Part 2: My Dying 8-Year-Old’s Last Wish Was a Dog — At the Shelter, He Walked Past All the Puppies and Stopped at the One Cage Marked “Terminal”

Part 2

I should tell you about the way Eli looked at things, because you cannot understand what he did in that aisle without understanding how that boy had learned to see.

Sick children see differently. I did not know this before Eli got sick, and I wish I had never had to learn it, but it is true. A child who has spent two years in hospitals, who has watched other children in the ward arrive and not leave, who has had the machinery of dying explained to him in eight-year-old terms because he insisted on the truth — that child develops a kind of vision the rest of us don’t have. He stops seeing the surface of things. He sees what state a thing is in. He sees who is scared and hiding it. He sees, instantly, who else is sick.\

My name is Dana. Eli was my only child.

Here is the small thing, the thing I clocked in that aisle and did not understand until later.

As Eli rolled past the cages, he wasn’t looking at the dogs the way you or I look at dogs at a shelter — checking for cute, for size, for color, for which one bounds up to the bars. He was doing something else. He was slowing down at certain cages and speeding past others, and there was a pattern to it, and the pattern was not about which dogs were appealing.

He slowed at the tired ones.

He slowed at the gray-muzzled ones, the ones lying down in the back of their runs, the ones who lifted their heads at him slowly instead of leaping up. He was reading them the way the ward had taught him to read a hospital hallway — not who is the most fun, but who else is where I am.

I didn’t understand it then. I’m not sure I’d have understood it at all if he hadn’t stopped, finally, at the very last cage, and said the thing he said.

But it mattered. The way he slowed at the tired ones. That mattered more than I knew.

Part 3

He stopped at the last run on the left.

There was a golden retriever in it. An old one. Thirteen years old, the card said — ancient, for a golden. His coat had gone the pale ivory that old goldens go, and it was thin over his hips, and he was lying down on the concrete with his chin on his paws, and he did not get up when Eli’s wheelchair stopped at the bars.

He just opened his eyes. And he looked at my son.

The card on the cage I will remember until I die. It had his name — they’d called him Sunny — and his age, and then, in the shelter’s careful, kind, terrible shorthand, the words: Terminal. Comfort care only. Not available for general adoption.

Cancer. The same broad ugly word that lived in my son. The dog had it too, somewhere in him, and the shelter had stopped trying to treat it and was just keeping him comfortable, giving an old dog whatever good days were left in a back run that smelled of bleach.

A volunteer hurried over, because she’d seen where Eli had stopped, and she said, gently, “Oh, sweetheart, not that one — let me show you the puppies up front, there are some really special—”

And Eli said, “I want this one.”

His father knelt down by the chair. I knelt on the other side. And we did the thing parents do, the thing I am not proud of and would do again, because we were trying to protect him from one more loss in a life that had been nothing but loss. We said, gently, baby, that dog is very sick. That dog is going to die soon. Wouldn’t you rather have a puppy, a healthy one, one that can play with you, one that will be around for a long time?

Eli looked at me. He had his father’s eyes and an old man’s patience, and he looked at me with both, and he said:

“He’s sick like me.”

I could not speak.

“He’s sick like me,” Eli said again, quietly, like he was explaining something simple to people who were having trouble with it. “The puppies don’t know. They don’t understand. He understands. We’re the same.” He looked back at the old dog through the bars. “We understand each other.”

The volunteer had stopped moving. Eli’s father had his hand over his mouth. And the old golden, Sunny, who had not gotten up for any of us, pushed himself slowly to his feet on his thin old legs, walked the three steps to the front of his cage, and lay back down again — right against the bars, as close to my son’s wheelchair as the cage would let him get.

And he sighed. And he closed his eyes. Next to Eli. Like he’d been waiting.

We took the old dog home.

It took some doing — the shelter’s policy, the foundation’s coordination, a vet’s sign-off — but the people in that building looked at my bald son and his dying dog pressed together through the bars, and every rule bent. By that evening, Sunny was in our house.

Part 4

I want to tell you about the months they had, because they were not the months anyone pictures, and they were the most peaceful months of my son’s entire illness.

They did not run and play. I had pictured, in the puppy version, a boy and a dog tearing around a yard. That is not what this was. Eli could not run, and Sunny could not run, and neither of them wanted to. What they wanted, it turned out, was each other, lying down, quietly, in the light.

Eli’s bed was by a window that looked out over the backyard, and that is where they spent their days. Eli propped up on his pillows, Sunny stretched out alongside him on top of the covers — we stopped pretending the dog wasn’t allowed on the bed within about six hours — the two of them side by side, looking out the window at the birds and the changing light and the ordinary world going on without them.

They napped. God, how they napped. Two sick bodies that tired easily, sleeping in the afternoon sun, Eli’s hand resting in the fur of Sunny’s neck, the dog’s breathing and the boy’s breathing slowly falling into the same rhythm. I would stand in the doorway and watch them sleep and feel something I did not have a word for then and barely have one for now — something that was grief and peace at exactly the same time, occupying the same space, refusing to cancel each other out.

They understood each other. Eli had been right, the way he was always right. The puppies would have wanted to play, would have needed more than my exhausted son could give, would have been one more thing that loved him too hard at a time when everything loved him too hard. Sunny didn’t need him to be anything but what he was. Sunny was tired in exactly the way Eli was tired. They met each other at the exact place they both were, which was near the end, and they kept each other company there.

