"Lola"

  

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Lola: May 3, 2010-June 29, 2024”

July 2, 2024

 

“What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never

lose, for all that we love deeply becomes part of us.”

                                                                                                                                Attributed to Helen Keller, 1880-1968

 

Toward the end of E.B. White’s novel Charlotte’s Web, Charlotte is dying and she speaks to her good friend Wilbur: “All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur – this lovely world, these precious days…You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing…After all, what’s a life anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die.” Whether human or animal, in the larger scheme of things, we do only live brief lives; but life is about the love we bring to others during the time we are allotted. Lola, a gentle, but fiercely proud Cockapoo, was liberal in the love she bestowed, and in death she gifted us the sights, sounds and smells she had known.

 

Death is never easy. In his last book before he died, Oh, The Places You’ll Go, Dr, Seuss wrote: “Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened.” Growing up on a small farm in New Hampshire, death was, if not common, not rare. I remember my father burying a horse in our rocky barnyard, and I recall one wintery day digging a shallow grave for a goat that had succumbed. But Lola was the sole pet of our daughter, her husband and their three children. She was integral to their lives. For their children, now 19, 21 and 23, Lola was part of their growing up. In the memories of all who knew her, she lives on. 

 

Every death provides a moment to consider the miracle of life. The “miracle” does not refer to the mechanics of the process nor to the intricate biological composition of a living species, but rather to its uniqueness – the right sperm interacting with the right egg. The odds of that happening are measured in the billions or trillions to one. No living creature could ever live at a time other than when it did. Just as it is a miracle that each of us is alive, Lola’s birth was a miracle. Her good fortune at being born was enhanced by the luck she had in abiding with our daughter and her family. 

 

Dogs, Winston Churchill is alleged to have said, look up at us. Cats he claimed look down on us. He favored pigs who he said look us in the eye. Lola was not subservient, and she did not have the arrogance of a cat. She treated people as equals, loving to cuddle, but then protecting us when an animal appeared on the television screen.

 

On June 7, 1945, General George S. Patton, speaking at Boston’s Copley Hotel, said: “It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived.” Lola’s immediate family especially, but all of us who knew her, including her dog cousins in Darien and Lyme, will miss her. Tears have been, and will be, shed. But we are thankful she lived and was part of our lives for fourteen years.

 

Rest in peace, Lola.