Warning: This one is going to be very, very sad. If you’re not in the mood, don’t scroll past that first picture.

If you are reading this, my dog—the sweetest and most handsome boy, God’s most perfect angel, the Cloud That Walks on Four Legs—is gone.

No sense sugarcoating it for you, when I’m the one that’ll have to wake up every morning without hearing the clumsy patter of his excited paws as he tries (and sometimes even succeeds) to get up for breakfast with his customary grace. There will be many, many more heartbreaking moments for me in the days, weeks, months, years to come. Let me ask you to suffer this one with me, at least.

Had I my druthers, he would have gone at home, cuddled between his mother and father, chowing down on a tender fatty piece of pork belly, rather than in an oxygen kennel in Buffalo,¹ picking up pieces of the canned chicken that he waited to actually eat until his parents were with him because he was such a good boy.

Let’s get one thing straight first: unless you met him in the fur, you probably knew him as Clark. You see, one of my dear friends tried to trick me into naming him after the Cubs mascot.²

Actually, she successfully tricked me into it, because I love unorthodox dog names, and my other choice of Nimbus didn’t impress anyone. Unfortunately, Milo, who had originally been named Lightning by the puppy millers who used him for stud and ruined his teeth, proved too stubborn for a regnal name. By then, though, he was Clark online.

Stubbornness proved Milo’s principal stock in trade. While he was an excellent walking companion for his mother, who has between us the more ferric constitution, he could be downright annoying for me: beyond the usual sniff stops and rests,³ he had a habit of hiking his leg and spraying imaginary pee all over every lawn he felt insufficiently dominated.

As is the case with most performances of toxic masculinity, he achieved nothing. Unlike most of those performances, it was kind of funny.

On those walks—and I would give anything to spend another hour and a half being dragged all over my neighborhood, knowing full well that if his not-quite-eight years with us seem short, any amount of time blessed by him would’ve seemed equally meager—I learned more from this recalcitrant puffball than I have in fifteen years of teaching.

Milo taught me that every being has the constant and inalienable right to refuse instruction or correction; that you look very handsome when you stoically bear your suffering, as long as the “suffering” in question is less pain and more offended dignity; that sometimes the best thing you can do to demonstrate you care for someone else is simply to inform them of your presence; that a true gentleman is always prepared to defend his mother from all dangers, whether those be her husband after a haircut, a plumber minding his own business, or the dastardly salad spinner.

First and foremost, though, I learned how absurdly lucky I am in my life. Milo was kind, he was loving, he was generous, gentle and noble, dependable and dignified, all while being the definition of friend-shaped . . . and when we applied for a dog, we didn’t know he existed.

Instead, we tried out for a couple other dogs. I went to Puerto Rico to visit my parents, and it was there that I got the call informing me of “another dog” who “isn’t even on the website” but who “seem[ed] perfect for [us.]” When we met him, his foster mom put down a collapsible water dish, and he literally laid down on the grass to drink from it. That was all we could talk about on the way home, and by the time we got there, we knew we wanted him.

One week later (on International Dog Day, no less) he visited our newly-reroofed home. The gist of the rest you know, even if you are not so initiated into Milore as to know about the time he climbed onto the dining room table and housed a bowl of lingonberry jam we had carelessly left out, or when we came back from something to find his chin and beard full of evidence that he’d been scarfing down the mac-and-cheese-in-law we had carelessly left on an ottoman.

Those silly little moments didn’t matter. Whether he was gently nibbling pieces of apple out of his mother’s hand, checking the locks with me every night before bed, or huffing and angrily drinking water because his parents were hugging without leaving room for the Holy Spirit, he was such a prim little gentleman that it was impossible not to fall in love with him all over again every time you saw him.⁴ As incontrovertible proof, I offer the fact that in the 25 hours or so he spent in his little oxygen kennel, he thoroughly charmed each and every one of the hospital staff, all of whom cooed over him like he’d been a regular.⁵

