The last of the Great Siberian Husky Clan has died this week. Bobo was put to peaceful sleep on Thursday, September 15, almost a year to the day that his dear mother, Neli, died.

I miss him terribly, just as I had missed his mother…but maybe more.

Bobo is the last of a string of dogs my deceased wife and I had started collecting way back in the early ‘80s. First there was Troika. She lived to be 14 and died soon after a serious surgery when we had left her at the vet’s for a blood test. Soon after came Kijé, then Neli, and their progeny, Bobo.

Bobo was named after my first dog Beau, who came from a litter of mongrel Puerto Rican dogs we reluctantly “allowed” to come into the world from our adopted female dog, Gigi. Dogs have been a complicated thing in my family mythology.

So Bo is gone. The last of the line.

I am flooded with a variety of feelings over this one. The obvious one being that I miss him very much and wished he had not had to go. I am also worried that maybe I should have let him live longer, albeit suffering. What is good enough for humans should be good enough for dogs, don’t you think? Or is it the other way around? I watched my wife, Janice, suffer, and she was around way much longer than Bo was. If she had been a dog, maybe someone would have had mercy on her and helped her exit gracefully. But maybe that is supposed to be the way of humans, since we are all so darn sure once you are dead, you are gone forever…

I also know, losing Bo, that I have truly made the transition from my old life into my new one. Bo, having lost his constant companion a year ago, held on to see me through to my new life in Canada. He loved so much making the cross-country trip, checking out each new hotel bed every night that we stopped for the day. Once he got here though he started to shut down. He never really seemed to enjoy his new home, and although he didn’t seem depressed, he did not seem very interested either.

The vet said that more than likely his disease had been churning around in his body for quite some time. In hindsight it did seem that way. And once again, I can say that one of my dogs, whether the choice was conscious or not, has been here for me, totally and unconditionally, at my time of need. I had wanted him to live long enough to enjoy his archaic ancestral love of snow, but alas, that was not meant to be. He did get to enjoy one small snowstorm when we arrived last March. Maybe that was enough.

I am again, after experiencing the death of four very close dog companions, struck by the profundity of the occasion. If I didn’t know better, in my materialist brain-washed upbringing, I would say that these creatures were all heavenly sent. Certainly they did have lives of their own, but whatever connection that I created with them, and whatever role they played in that connection, seems more than just happenstance and projection.

Maybe dogs are really angels.

Maybe anything that we love, dog, cat, human, trees, ocean, sunset, are all angels. Anything that we allow to pull the love out of us is divine…and that is pretty much anything if we let it.

This can be paradoxical, as I certainly feel that Bo “deserves” more love than a stone or a tree. But it isn’t Bo that is the love—that awareness comes from me. Bo is simply a conduit for me to experience the purity and unifying perfection of love as it emanates from my own being.

Maybe I am getting too woo woo here. But I do think, for me, this is going somewhere that makes sense. I think at this level of conscious evolution we may only be capable of seeing love through other living beings. Even for humans it is not a shared perspective to love animals almost as much as we love our fellow humans. In many cultures and many other parts of the world this sort of love just doesn’t exist. So when will it be that love is pulled out of us by nature alone? Or by the earth itself?—so we no longer treat it as an unfeeling object, but rather treat it as what it is, a reflection of ourselves, or more accurately, the very thing that is ourselves.

I felt that way about Bo…when he lay dying with his head in my lap, I truly died with him. I felt the suffering of the world, of the universe, in that very moment. And now, beyond that moment of his sorrowful death, I feel the joy and love of the world and the entire universe through his life…through my life…through the life of those others I have lost…my wife…my father…my friends who have died and my other beloved pets…

But I also feel the love Bo had given me present now in all things dear to me…in my new life he so gracefully accompanied me into, my beautiful and loving new wife, and my precious sisters, stepfather, dear mother and beloved friends.

One day, maybe a mere stone will be enough to pull the love out. But that level of consciousness, alas, will for me come only in another lifetime.

For now, let me say farewell to my dear companion—and a sincere thank you for being in my life and making me more than I was before I met you. Thank you.

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