Part 2: My Father Was Seventy-Five and Dying in Hospice. On His Last Night, He Asked for One Thing — to Have His Old Pit Bull Lifted Onto His Chest. What the Dog Did After My Father Stopped Breathing, and What the Dog Did One Week Later, Is Why Our Motorcycle Club Still Rides Past That Field Every Year.

Part 2

I want to tell you about the Harley first, because the Harley is the thing that makes the rest of it land.

When it became clear that my father’s time was measured in days, and he moved into the hospice, my father did not complain and did not rage and did not, in any way I ever saw, feel sorry for himself. But there was one thing he said, more than once, quietly, looking out the window of that room. He said he wished he could see his bike.

It was a 1970s Harley. He had owned it for over forty years. He had rebuilt it more times than I could count, with his own hands, in our garage, on weekends, my whole childhood. That motorcycle was not a possession. It was a member of the family. It was, in a real way, the physical object that held fifty years of my father’s life.

So my father’s club, and I, decided to do a thing.

We could not give my father a ride. He was far past that. But we could bring the bike to him. And so, with the quiet permission of a hospice staff who understood — and I want to say this clearly, hospice nurses are some of the finest people I have ever encountered, and they understood completely — a group of my father’s club brothers, gray-bearded men in their sixties and seventies, carefully rolled my father’s Harley-Davidson in through the wide doors of that hospice, down the hall, and into the corner of his room.

My father did not say much when he saw it. He was not a man who said much. But he looked at it for a long time, and the corner of his mouth went up, and his eyes did something, and I watched fifty years move across my father’s face.

The bike stayed in the corner of his room for his last days. He could not ride it. He could barely turn his head toward it by the end. But it was there, and I think — I believe this — I think it mattered to my father, in those last days, to be dying in a room that had his Harley in it. To not be only a sick old man in a bed. To be, still, to the very end, the man that motorcycle made him.

And the dog was there too. Diesel was at the hospice the whole time. The staff allowed it; they will tell you, those nurses, that they have learned not to separate the dying from the animals who love them. Diesel lay on the floor by my father’s bed, an old gray-muzzled Pit Bull, fourteen years old now himself, keeping his own quiet watch.

The Harley in the corner. The dog on the floor. That was the room, on the last night.

Part 3

I want to tell you about the last night itself, because I was there, and my sister was there, and I am going to tell it the way it happened.

The hospice nurses had told us, gently, that afternoon, that they believed it was close. They are very good at knowing. And so my sister and I had settled in for the night in that room, the way families do, prepared to simply be there, however long it took.

My father was mostly not speaking by then. The sickness and the medication had taken most of his words, and what was left he spent carefully.

And late that night, my father opened his eyes, and he looked at me, and he gathered himself, and he spent some of those last few words.

He said: “Diesel. Put him up here.”

I understood him. He wanted the dog on the bed.

I want to tell you that I hesitated, for just a second, because I am a practical man and there were tubes and there was equipment and my father was so terribly fragile. But the nurse who was in the room — and I will be grateful to her forever — the nurse just looked at me and gave the smallest nod, the nod of a person who has been present for many last nights and knows what the last nights are actually for.

So I bent down, and I picked up Diesel — fourteen years old, heavy, slow, an old dog with old hips — and I lifted him up onto my father’s bed.

And Diesel, with a care that I did not have to teach him, climbed the rest of the way himself, and he lay down, very gently, the full length of his old body along my father’s chest, and he put his graying head down under my father’s chin.

And my father’s hand — the old leather hand, the hand that had rebuilt a Harley a hundred times — came up off the blanket and rested on the dog’s back.

And my father let out a breath, a long one, and his face, in the low yellow light of that room, with his motorcycle in the corner and his dog on his chest, was the most peaceful I had seen it in months.

My father died about thirty minutes later.

He died exactly like that. He did not speak again. He simply, somewhere in that half hour, with his hand on Diesel’s back, stopped — the way the nurses had told us it would be, quiet, and gradual, and gentle.

And Diesel did not move.

Part 4

I want to tell you about the four hours, because the four hours are the part of this I think about most, and they are the part I understood the least at the time.

