The presence that pervades the universe is imperishable, unchanging beyond both is and is not:   how could it ever vanish?

I doubt that you can ever really know someone until you know how they feel, intimately, about death and dying. How they feel about their own death, your death, the deaths of their loved ones.

I had known Matty fairly well for a while, but when he killed his dog I knew that he would we would become—and remain—the best of friends for life.

Death hangs over our lives with a hurricane-like heaviness. Even in the calm eye of the hurricane you know that damage and destruction hover at but a heartbeat’s remove. The only sure thing—and don’t talk to me about taxes, there are people who never pay a nickel on some dreadfully heavy, hefty incomes—is death. That is probably the sum total of what any of us knows for certain.

Death paralyzes us to the point of silence. We won’t talk about it.   We will not confront it. We refuse it the slightest currency.   We deny, we forgo, we banish. Which, to me, makes it all the more impressive when I tell you that I gained a serious, new measure of respect for Matty when he killed his dog.

Even though he’s now a cop, Matty’s hardly a cold-blooded killer.   Rather the opposite, if you want to know the truth.   Hell, he’s never even fired his service revolver in anger that I know of. Spends a lot of time at the firing range. Sure. It’s a requirement.  

We met playing hoops in college. Matty can shoot the lights out (“Good mechanics,” he likes to remind me). Even if a guy’s right in his face, he stays so calm, so cool, and just strokes his stroke. Guys hack him, and he still gets his shot off as if there were nobody else in the gym.

Even in pickup games now, he still shoots like he did in school.   Easy, effortless, smooth. Straight from the elbow, little outward flick of the wrist at the end. “Ball has to come off equally between your index finger and middle finger,” he likes to say in that easy, quiet whisper of his.  “That way, you get that perfect backspin, and if the backspin’s true, you have line. You got good line, that eliminates one of the three prime variables to the shot. After that, all you have to worry about is distance. If your arc is good, that is.”  

Talented as he is, he’s never been the type of guy to get in anybody else’s face, anyhow, anytime.   You’d think that that would have eliminated him from the Police Academy , wouldn’t you?   But no, I guess they were looking for a few “sensitive” guys, and Matty’s certainly that.   Geez, I think Matty’d just fade into the shadows if people’d let him.   He’s so self-effacing that he donates time and money to Big Brothers without even thinking of taking credit for the generous gift of himself.

And he is a gifted sensitive fellow. He can talk classical music and opera until your ears would be soothed by Metallica. No kidding. He knows the librettos to a dozen operas in their original Italian and German—which I find just a little bit bizarre, and I think I’m a pretty open-minded person.

But it’s Rigoletto we’re talking about, here.  “Rigs” for short.   A mutt, really. A mongrel cross between a Lab and some sort of shepherd you’d have to guess by his massive, big-tongued head and the medium-short, light brown hair. A real sweetheart, was Rigs.

Matty had had Rigs since the mutt was a pup. I think from when he was still living at home, finishing up college. Matty has always been something of a homebody—he only moved out of his parents’ place when he married Beth—never much for travel, although he startled us all one school summer when he impulsively took off for Italy to check out the opera houses of Rome , Milan , and Verona .   People can surprise you. Dogs, too.

You could always tell that Rigsy had had some measure of obedience school. He responded alertly to commands “sit,” “down,” and “heel.” And if you said “walk,” he’d raise up on his hind feet and take three or four steps, with his front legs held high in the air like a Lipizzaner stallion. Man. You had the distinct feeling that this mutt was as proud as could be at that feat.

Despite his training, and his immense desire to please—well, Matty, anyway—Rigs retained an extraordinary measure of independence.   Often aloof in his bearing to anyone other than Matty, Rigs had one supreme skill: escape artist. Matty and Beth—some people “cleverly” called them The M & M’s, as her given name is MaryBeth—had a small house and a smaller yard. The fencing has always been a raggedy mixture of field fence, chicken wire, and tattered boards that belie Matty’s otherwise precise and practical nature. I used to rag Matty and Beth about the fence, and the fact that Rigs was always testing the fence’s defenses . . . and always finding a new way out. I’m pretty convinced—though I’d never actually asked him—that he was quietly bemused by Rigsy’s many and varied escapes.

One of Rigsy’s tricks was to walk up the loose field fence, like he was climbing a ladder, until his weight pushed the top of the widely-spaced wire wall over a bit, then leap off onto the other side. When Matty staked the field fence portion, and that was no longer an option, Rigs would dig his way under another portion of the fence where the soil was loose. When Matty lined the foot of the fence with rocks, Rigs’d find miniscule openings in the wire sections that it would take Matty and Beth days to discover. Most of the time Rigs would forget how he’d escaped, so he’d just camp out on the front porch and wait for Matty to let him back into their backyard.

There is a shallow creek bed that meanders along the back edge of Matty’s property, and Rigs would take off along the sandy bottom, lined with water-smoothed stones. The poison oak and blackberry bushes never seemed to bother Rigs, and often times he’d come back scratched and muddy and imperiously happy, his tail wagging so that the whole back half of his body would shimmy in delight.