Milo was a star athlete at his favorite sports, which included “Chase,” “Tug,” “Snicker-Snack,” and (everyone’s favorite) “Milo in the Middle.” He used to regularly sleep on his back, all four paws and their adorable black toe beans in the air. When he could still let us pet his belly, he would push our arms back down with his paws if he felt we had not provided a sufficiently expansive tummy rub. He enjoyed, for some reason, licking my hair until he worked himself into a lather. Nothing made him happier than being exactly equidistant between his parents, except perhaps a room full of people quietly paying attention to him. He loved piggy and chicken and steak and popcorn equally, and when his teeth let him, he even liked to chew on asparagus or kale stems and celery. In our DSA chapter, we joked that his name stood for Marxist International Labor Organizer.

After the job-in-law became remote, he loved to wait for me to come home by the garage door and escort me through the house to the office, where his mother was working, to announce my arrival. When one of his parents was out of town, he insisted on waiting for them by their favored door, and when it was his mother who was traveling, he couldn’t lie down to sleep until he’d made a few rounds of the house, just in case she was watching TV. After he lost his eye and depth perception with it, he used to boop the backs of our legs with his nose to let us know where he was, and sometimes even follow that up with a little kiss if he hadn’t seen us in a bit.

He was one of one, is the point, and I have no idea what we’re going to do without him.

Last February, during the sleepless night before I drove Milo to Buffalo,⁶ where doctors removed the remnants of his ruined eye⁷ and replaced them with a little metal sphere that reassured him his skull was still in one piece, a friend mentioned a poem that became my mantra for the day.

I recited it in the blizzard that accompanied us until a mile or two before we got on the thruway, when the road miraculously cleared the whole way to our destination.

I whispered it to myself each time my heart rate spiked, which was every time I was scared for him, which was more or less constant that horrible day.

I (let’s be for real here) prayed it, like a novena to St. Guinefort, as I waited for the call that would tell me he was okay.⁸

As he somehow made it past each date we thought he would never reach—another birthday, another Thanksgiving, another Christmas, the anniversary of his surgery, the end of a horrible school year—I remembered it every time he was in any trouble.

Now, I pass it on to you. Who knows? Maybe, someday, it’ll help you in the same way.

“Canis Major,” by Robert Frost:

The great Overdog
That heavenly beast
With a star in one eye
Gives a leap in the east.

He dances upright
All the way to the west
And never once drops⁹
On his forefeet to rest.

I’m a poor underdog,
But to-night I will bark
With the great Overdog
That romps through the dark.

I could write the saddest 100,000 words tonight, and it wouldn’t be enough.

I am so grateful for the love you’ve all shown Milo over the years, even if you didn’t know his real name. It considerably lightens the vise around my heart to know that there were so many people—most of whom never met him!—who found him just as special as we did.

As for me, I’ll think of him whenever a piece of meat falls to the kitchen floor and remains there unbothered, or when I forget to close the bathroom door all the way and no perfect little pink snout boops it open.

I’ll hear him bark, clear as thunder, whenever the glint from my phone reflects off a wall, and I’ll see him in every smaller dog, with tenacity excelling their wisdom, who plants their paws and challenges a much larger pooch.

Milo, mon petit prince, I’d say you can finally rest now, but after all you went through in the past few years, you’ve been on nothing but enforced rest for so long. You and I both know you’re tired of it.

Where you are now, there’s no arthritis to make your joints creak, no compressed disks to render hardwood and tile floors into slippery disaster zones, no soft teeth that can’t chew without pain, no masses pressing on your windpipe, no icky medicines for allergies, no eye drops, no paw wax, no booties, no rain jackets, no angry dad pulling back on the leash.

Just endless fields of richly-perfumed flowers, piles of leaves deep enough to sink to your knees, big snowdrifts for zoomies and solid hydration, squirrels to chase, fresh berries all over the ground just waiting to be picked, lakes of fresh cold water and peanut butter to lap up until you get your fill, and nice, soft, cool beds that never get too warm to lie on.

So go romp through the dark, my darling boy, my great Overdog, until we meet again.

I love you.