CarrollBlog 1.10


Two hours before my dog Jack died, I took him to see the Christmas trees. A week ago it was discovered that he had cancer everywhere although he was only six years old. The doctor said the disease was moving so fast that the kindest thing I could do was to put Jack to sleep while he was still alert and filled with lebensfreude, as the German language puts it. The greatest thing about Jack was how funny he was. I have never owned a dog that made me laugh as much as he did. His last morning was no exception. For some reason, the dog had always loved Christmas trees. He loved to smell them and rub up against them. When there was a tree in the house over the holidays he was in heaven. To everyones amusement, he would delicately sniff it all the time and stand unmoving as if stoned under its branches for long minutes so that he could feel them on his back. A year ago I wrote about there being collection places around Vienna after Christmas where you can leave your tree and eventually city workers will take them away to the dump. One of these drop off places is in the park across the street, so on our final walk together I purposely took him to see the trees. It was the first week of the new year and most people in the neighborhood had already brought their trees or Christmas wreaths and made a giant pile of them. Jack was mesmerized. He kept looking at them and then up at me as if to say, isnt that amazing! Look at how many there are! After gazing in wonder for a while, he literally threw himself into that high pile, like a musician doing a stage dive into the audience. He burrowed and leapt around and grunted in total delight. His lungs had been badly damaged by the cancer so he was very short of breath. But he would not stop flipping and flopping. A young couple walking by stopped to watch him. They started laughing because he was so nutty in his ecstasy. Back and forth, wiggle waggle, stop, wiggle waggle some more. They laughed, my beloved friend Jack frolicked, and the only thing I wanted in the whole world then was for that moment to go on and on.

--Jonathan Carroll

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."
Leonard Cohen