As energetic as Rigsy could be, he never grew into the size promised by his leonine head and Labrador-sized paws. He probably weighed forty or fifty pounds or so, but his heart was closer in proportion to his noble brow. For a time there had been a nasty Doberman owned by one of Matty’s neighbors, a couple of doors down Spring Street. The damned dog must have outweighed Rigs by sixty pounds or more, and the bully had a menacing look about him that was only intensified by the constant drool drooping from his white-fanged jaws. Not a critter you’d wish to meet in any dimly-lit alley.

Yet Rigsy would stare down the Dobie as if he was some ankle-biting little runt of a dog . . . and the Dobie would take it.   (Maybe dogs aren’t inconvenienced by egos or “face.” Maybe the Dobie simply knew Rigsy was a natural Alpha dog. Or maybe there was some innate intra-canine intelligence being passed back and forth that us bi-pedal creatures will never be privy to. Beats the hell out of me.)

It began to happen when Rigsy was about eleven or twelve.   I remember going on a hike up along Cavedale Road with Matty and Beth. Matty, for all his superficial blandness, loves the out-of-doors. He is particularly fond of thick stands of towering redwoods, to which he gives a spiritual significance. “These are the real cathedral spires,” he loved to tell me when we would walk the woods together. “If there is a god, this is where he or she really lives. This is where one can assess what’s important and what’s not, what’s real and what’s false. Without the impingements of political constraints, financial considerations, or liturgical nonsense.” (To which, as his Greek chorus, I would ritually return, “Okay, okay.   The place is pristine.”)

All Rigsy knew was that he was free to lead the way, which he always did, because he knew well the steep, narrow, two-mile mountain creekside trail. The trail led to a secluded, sunbeam-dappled, pine-scented pool and its enchanting, 75-foot waterfall.   “Looks like ol’ Rigsy’s finally starting to show his age,” I muttered lightly, slightly out of breath from the rugged, uphill trek as we came into sight of the algae-green pool, listening to the refreshing rush of water spraying down from above.

“No, he’s not!” growled Matty under his breath.

 “Geez, sorry.   It just seemed like he wasn’t bounding up the creek with quite the enthusiasm he used to have, the little show-off.”

 “Seemed that way to me, too,” murmured Beth.

 “He’s had a busy week,” grimaced Matty.   Beth looked at me.   I looked at her.

Matty and I were having a quiet beer at my bare bachelor apartment a couple of weeks later.   We were pretty sweaty after shooting some hoops—one couldn’t help but be at least physically competitive with Matty, after all—and the cold wetness of the beer was supremely quenching. Matty had out-shot me, of course. And then lectured me on the proper shooting technique to boot. “Good mechanics, don’t you know,” he had informed me for the umpteenth time.  “Use your arm as a lever, and make sure the ball releases off your middle and index finger, with a slight outward twist of the wrist. You know your mechanics are right if the backspin is true, and once you have true backspin, you have good line.”

 “I know, I know,” I echoed. “And if I’ve got good line, and a decent arc, then I’ve eliminated two of the three essential factors. Then, all I need to worry about is distance.   Right, professor?”

“Right you are,” he said, as if praising a dull student. There was a somber, dark undercurrent present, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to go there. Matty didn’t give me any choice. After a couple of long beats it came out in a waterfall torrent.

“You ever think about dying?” he asked.  “I mean about what it would mean to, all of a sudden, go from awareness and cognizance to . . . what, nothing? One second you are of the world, and the next you’re food for the worms. Is that all there is?   Didn’t somebody once ask that?   Are we worms or are we gods?”

“Criminy snakes, Matty.   Why’re you asking me?   How the hell should I know?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.   Rhetorical question.   But it does make you think, doesn’t it?”

“Doesn’t make me think.”

“Well it does me.”

“Geez, where’d this all come from?”   The room suddenly seemed so much closer, the air so much thicker, as if I could feel it, tide-like, sluicing in and out of my lungs.   Water on the lungs, I thought crazily—not a good idea.

“I don’t know,” he mused, as if he were talking to himself. “You just start to wonder if the words ‘death’ and ‘dignity’ can ever go together. You look at the way people die these days, and you wonder what the whole point is.”

“Say, are your folks okay?”

“Oh, yeah. They’re fine. It’s just, I don’t know, but out of the blue one day you realize that you’re going to die like everybody else, and there isn’t a whole lot done to prepare you for it. I mean, if you knew you were going to die tomorrow, would you be ready? Could you handle it?”

“Geez Louise, how should I know?   I’m not ready to die.”

“Hey, either one of us could be taken out by a car in the next hour.”

“Well, yeah.   Okay.   Maybe you should walk home.   But   . . .”

“Very funny,” he said.

