When my last dog lay dying, our family sprawled out a mattress on the floor of our living room in order for her to lay in comfort. With labored breaths and shaky, barely-working legs, she was no longer the spry ball of youth and jubilation she once was.
Her name was Boo and I got her for my eighth birthday.
The floor was her home for her final few weeks and my mother, father, and I each took turns laying down beside her. Some days she had the resilience to walk and smile. On other days, we supported her with arms at her waist as she wobbled through the same yard she once leaped, frolicked, and zig-zagged.
But there were no mounds of snow for her to vault now, nor tall blades of summer grass for her to scour. Just the hard and frigid ground of a forsaken November.
In those empty days when finality ticked closer and we solemnly prepared for her soul to depart, laughter was a scarce commodity. I found a flickering sense of reprieve in the animated TV shows of my childhood. There were passing moments of comfort in the lighthearted shenanigans of SpongeBob SquarePants and The Fairly OddParents. With worn and beaten eyelids, I’d smile a tired smile before returning focus to my dying dog. My best friend. And in her pained eyes I’d be sent hurdling horribly back to the crumbling world around me.
But those vibrant cartoons were a rare source of light in the abyss that I’d begun to wade into. As Boo’s life looked less and less certain and calls to vets became a dark and melancholy routine, I searched for whatever solace I could find.
South Park stands as a raucous convergence between my child and adult worlds. I still remember the day that I first discovered it.
I ambled mischievously into my living room one night at only age ten, a quarter to eleven on the clock and nearly two full hours past my bedtime. Boo looked toward me with the naive curiosity of a still-teething cockapoo.
In those days, she was an uncontainable ball of energy — chewing socks and memory cards and carpets and running in guilty circles of delight when caught in the act. With glossy, innocent eyes, she looked toward me — a silly, open-mouthed smile spread across her face and sparsely dappled curls of black fur glowing softly in the neon of our long-ago-discarded television.
With her whole head turned and her eyes fixed lovingly on mine, the crude stop-motion cutouts danced in the doughy, inexperienced whites beside her pupils. Her cocked head cued my father in to my late night wanderings.
“Ben! What are you doing up?” he asked with a startled half-jump.
Boo full-jumped as she looked toward my dad with a quick-forgiving curiosity. Her ears were overpowered antennae, and her windows to the world darted excitedly from side to side. The potty-mouthed cartoon cutouts continued cursing in the background as I tried to conceal my intrigue.
Boo followed my father at knee height as he escorted me off to a belated bedtime.
Ever since that night, South Park has been the rare show to remain by my side as I’ve aged from a child into a teen and adult. In the abrasive antics of its earliest seasons, I’d found a second home. But a decade and a half later, with that same dog still at my side and the youthful whites of her eyes colored by cataracts, the humor had suddenly begun to strike a sour chord.
As her final hours on earth inched closer, another episode came on and I blearily watched the opening. The episode is called “Raisins.” In it, Butters takes a more central role than we typically see from the relatively static side character.
Butters is somewhat of an anomaly in the world of South Park. In the titular hometown in which the show is set, adults are routinely reduced to childish squabbles as children are presented as the mature and sensible ones. But in their maturity, they exude a comical desensitization and pragmatism that you would never see in real-life ten-year-old children. Incurring gang violence and fighting in the front lines of wars to enduring Kenny’s systematic deaths and even witnessing the rise of the dark lord Cthulu, it’s understandable why the kids have become a little numb to the pandemonium taking place around them.
But Butters stands on the outskirts of the main friend group as a lovable beacon of naivety. In the town that’s seen it all, he retains the innocence and whimsy of childhood.
In “Raisins,” Butters experiences heartbreak for the first time. In the aftermath of his loss, we see him crying on the sidewalk as rain pours and sad music plays. Then, one of the main four characters, Stan, going through a rough patch of his own and flanked by a couple of his new “goth kid” friends, idles closer to Butters.
One of Stan’s new friends sullenly offers to him, “I guess you can join up with us if you want.”
A second chimes in, “Yeah. We’re gonna go to the graveyard and write poems about death and how pointless life is.”
But with a puppy-like perseverance Butters explains, “… No thanks. I love life… I’m sad, but at the same time I’m really happy that something could make me feel that sad. It’s like, it makes me feel alive, you know? It makes me feel human. And the only way I could feel this sad now is if I felt somethin’ really good before. So I have to take the bad with the good, so I guess what I’m feelin’ is like a, beautiful sadness.”
In their simple, cartoonish presentation, I understand the words may not convey much to every reader. But I’d never truly grasped the meaning behind them, despite having seen the episode two or three times over. I had never undergone a loss that made me feel that way before.
And grappling with the terminus I was rapidly approaching, the character’s words came to life in a new light. The realization churned at my core.
It hurt so much to lose Boo because our time together was so incredibly special. It tore my heart in two to say goodbye because housed within the walls of her ancient incarnation were echoes of each adventure we’d ever gone on and every experience we’d ever shared.
In Butters’ simple, resilient words were everything Boo and I had lived through together over the past seventeen years.
They spoke to every heartbreak, election, and graduation she was there for, and each and every walk we’d ever taken, every game of tug of war we’d ever played, and every time she unfurled from a little black ball in the morning to groan a sleepy good morning before I’d hurry off to catch my school bus.
Moving through the murky darkness of Boo’s aged and loving eyes, I saw a million passing moments. Some frenetic, some fraught, and others suspended frozen.
I saw each time I threw a stone into the shallow streams that wound their way between the serpentine streets of our quiet Pennsylvania town. And I saw each time she dashed toward the ripples that emerged out from the splash zone in the quiet, concentric circles of slow-moving August days. I saw the water that dripped from her graying chin as she eagerly gestured for me to toss another and another and another.
I saw her head stuck out the car window on a warm day in march, daffodils blooming, her ears flapping in the breeze, and a look of unremitting ecstasy stretched wide across her face.
I saw a life full of joy hovering beside a chasm of despair slowly cracking open. I felt lost — adrift amid a stormy, stormy sea of life.
Looking out over the sheer magnitude of the void she’d create left me raw, empty, and numb. But it was a pain that made me feel alive. In eyes preparing to leave this world behind were the soaring peaks of every second we’d spent together.
It was in that moment that I decided to name our next dog Butters.
For the first time, as Boo lay dying, I shed a tear not because her time in this world was coming to an end, but because she was ever a part of my life at all. Because I knew she’d always be a part of me.
In her affectionate and unfocused eyes and in those final, labored breaths I found a beautiful verification of one of my most eccentric beliefs — that moments exist beside one another. That times passed and memories to be made float in a strange and incomprehensible perpetuity.
That the present second is as palpable as every other.
That memories are more alive than they seem — that somewhere I can’t quite touch, the story of Boo and I continues. In the lines of a book whose pages I can’t turn back but whose words have changed me all the same. It’s just another me that’s alive on those pages — a person I recall. A person I am no longer.
As Boo lay dying, in her foggy mind were passing still frames of every car she’d ever ridden, stone she’d ever chased, and game she’d ever played. Every time we told her how much we loved her and how very, very hard this life would be if she ever left our side.
But in those departing eyes I saw that gone isn’t always as gone as it seems. There are cars we continue to ride and stones we continue to chase and games we continue to play in some other time and some other place.
I have suffered a similar loss. They live in our hearts, close, forever.
Beautiful and poignant. I’ve been through some terrible stuff but losing a beloved pet is one of the hardest. Thank you for sharing Boo with us.