Eli talked to him. I heard it, sometimes, through the door. He told Sunny things. He told that old dog things he didn’t tell me or his father, and I made my peace with that, because there are things a dying child should get to say to someone who isn’t going to cry, and Sunny never cried. Sunny just listened, with his chin on Eli’s leg, and his old eyes half-closed, and his tail giving one slow thump when Eli’s voice rose into a question.

For three months, my son was not the sickest one in the room. He had a friend who was right there with him. And it gave him something I had not been able to give him with all the love I had, which was the simple, enormous relief of not being alone in it.

Part 5

Sunny went first.

It was a morning in June. He had been slowing even more for a few days — we knew, the way you learn to know — and that morning he did not get up when Eli woke. He had died in the night, on the bed, alongside my son, in his sleep, with his head near Eli’s hand.

We were terrified of what it would do to Eli. We had braced for it, talked to the hospice counselor about it, rehearsed how we would handle our boy’s grief on top of everything else his small body was already carrying.

Eli did not fall apart.

He woke, and he understood right away — he always understood right away — and he put his hand on Sunny’s still side, and he was quiet for a long time. And then he did not cry, not much, just a few tears that he wiped with the back of his hand like they were a small thing.

And he said the words that I have carried every single day since, the words that are on the stone now, the words that an eight-year-old said to comfort his grown parents instead of the other way around.

He said: “It’s okay. My friend went first to clear the way.”

I made a sound. I couldn’t help it.

“He went ahead,” Eli said, patient, certain, explaining it to us the way he’d explained the cage. “He’s going to get there first and get it ready. And then I’m going to come after him.” He looked out the window, at the backyard, at the light. “And then we’re going to run. Both of us. On the other side. Where nobody’s sick.”

Part 6

I have turned that morning over in my hands more times than I can count, and here is what I have come to understand about my son, and about the choice he made in that kennel aisle.

Eli had not chosen a dying dog by accident, and he had not chosen one out of pity. He had chosen Sunny because Sunny was the only one in that whole building who was where Eli was. Everyone in Eli’s life — me, his father, the doctors, the nurses, the puppies up front — everyone was on the living side of a line that Eli was on the other side of. We loved him across that line. We could not stand on it with him. We were all, in our way, the healthy puppies: full of life he no longer had, wanting things from him he could no longer give, unable to truly understand the country he was already living in.

Sunny was the only one standing in that country with him.

That was what Eli saw in the aisle, slowing at the tired cages, reading the dogs the way the ward had taught him to read a hallway. He wasn’t looking for a companion for the living months. He was looking for a companion for the dying ones. He knew, better than his own parents, exactly what he needed, and what he needed was not a beginning. It was someone to be at the end with.

And the thing he said when Sunny died — he went first to clear the way — I understand that now too. Eli had spent two years watching people be afraid of his death. Everyone around him was braced against it, fighting it, grieving it in advance, and a child feels that, a child carries the weight of everyone’s terror about his own dying. But Sunny had just done it. Calmly. In his sleep. In the morning light. Sunny had shown my son that the thing everyone was so afraid of could be done gently, could be done first, could be done by a friend — and that made it, for Eli, not a terror but a path. A thing his friend had already walked, and left footprints on, so Eli wouldn’t have to find the way alone.

The old dog gave my son the one thing none of us could. He went ahead.

Part 7

Eli died two months later, in August, in the same bed, by the same window.

He was not afraid. I need to say that, because it is the thing that lets me get up in the mornings. My son was not afraid at the end, and I believe — I have to believe, and I do believe — that a thirteen-year-old golden retriever named Sunny is the reason. Eli had watched his friend go first, gently, into the light, and he was not walking into the dark. He was following someone he loved down a path that had already been cleared.

His last clear request, a few days before, was about the dog.

We had kept Sunny’s ashes. We hadn’t known what else to do with them, and we couldn’t bear to scatter them while Eli was still here, so they sat in a small wooden box on the windowsill where the two of them used to watch the birds.

And Eli asked us — quiet, certain, the way he asked everything — to put them together. His and Sunny’s. He didn’t want to be buried alone. He wanted to be with his friend, the way they had been on the bed all those afternoons, side by side in the light.

So that is what we did.

We had them placed together. My son and his dog, the two friends who had understood each other when nobody else in the world could, resting in the same place, the way Eli wanted, the way they had spent their last good months — not apart, never apart, side by side.

Part 8

There is a stone now, in a quiet place, under a tree that goes gold in the fall.

It has my son’s name on it, and the dog’s, and the dates, which are too close together, which I cannot look at without my chest caving in. And under the names there is a line that Eli’s own words wrote, that I only arranged into sentences. I will leave you with it, because there is nothing I could add that would not make it smaller.

Two friends who understood each other.

Now they run.

I picture it, on the bad days, which is most days. I picture the two of them on the other side, the boy and the golden, both of them whole now, both of them well, neither of them the sickest one in any room ever again.

Eli said they would run.

I believe my son.

He always understood things before the rest of us were ready.

Follow this page for more stories about the ones who understand each other when no one else can, and the friends who go first to clear the way.

This is a heavy one, and if reading it stirred up something you’re carrying — about a child, about illness, about a loss of your own — please don’t sit with it alone. Talking to someone you trust, or a counselor, can help. I’m here if you want to talk through any of it.