Charlie

Tonight, the only dog I have ever owned passed away, a month shy of what would have been his sixteenth birthday.

Charlie Brown was adopted by my family in November of 1998, when I was in fourth grade, and we knew early on that Charlie was going to be around for a while—his father was adopted by my uncle, now 50, while he was in college (for historical reference, he was named Spuds MacKenzie). He died in the mid-2000s. And Charlie held up his end of the bargain.

Charlie was always there for me, even if he didn’t know it. Obviously he didn’t know it—even after hearing it thousands upon thousands of times, it’s doubtful he ever learned my name. But whether he really grasped it or not, Charlie was always there.

When my dad and I leapt out of our seats to bob-and-weave after the Rams won the Super Bowl, Charlie was there (startled, and presumably not very happy with us, but nevertheless there). When I needed a hug while watching news coverage on 9/11, Charlie was there. When I was an unhappy high school freshman, totally incapable of making friends after being immersed into a social situation in which a vast majority of my school went to the same middle school which I had not attended, and I felt destined for a permanently lonely existence, Charlie was there. When I overcame my social struggles, and then when I graduated from high school, and then when I went away to college, Charlie was there. When I moved back in after college and when I moved out a year and a half or so later, Charlie was there.

I can say with absolute certainty that Charlie didn’t remember any of those things. I doubt he had memories, really—just enough to know that he loved sitting in one specific recliner in the living room, he hated the sound that a toaster makes, and he had a definitive preference for “human food”. But for me, his presence was valuable in ways I couldn’t begin to measure. It is completely impossible to explain, but I am glad Charlie was there for so many important years of my life. I assume this is the way most pet owners feel—I probably just needed somebody to be my friend, whether it was a human or a small animal, and he was that.

He, like most dogs, was constantly happy. When my family got Charlie, we didn’t even have dial-up; in the ensuing decade and a half, my eyes were opened to a much more cynical world than I had anticipated (whether that was because of the internet or just growing up as a whole, I’m not entirely sure). But Charlie was always happy. Even as he was dying and certainly going through pain, he lit up the lives of not only me but my family. Anybody outside of my family who met Charlie probably didn’t think much of him and I can’t blame them—until he went almost totally deaf late in life, he would bark at just about anybody who walked through or near our front door. But to the four of us, he was a galvanizing ally who kept us together through the enormous changes that happen as a family’s children go from 9 to 25 and from 8 to 23.

I’m sad that Charlie is gone, but I’m happy that he was able to go peacefully, and I’m delighted that he was ever a part of my life.