When the nurse confirmed, quietly, that my father was gone, my sister and I did the things you do — we held each other, we cried, we sat. And the dog stayed exactly where he was. Diesel lay along my father’s chest, his head under my father’s chin, and he did not move.

I want to be clear about what I mean. Diesel was not asleep. His eyes were open. He was not distressed — he did not whine, he did not bark, he did not do any of the frantic things. He simply lay on my father, with total stillness, and he stayed.

After a while, I moved to lift him down. It seemed like the thing to do. And the nurse — the same nurse — put her hand very lightly on my arm, and she said, softly: “Let him. There’s no hurry now. Let him stay as long as he needs.”

So we let him.

Diesel stayed on my father’s chest for four hours.

Four hours, in that low-lit room, with the Harley in the corner and my father gone and his old Pit Bull lying the length of him, keeping a watch that the rest of us did not fully understand and did not have the right to interrupt. The hospice let it happen. They are extraordinary, those people. They understood that the room did not belong to procedure that night. It belonged to my father, and to the dog who was not finished saying goodbye.

And after four hours, it was my own son — my father’s grandson, a young man in his twenties who had loved his grandfather and that dog his whole life — it was my son who finally went to the bed, and gathered Diesel up into his arms, gently, the way you lift something sacred, and carried him out of the room.

Diesel let him. He did not resist. He had stayed for as long as he had needed to stay, and then he let himself be carried.

I thought, that night, that the hardest part was behind us.

It was not. Because Diesel was not finished either.

Part 5

I want to tell you about the week that followed, and I am going to tell it carefully and honestly.

We took Diesel home — to my house, my family’s house, where he was loved, where he had been many times, where there were people who knew him and would care for him. We did everything right. We made him comfortable. We grieved my father and we tended my father’s dog, and we expected, the way you expect, that an old dog who had lost his person would grieve too, and would be sad for a while, and would then, slowly, the way they do, go on.

Diesel did not go on.

Diesel, from the night my father died, declined. He did not become sick in a way the vet could fully name. He simply began, quietly and steadily, to let go. He ate less, and then very little, and then not at all. He slept more. He grew still in the way that the old ones grow still. He was not in pain — we made very sure of that, the vet made very sure of that — but he was, unmistakably, leaving.

Diesel died one week after my father. Almost exactly one week, in his sleep, at my house, an old dog who had been comfortable and cared-for and was simply, gently, done.

I took it hard. I want to admit that. I had buried my father seven days before, and now I was holding his dog, and it felt like one loss being made to happen twice.

And it was the veterinarian — a kind woman who had known Diesel for years — who said the thing that changed how I understood all of it.

I had asked her, the way you ask, whether there had been something we missed, something we could have done. And she told me, gently, that there was not. And then she told me something about old dogs and the people they belong to.

She said that there is a thing that happens, sometimes, with a very old dog and a person it has bonded to with its whole self. She said it is not sickness exactly, and it is not a thing medicine has a clean word for. She said that some dogs, when their person goes, simply make a choice — not a choice the way we make choices, but something underneath that, something in the deepest part of an animal that has organized its entire being around one person.

She said: “Some dogs decide not to follow you back.”

She said: “Diesel did the thing he had done his whole life. He went where Earl went. Earl went somewhere Diesel couldn’t be carried in a sidecar — and Diesel, in the only way left to him, followed anyway. I have seen it before, Wade. It is rare, and it is real, and there was nothing you could have done, because it was never a thing that was yours to fix. It was between the two of them. It always was.”

Part 6

I want to tell you what my son did, because my son, who was in his twenties, understood something faster than the rest of us, and what he did is the reason this story has the ending it has.

My son came to me, after Diesel died, and he said that he did not think my grandfather and the dog should be separated. He said it plainly. He said: “Granddad and Diesel did everything together for three years. Diesel followed him out of this world on purpose. We can’t put them in two different places now.”

And he was right. The moment he said it, every one of us knew he was right.

