Future Here Now: About a dog.
I don't want to write about a dog.
How can you write anything about a dog that has died that hasn't been written a thousand times before? Is there any experience more expected, more predictable, more humanly universal across time and space and cultures than the death of a companion animal? So, hard to say it but, cosmically mundane?
I've lost three dogs and countless other pets. We all know that most animals we might share our lives with are time bombs, It's simply how the lifespan numbers work.
We've already done Old Yeller and Marley and a million other tearjerkers. We know exactly how the story goes. If there's a story that's played out, that's d-o-n-e, Good Dog Dies is the one.
And yet.
You can't say anything else that hasn't been said.
And yet.
The And Yet is chewing at me extra hard. I'm a writer, but I'm not a YA novel writer, Not a a novel writer at all. Most of the time I write about topics that would leave a lot of readers going, "whaa?"
Or snoring.
I'm a technical writer. A Subject Matter Expert writer. A Person Who I Read Because She Knows Stuff writer.
Not a generator of schlock about how a dog died writer.
And yet.
A big part of the Industrial Age modus operandi had to do with separating the personal from the corporate, the emotional from the rational, the inner world and its mess and tumult from the cool, crisp logic, the clear processes, the precision of the external, the business, the factory. It's a lesson we stared in kindergarten, when we learned to stuff our urges to yell or dance or kick that kid or spash in the puddles, and instead sit in the little chair and trace outlines of letters and numbers. Some of us had an easier time with that lesson than others.
We learned while still tiny that emotions belong over there, away from the serious work. Recess and art class and band practice were "outlets" or "enrichmnent" or "extracurriculars," tolerated as an outlet for the internal mess but not Core Subjects. Especially after we decided that teaching must be to The Test.
Don't let that emotional gunk get in the way of the real work.
--
It is exactly the universal-ness, the vividly shared emotionality, the primal pain of losing a dog that makes it so impossible for someone like me to write about it.
I was a really good kindergarden student. I could trace the letters and do the worksheets all day.
Maybe I got too good at it.
--
Business gurus like to tell company leaders that they need to allow employees to "bring their whole selves to work." Most of the time that gets interpreted as lax dress codes and fun cubicle decorations or "Sh,wcasing Our Cultures Day."
Which completely misses the point.
People who are transitioning into the Fusion Era, who see the glimpses of the fundamental changes that are unfolding, understand that the highest value they can put into the world ultimately comes from their human-ness -- their unique ability to create, to problem-solve, to collaborate and to conjure new ideas.
Which is a whole nother level from tracing letters or sitting in chairs or pulling levers on a machine.
And while that work needs skills and frameworks and intellectual underpinnings, Fusion Era work requires more of our human-ness than ever before. Through that, we create the machines and software that can make the letters and pull the levers.
But our work and learning places still avoid emotions, stuff pain in a drawer, operate on the assumption that the people in our organizations will continue to function like Industrial Era semi-automatons, albeit with better clothes and more polished social skills.
And that assumption is so deeply embedded in us that a person who writes about local government and economy and technology issues finds that she cannot write about her pain over the death of a dog. The words fail to compute.
Shoving emotions aside is a foundational assumption that we're going to need to learn to challenge and unpack - for our community, our organizations, ourselves. Fusion Era people are claiming, and will claim, a right, an imperative, to live as their full, authentic selves - not just because they want to, but because they know in their guts that this is where their greatest potential lies. So you better get comfortable with that.
I had better, too.
--
Piper was my in-laws' dog, and she was put to sleep today after a difficult couple of weeks. She was a 13 year old Golden Retriever who everyone called "Perfect Piper" because she was so well trained and loving. She was a therapy dog in an assisted living center, which is why she never put her paw on you, and she would look directly into your eyes when you talked to her. She shed like crazy, got excited when "the boys" were coming, had a detente with the deer and started asking for dinner at 4:45, which she would inhale in about 30 seconds.
She's no longer in pain, but I have been crying on and off all day - for her, for my heartbroken family members, and maybe a little for me.
And even though I know all the reasons why, and it ain't my first rodeo and all that, it seems cosmically wrong that she should be gone.
And don't want to feel that way at all.
And yet.
It feels right to write about her. I don't know why. But it feels like a piece of... something...is going back into the place where it's supposed to be.
Us old dogs sometimes learn new tricks too.
Piper in better times with my son and her sister, Lily. Piper is the dignified one.