Hercules

A note on loss

Last month, a young and gentle veterinarian administered a shot that relieved the pain and sped to sleep our 6-year-old dog while my fiancée and I held him close. A few minutes later, she secured a red vial of IV fluid to his left ankle and—though she warned us that there would be a few minutes for the drug to take effect—within thirty seconds, after checking his newly-yellowed chest with her stethoscope, she told us that he was at peace.

One of the few things I miss about my period of excessive Facebook use is reading and occasionally writing tributes to lost pets. The exercise is both a public declaration of thanks for the thousands of small and private experiences that make up the relationship with a pet and a way to help process grief. In the modern world — not long removed from regularly losing a half-dozen siblings before the age of maturity — we are not often forced to contemplate death. I often do not know how I feel or what I think until I write something for an audience. With your indulgence, I do so here.

The uncertainty in the first months of 2017 had me in a dark place. I was in my hometown working as a felony prosecutor, holding onto the dream of a public life. The town had gone 75% Trump and the airports were still in chaos from the slapdash rollout of the closest thing Trump could do for his promised Muslim ban. I do not like that public events beyond my control often affect my mood and outlook, but they do. The prospect of years more of similar chaos had me in one of my lower downswings.

Driving to work, Annie’s stepmother saw a stray with striking tiger-stripes, scarring around his neck, and sunken, undernourished shoulders. A dog-lover, she stopped and—over the course of several hours—coaxed him into her car with food. They took him to a rescue shelter and planted the idea of adoption with us.

I had a dog at the time and lived at home with two others. I had used getting a dog as emotional Narcan before when a bad breakup at 17 triggered my first bout of what was later diagnosed as Clinical Depression. Though my disorder is better managed now, my loved ones were concerned since we all knew that my 13-year-old lab Scout was not going to be with us for much longer.

After Annie’s parents fostered him for a few weeks and we realized that despite his abuse and appearance he had a sweet temperament, I adopted him.

I named him DJ Kool Hercules Mulligan. We had been watching Netflix’s The Get Down about the 1970s Bronx roots of hip-hop. On my mind was DJ Kool Herc - the giant Jamaican community-center leader who pioneered the early techniques of record looping. I have always been a geek about ancient Greece and Rome, so Hercules worked, even before his muscles grew to their natural size and we realized that he was in fact history’s strongest dog. Hercules Mulligan is my favorite character from Hamilton, which I had been evangelizing for and had fully memorized. As well as being big and a very fun name to yell out loud — a thing I imagined myself doing to call him — Mulligan also was a tailor. With his unique reverse-brindle coat, a sartorial homage was appropriate.

Shortly after, I moved with Herc into a studio apartment next to the marina in Corpus Christi. He was my companion and a friend to all of the downtown denizens in the Sparkling City. He would often pick which of his favorite bars and restaurants to visit just by dragging me there. When we would walk on the sea wall, he would occasionally just stop to watch the gulls and sniff the sea breeze.

He did not swim or fetch - a novelty after years only with a series of Labradors. Instead, he cuddled and comforted strangers. I would come back to my table to find a waitress on the ground with Hercules fully in her lap. He was docile and reserved in crowds or just with family, but if we had one or two people over, he would detect and remedy any insufficiently licked face or bonked groin.

His coat was striking. “Can I pet your dog? What kind of dog is he? He looks like a tiger.” was a constant refrain any time he was in public around small children. With a straight face, I would tell them that his dad was a mastiff and that his mom was one of the Bengals in the Dallas zoo. Once, a crusty Cajun shrimper stationed each dawn at his boat by the Selena statue looked up from his swabbing, saw Hercules, and grunted “Jungle Pup. Alright!” before returning to swabbing and hosing.

He was steady while my life was not. When I moved back to Austin, he kept me company through countless work-from-home pandemic hours and the Freeze of ‘21. When I had my most difficult casework involving murder and child abuse, there was something about his unconditional love, prodigious strength, and literal and figurative warmth that kept me from burnout.

He loved vegetables, especially carrots.

Hercules did not outgrow his toy phase. We at first bought the rubber toys recommended for bully breeds, but Hercules preferred softer ones that he could slowly and deliberately dissect with his incisors. Extremities were not long for the world. Narwhals became whales; bear toys became bear puppets; octopuses became sperm. We noticed one animal - a sloth named Tico - was spared his wrath. A smaller version, Tiquito, was as well. Why sloths? The mystery remains.

Two weeks before his last day, he had no symptoms. We were spared the slow descent into hip dysplasia, senility, and incontinence that I had come to expect from aging and ailing dogs. Our house is very vertical. Watching him struggle to get up and down each day would have been difficult, regardless of how good his spirits were. But with the sudden onset of his unknown illness, we were also robbed of any time to prepare. My family has gone from five dogs to zero in less than 3 years. The others, however, had long, full lifespans.

We handled the end of things well. In his last day, we invited many of his favorite people over. We plied him with burgers, pizza, dog treats, and human deserts. He went out like he was in the food debauch in Heavyweights and entered Doggy Valhalla full of forbidden, delicious snacks.

I searched for Stoic advice on the loss of a dog and, though the loyalty and companionship of a dog was important to Ancient Greek culture, it was in modern forums that I found the best advice from an anonymous redditor, quoted below:

I have an old dog in kidney failure too. Haven't told her yet, she just keeps being happy.

I'm old too, and I've had animals my whole life, mostly cats and dogs in various multiples. Do the math and you can see I've been here before.

The way I reconcile it is pretty straightforward, and well in line with the overall Stoic approach to things. It always begins the same way- see things plainly for what they are, understand the natures of the things involved, and respond reasonably and virtuously to the reality around us.

Every day I care for my animals, keeping them happy, keeping them safe, shepherding them through their day with joy, and without harm. When they get old and approach death, nothing changes. As crazy as it sounds, the day I take them to the vet to be put down is the day that I have been working for all this time - I have successfully taken them the whole way. They did not get lost, they were not unhappy, they got to live their whole natural lives the way I wanted them to live it. We made it. We got there together.

When they are gone, my feelings for them don't change. Their bodies are taken but my feelings are my own; I still love them, I am still happy to think of them, my heart is still open.

What has changed is that I have a space for another thing to love, and the cycle continues again, when I'm ready to start anew.

Their bodies, our bodies, everything external to us will always change and always come and go. Our love, our care, our joy belongs to us, and we apply it to what we have and to what is new.

For those of you who met him, thank you for helping us make his life great. I am sincerely glad that he touched your life and, thus, improved it.

In mythology, Hercules did not die but experienced apotheosis. Ovid renders it thus:

As a snake enjoys its newness, sloughing old age with its skin, gleaming with fresh scales; so, when the Tirynthian hero had shed his mortal body, he became his better part, beginning to appear greater, and more to be revered, in his high majesty. The all-powerful father of the gods carrying him upwards, in his four-horse chariot, through the substanceless clouds, set him among the shining stars.

Thank you for reading.