Today is Dia de los Muertos, a day to honor our loved ones—including our pets. Leslie Smith brings us this Perspective.
He arrived in the spring and left us in the fall, so if you want to take this whole season-inspired analogy to its predictable finish, those eleven and a half years in between comprise the beautiful summer in which everything changed.
We called him Uno because he was our first dog, but from the get-go, there was a duality about him. Somber and at times aloof — yet wholly trusting and compliant, even as he was just getting to know us. Ultimately, routine was king. Breakfast and dinner were served precisely the same times each day or you heard about it. You could schedule a NASA landing based on when he sprang up for his walks.
In that rigidity, he taught me compromise. And in his stoicism, an unmistakable vulnerability overshadowed all else. I still expect to glance in the rear-view mirror and see him sitting upright in the backseat, an earnest school-boy imploring us to keep him safe and protected on the road ahead.
It became impossible to look in his eyes and not see the Universe, the multitudes of other living creatures — their patience and their pain, their joy and terror. The trajectory of my life changed. I quit my day job to travel a path more congruent with what he’d shown me, and I focused my leisure time on that singular passion. This was not a sacrifice. It was the gift of finding purpose and grasping certainty. He gave that to me.