“In a way, you’re right. Okay? I remember when my grandfather was dying last year. Emphysema. You think about it, it’s about the shittiest way to die there is. I mean, there he is, flat on his back, barely has the energy to get out of bed to take a dump, and has the oxygen tank there to try and get a little oh-two into his lungs. And you know what his lungs are doing? All those little air sacs, the alveoli, losing their elasticity, losing their ability to expand and suck air into the guy’s lungs.  So there he is, this once lusty and strong and vital guy—one of my heroes, you know, Iwo Jima and all that—and he’s suffocating, one alveoli to the next and it’s taking months and months and months. Man oh man, that was the pits.   I wanted to put a pillow over his face or take a pistol to the guy’s head and put him out of his misery, but I didn’t have the guts.”

“Well, they’d have thrown you in jail and thrown away the key.”

“Well, yeah, there was that, too.”

A couple of weeks later I found out where all this was coming from.

The waterfall hike had, in hindsight, offered a clear precursor to the future.  Rigs clearly wasn’t up to his usual snuff, and the manner in which it finally became too obvious to ignore for Matty was when Rigsy was no longer able to show off by “walking.” Even the lure of an extra-large doggy biscuit couldn’t get Rigs up off those front paws. Where he had always carried his King-of-the-Jungle head so regally, now his grizzled muzzle hung disconsolately.

“Last week he was dragging his left hind leg, and this week he’s having a hard time getting up at all.” Matty’s voice was a hoarse whisper echoing emptiness across the fiber optic cable of the telephone line.  “A favor?”

“Sure.”

“I’ve got another appointment with the vet this Friday afternoon.   Doc Green. You know where he’s at. Could you manage to come over and meet us there? I’d really appreciate it.”

“Sure, Matty. I’ll be there. What time?”

Dr. Green was a tall, slender fellow. Blond. Germanic. But wiry.   Probably a pretty good basketball player. And, according to Matty, very protective of the animals that came into his care. His lined, ashen face showed his concern about Rigs.

“Take a look at these X-rays,” he said, ushering Matty and me into his office. (Beth had a final exam in cardiology, otherwise she surely would have been there with us.)   His voice was soft, strained, as if he’d rather have been anywhere but here.  “Pinched nerve along the spine. Severely advanced arthritis in both hind legs. We can give Rigoletto something for the pain, but he’s never going to walk again. And there’s nothing we can do about that.”

In a flash, I had a wild image of Rigsy with his butt on a small wheeled platform, like the legless beggars selling apples in movies about the Great Depression.  I stifled a chuckle as best I could.   This wasn’t going well.

Rigs lay stoically on the cold, stainless steel examining table, observing the three of us in a serene manner that seemed to suggest, “I know you’ll decide what’s best.” Matty’s hunched shoulders showed the strain he had been under, but I guessed that it wasn’t remotely akin to what Rigsy had been enduring with such magnanimity over the last week or two.

“I’m not sure that there’s much choice left,” intoned Matty in a hollow, empty voice.

“You mean you want to p-put Rigsy to sleep?” I spluttered.

 “That’s always the last option,” mumbled the vet, “but in this case I don’t think there are any other viable options.” Geez, this guy sounded like he was ready to break out in tears! He was practically shaking. Man, oh man.

That was when Matty laid the big one on us.

“I want you to do the venepuncture, doc. But I’m going to push the plunger.”

“Ah, well, nobody’s ever done that before, ah, that I know of,” coughed Green.

“Look,” said Matty in a soft, but stern voice that I had rarely ever heard from him before. “Rigs is my dog. He has been my responsibility in life; he remains my responsibility in death. If I walked out of here now, he might just think I was abandoning him, and that’s something I just cannot do. Not now, not ever.”   Somehow, I could sense that Matty did not think this an earthshaking notion, any more than he considered it unusual to understand L’Elisir d’amore the way Donizetti wrote it.

And so the doc did what Matty insisted upon. He ritualistically brought in a barbiturate-loaded syringe, carefully wiped clean the area around the injection site (as if Rigs an infection would worry anybody now), then carefully, even sweetly, inserted the needle into a vein. Matty switched places with Green, put his arm on Rigsy’s shoulder, looked into the mutt’s eyes for a long moment, then pushed the plunger home. Rigs relaxed into Matty’s arms, dead in a heartbeat.

Now I know that no amount of logic supports what I am about to say, but I will swear to the point of my own deathbed that Rigsy returned Matty’s look—the instant before Matty pushed that plunger—with some measure of understanding and benevolence, even if it was only some inter-species understanding that love and caring were the motivating forces at work in that lousy, tender, wrenching moment.

Death, I began to understand, isn’t so very extraordinary. Perhaps we live the whole of our lives in the hurricane’s eye, and death is simply everything around us that’s not in the eye. Our lives proceed centrifugally outward, toward death, life’s one hundred percent fatal disease. What I am certain of is this: My friend allowed his buddy to taste of death just once . . . and know that moment as a blessing.   We should all be so lucky, so extraordinarily loved in our final moments. That is one thing I’m pretty darned sure of.