So we did a thing that is not the ordinary thing, and we were able to do it because my family has a piece of land — a field, in rural Kansas, that had been my father’s, flat and open under a very large sky, the kind of country my father had ridden across his whole life.

We buried them there. Together. The same day — we had held Diesel that week so that we could do this, so that my father and his dog could be put into the earth on the same afternoon, in the same field, side by side.

Two graves. Two stones. Side by side in the middle of an open Kansas field, under that enormous sky.

And my son chose what the stones would say, and I want to tell you what they say, because I think it is the truest pair of sentences I have ever read.

On Diesel’s stone, it says:

HE CHOSE TO FOLLOW.

And on my father’s stone, it says:

I WILL WAIT.

That is all. Two stones, a few feet apart, in a field. One of them promising to follow. The other one promising to wait. And whoever stands in that field and reads them, in either order, understands the whole of it without another word needing to be said.

Part 7

I want to tell you about the club, because the club did something, and they have kept doing it, and it has become the thing I am proudest of in this entire story.

My father’s motorcycle club — the gray-bearded men who had rolled his Harley into a hospice room — came to the burial. Of course they came. They came in a long, slow rumble of motorcycles down a dirt road in rural Kansas, and they stood in that field in their leather, a row of old riders, while my father and his dog were put into the ground.

And about a year later, on the anniversary, they came back.

Nobody had asked them to. They simply came. The club rode out, that day, on a route that took them down the dirt road that runs along the edge of my father’s field — and they did not stop, and they did not make speeches, and they did not turn it into a ceremony.

They just rode past. The whole club, in a long line, rolling slow past the two stones in the field.

And every one of them, as they passed the graves, lifted one hand off the handlebars, and waved.

That was all. No words. A line of old bikers, riding slow past a field, each one raising a hand to a man and a dog in the ground. The way you wave at a brother you are passing on the road. The way my father had waved at ten thousand riders over fifty years.

They have done it every single year since. It has become, in the plain unspoken way that the realest traditions become things, a tradition. Once a year the club rides the route, and the route goes past the field, and they slow down, and they wave, and they ride on.

My father would have understood that better than any words anyone could have said over him. A biker does not need a speech. A biker needs to know that when his brothers pass by, they still raise a hand. That he is still, out there on the long road, recognized. Still one of them. Still waved at.

They wave at the dog too. I asked one of the old club members about that once — whether the wave was for my father, or for both of them. And he looked at me like I had asked something a little foolish, and he said: “Both of them. Obviously both of them. Diesel rode with this club for three years. He’s a member. You wave at a member.”

Part 8

It has been two years.

I drive out to the field fairly often. It is a quiet place, and a person can think there. Two stones, a few feet apart, in the open, under the Kansas sky.

HE CHOSE TO FOLLOW.

I WILL WAIT.

I have thought a great deal, in two years, about my father’s last night. About the Harley in the corner, brought in by men who loved him, so that he could die as the man he had spent fifty years being. And about the last thing he asked for — not the bike, in the end, not the machine that had been the center of his identity. The dog. The soft thing. The old Pit Bull that nobody else would have taken, that my father took because they were about the same mileage.

My father spent his life being a hard man on a hard road, and at the very end, what he wanted on his chest was not steel. It was a heartbeat.

And the dog, who had followed my father everywhere for three years — in the sidecar, through the house, into the hospice — the dog followed him one more place, the only way he could, one week later.

Some dogs choose not to follow you back. That is what the vet said. I did not understand it that night. I understand it now.

My father is not on that hard road alone. That is the thing I hold. Whatever the road is, now, wherever it goes — he did not have to take it by himself, because an old Pit Bull made a choice, in the deepest part of himself, the same choice he had made every single day for three years.

He went where Earl went.

And once a year, a line of old riders rolls slow past a field in Kansas, and lifts their hands, and waves at the two of them — and rides on into the rest of the long road, the one that all of us are still on, the one my father and his dog are simply a little way ahead on now.

Wait for us, Dad.

We see you out there.

Good boy, Diesel.

Good boy.

You followed him all the way.

Follow this page for more stories about the ones who chose to follow, and the ones who promised to wait.