The Experiment – A 365 Day Search For Happiness

It has been coming. I have been thinking about this as the time approached…

My beloved Tanner pug came to me in May 2011. He was precious beyond words and of the 11 pugs I have adopted in the last dozen years he had a very distinctive personality and a very special place in my heart and home. And he, more than any other pug I have ever had, was terrified beyond all reason of fireworks. Occasional odd fireworks throughout the year set him off. The New Year’s fireworks were a nightmare, but nothing was more dreaded and dreadful than the 4th of July. He wasn’t just afraid, he went insane!

I have a doggie door here in my studio that opens onto a deck and out into a very large fenced backyard. The pugs love it but for the most part, and almost without exception, they would go out to potty and right back in. Some of them never even used it and would wait for me to go out with them which I do several times a day, but Tanner was in and out all day long, from morning till night. and even sometimes in the middle of the night he would go out, once in awhile I had to get up and get him in because he would start barking, but mostly he just went out to the potty I guess, came back in, jumped up and snuggled back in with us and went back to sleep. The night he died, April 6, when he went out at 10 I thought nothing of it, he just did that, but when, 20 minutes later, he had not come back in I went out to check on him he had gone out, down the stairs and just a few feet beyond the deck, laid down and died. It was one of the worst nights of my life, finding him like that. I will never get over it.

But on the 4th of July he would blast out through the doggie door and race so madly around the yard as soon as the fireworks started it was like he just went absolutely insane. I had to go outside and carry him in or he would run frantically until he would literally come in and collapse on the floor. It got so that not only did I have to keep the doggie door locked up so he couldn’t get out but the vet prescribed Xanax for him. It helped. In the last few years it was the only way we got through the times when fireworks were being set off, and the whole time, even with Xanax, he would be uneasy to mildly anxious and I would be a wreck just praying that the hours would go swiftly and it would all be over. I grew up loving fireworks. I have dreaded them, now, for years.

But this is a different time. Tanner is gone. Delilah and Pugsley don’t seem to notice, or if they do it doesn’t bother them. They snuggle close as they always do. I get them out to the potty and then we hunker down. But the thing is as much as I hated it, and dreaded it, I would go through it again in a heartbeat to have my Tanner back. He is gone forever now, and the fireworks will go on, as they always do, but this year they remind me that he is not here, and it breaks my heart. All of a sudden I am filled with a sweeping sadness, and choked up, and teary.

It is 8 now, it is getting dark, they will start soon. I’ve even thought I would like to find a way online to see a live fireworks display, one of the big ones, Macys, say, because I no longer have to worry about them upsetting my small boy. But, in the end, I would rather have him with me. Tonight, remembering cuddling him close, my heart is breaking. Maybe I will find some to watch — I haven’t had cable for over a year so I don’t have any tv to watch them that way — and maybe I won’t, but I’d rather have my boy with me, and it hurts that he is not here.