my desk was where she was permanently parked until the moment she decided the workday was over, at which point she'd walk over and paw my laptop closed. No negotiation. Meeting adjourned.

And when Sunshine and I got COVID and spent a week in bed, June concluded that she, too, would now be in bed for a week. She requested fewer bathroom breaks and never whined about when dinner was served. As far as she was concerned, sick people need one thing, and she was it.

She was right. We're a culture that drafts and redrafts the perfect message and debates the right response to support someone in need until so much time passes we're embarrassed to send anything at all. June never drafted anything. She just did it, leaned her whole weight in, and stayed.

Dog Wisdom: Presence beats polish. Stop wordsmithing and go be an eighty-pound presence in somebody's lap.

3. Every day is magical

June would wake up every single morning like a baby bird hatching, the blanket being pulled back like the shell cracking open, and her smile said that she believed whatever the day contained was probably going to be the best thing that ever happened to her.

She treated the same midday walk she'd taken a thousand times like Dorothy stepping out into technicolor for the first time. We walked variations of the same route every day but she always had a fresh inbox of pee-mails from her best friends, and she read every one, thoroughly, making sure to reply to the most important ones.

June absolutely hated the car, but when we finally arrived at our cabin in the Adirondacks and I rolled the window down, she'd push her whole head into that mountain air, forget about the car ride, and conclude, every time, that she had won the life lottery.

And then there are zoomies, which exist for no reason anyone has ever identified, which in turn suggests to me that joy doesn't actually need a reason either.

Meanwhile, we start every morning by scrolling through our phone, which inevitably leaves us anxious. Then we start our days and tick off the same routine, same meetings, same rhythm. And somewhere along the way we started seeing things in shades of grey and not technicolor. Even though the choice is ours.

Dog Wisdom: Seeing the technicolor version of life is a decision you make.

4. Life on life's terms

Dogs control nothing. Not their dinner, not their address, not their name, not when the people they love leave the house or whether they come back. By every theory we humans hold about happiness — autonomy, agency, optionality, a plan — dogs should be miserable.

They are, instead, the happiest beings any of us has ever met. That's not a coincidence, it's their brilliance.

June never once waited for a guarantee before committing. She ran full speed through every day without knowing how it would go, greeted every stranger without knowing if they'd be kind, loved us completely without a single assurance about what came next. She tried hard at everything. She failed at all sorts of things. (Screen doors, for example). It never once changed her commitment to try again.

There's a phrase in the rooms of AA: life on life's terms. Not your terms. Not the terms you'd negotiate if you were in control because you never are. I understood the phrase the first time I heard it and it's a deeply important part of how I live. But reconciling it and accepting it feels nearly impossible in weeks like this one.

Nothing about Juney's life was up to her, including, in the end, the ending, which was as unfair as it gets. She was vaccinated for leptospirosis and either it wasn't enough or she caught the one strain the vaccine doesn't cover.

But she never made her joy contingent on the terms, so the terms never had power over her joy. We spend our lives white-knuckling variables we don't control, the job, the client, the outcome, the timeline, the relationship, and calling the resulting anxiety “being responsible.”

June would call it a waste of a perfectly good afternoon.

Dog Wisdom: Joy isn't the reward for things working out. It's how you play regardless.

This Week's Red Thread: We Don't Deserve Dogs

People say we don't deserve dogs, and the evidence is on their side.

Consider the resume:

Dogs want to be wherever you are, no matter who you are.

Dogs are terrible liars, incapable of the thing many humans spend their lives perfecting and then convincing themselves is acceptable.

Dogs never check who's watching before they're happy.

Dogs love with everything they are without ever keeping score. Dogs hold grudges for three seconds, which is exactly how long a grudge deserves.

And dogs forgive instantly and completely, which flawed humans read as weakness while the rest of us recognize as the hardest thing a person can do.

Any human who managed all of that at once would be canonized. Dogs manage it daily, for free, and their only ask is that you come home. We're a species that has scripture, philosophy, psychology, and a multi-billion dollar self-help industry and still struggles to manifest the rules a dog is born with:

1. Show up.
2. Love hard.
3. Forgive fast.
4. Play daily.
5. Life isn't fair.

We write and read thousands of books about these things and abandon them when someone cuts us off in traffic. A dog simply IS them, not as a final achievement, but as a starting point. While we spend our whole lives becoming. Dogs arrive finished, and then spend their whole visit waiting for us to catch up.

June did all of it for eight years. She loved us at one temperature the entire time, through the versions of me that deserved it and the versions that didn't. And the deal was on the table from the day we brought her home: you get everything she has, every single day she has, and then you carry it on.

We don't deserve dogs, but we are all better for them.

— NB