A eulogy on my dog, Bonnie

Here we are again, another Reading Period — another eight days when our world consists almost completely of researching papers, writing papers and talking about how many papers we have to write. But I also have something else on my mind.

Over Winter Break, my family and I had to put our dog, Bonaventure, to sleep. Named for the hotel where my parents honeymooned in Montreal, Bonnie was 17 (over 102 in dog years) and suffering from liver and pancreas failure, as well as from severe arthritis in his back legs. He had lost a lot of weight, and we could clearly see each one of his ribs. He looked like a skeleton with fur.

It was difficult to see him look so old and frail, but I never imagined how much more difficult it would be to put him to sleep. We took him into the vet's office and lifted him up onto the table. The vet had to put a muzzle on him because, like many of us, he never liked getting shots. It was over in seconds, and Bonnie was just lying still on the table, looking just like he did when he slept on my parents' bedroom floor.

When I was little and I couldn't stop laughing at a moment when laughing wasn't appropriate, I would imagine the way Bonaventure would look if he were dead. Call it some grotesque fantasy of a disturbed young boy, but it worked. As cliché as it might sound, it didn't occur to me back then that Bonnie actually would die. And so it was all the more surreal and unsettling to experience my fantasy as reality.

A few days later, we received a card from the vet's office telling us about the "Rainbow Bridge." It's where all of our pets go when they die to wait for us to come and take them to heaven. Cheesy, I know. But I couldn't read it all the way through without crying until the day before I came back to school.

My family had been told that the best way to get over losing a dog was to get another one. So we searched petfinder.com and other web sites for shelters and went to look at some dogs. We ended up coming home with a Jack Russell Terrier/Welsh Corgi mix that the shelter had named John. That being my name, we had to change it, and so we now call him Keats. He's little, white and tan, and I don't think he's stopped wagging his tail since we met him. I still miss Bonaventure, but Keats is great to have around. It was hard to come back to school because I wanted to stay and play with him.

So I was working on my JP the other night and I was getting stressed because I still needed to start a number of other papers, all due on Dean's Date. I could feel the anxiety gnawing at my stomach, that feeling I get every time I feel like the paper I'm writing is getting beyond my control. I looked up and out the window and a picture of Bonaventure on my windowsill caught my eye.

And it made me feel better because I knew that whether my JP was good or not, whether I got an A or a D on my other papers, or whether I even finished them at all, that Bonaventure would react the same way. He'd run up to me, wag his tail and, with a smile and sparkle of unconditional affection in his eyes, lick my face until I would make him stop. And I realized that, though I would naturally do my best on my papers, I was glad to have had —for 17 years — the kind of friendship only a dog can give.

So though my brain is full of random snippets of sentences, esoterica and jargon, Bonaventure — and Keats — occupy much of my thoughts. It's a good reminder that, though all this work is important, it's definitely not the only thing in my life. John Lurz is an English major from Lutherville, MD. He can be reached at johnlurz@princeton.edu.