Dogs, Love and Death (Part I) — Even Her Beloved Couldn’t Save Her

Dogs became our lifeblood during Covid-isolation. A stampede on breeders and rescue centers shrunk the supply to a trickle. Competition for canines now rivals child adoptions. 

Our family might not have become enamored of dogs had our daughter Daniele, ten at the time, not pleaded for one once my husband, Mike, helped cure her canine phobia. They began dog-walking together at the local humane society. Although Mike knew nothing about exposure therapy for phobias, his intuitive deduction eventually led Daniele to assume the leash.  

 Daniele’s diagnosis of suicidal depression the following year clinched our decision to get her a dog. She studied the “Big Book of Dog Breeds,” but had to settle for a hypoallergenic standard poodle. The night we brought home 10-week-old Beauregard, Daniele quietly expressed her gratitude. “Oh Daddy, I love him so much.”

Although Beauregard was supposed to be Daniele’s dog, he became imprinted on Mike because he worked from home as a freelance writer.  We couldn’t anticipate that Beau would become a one-person dog who would wind up choosing the wrong person. Daniele never quite abandoned her grudge against Beau for the infidelity.

Our family’s history with dogs dates back to1974 when Mike and I hooked up. He had a pointer named Casi, French for “that-this.” Because of my dog allergies, sleepovers at his place were out, a damper for smitten twenty-somethings. Two weeks after our first kiss, Casi was hit by a car while wandering the streets near Mike’s Minneapolis apartment. She dragged herself home to die in his arms. Mike felt guilty because he had created a hole in the door that permitted her freedom to come and go. I felt guilty about the fortuitous timing.

Fast forward 30 years to 2004. Daniele was hospitalized on a 72-hour hold —legalese for incarceration in the locked psychiatric ward against her will — because of a mortally close encounter with a bottle of Vodka and 40 tranquilizers. As a condition for hospital discharge, the psychiatrist insisted that she see a therapist. 

Daniele complied, and quickly progressed in therapy. After eight sessions, her TV time shrunk by 90 percent and her drinking slowed to a dribble. Her panic attacks diminished. So she decided to swap psychotherapy for a dog. She found a six-week-old unlikely Dachshund-Australian Ridgeback mix on an online rescue site. He and his littermates had been beaten up by their man-master. She named him Zeppo after the Marx brother who played the straight man, a choice that resonated with her Jewish identity and her own dry humor.

Because financial independence had proven elusive, Daniele and Zeppo came home to live with us. Zeppo would race through dog parks and woods and dig frantically when something caught his olfactory fancy. Our living room couch didn’t survive the burrowing.

 Daniele had rescued Zeppo to rescue her — a common quid pro quo in a society that has become disabling for so many. Except for work, Daniele and Zeppo were inseparable.  

On a Twin Cities Punk post, she referred to herself as the obnoxious clingy girlfriend who would nudge him five or six times a night when she was sleepless. “Zeppo is thinking in his fuzzy little brain ‘Women. Oi.’ because in my mind Zeppo is an old Yiddish man.”

Two years after she boomeranged, Daniele moved out thanks to steady work in the restaurant industry and the state’s pilot health insurance program for people with mental illness.

Daniele and Zeppo’s quid pro quo worked until it didn’t. In 2009, Daniele fatally overdosed on a cocktail of respiratory suppressants including alcohol, Oxycodone, Xanax, and Ambien.

Her roommate Eric came home to find her slumped over a coffee table flanked by Zeppo and his dog Rooster. Thinking she’d blacked out, he attempted to lift her. Her dead weight alerted him to the graver possibility, and he called 911 and began CPR.  Zeppo began pouncing on Daniele’s chest in imitation of Eric’s chest compressions until the paramedics arrived. Zeppo had attempted to fulfill his end of the deal more literally than Daniele had in mind when she’d rescued him to rescue her. 

In our fresh grief, Mike and I couldn’t consider taking in Zeppo. Word spread among Daniele’s punk rock tribe that Zeppo needed a home. An older punk-rock friend, Foul Finn (not his “real” punk rock name,) stepped up to adopt him. 

A couple months later, I visited Finn at his modest home in St. Paul, where he lived alone until Zeppo came to stay. I entered the mud porch, noting the sign on the wall: “Go Away.” 

Finn explained how Zeppo was the only dog he’d ever liked. Although Zeppo was aloof when Finn first brought him home, five days on he began licking him from head to toe in an apparent canine initiation into a long-term relationship. He’d waited a respectable interlude, a widower who had held off before accepting a new human partner. Did this signify a primitive understanding that his girl wasn’t coming back? I think not. Except for our species, only elephants and chimps are thought to comprehend mortality. Zeppo’s canine drive for attachment had surely led to this initiation.

Finn and I broached the topic of Daniele’s death. “She called me the day she died, asking to get together, saying, ‘It’s been a while since we’ve hung out.’” 

He had to work that night. Although Finn had no way to know Daniele was tipping toward self-destruction, like so many others who survive the loss of a friend, he’d blamed himself for having missed the chance to save her.

He described the moment they met at a Minneapolis punk rock and metal music venue where he was drumming. While he was waiting in a corner for the other band members to arrive, 15-year-old Daniele introduced herself by way of an observation, “You look like you could use some company.” 

Finn described Daniele as the younger sister he never had — “cool” meaning authentic with a dark sense of humor. “We got each other.” He taught her the minutiae of punk rock history; the bands he liked and the ones he didn’t, and why. She’d absorb his assessments and then come back with her own critiques. “She didn’t mind telling me when she disagreed with me. I liked that about her.”

Despite the charming beginning, Daniele soon got herself into trouble with Finn at a bar where he worked as a bouncer. He caught her using fake ID.  Exercising an elderly brother’s tough love, he’d warned her, “You better get yourself some good ID or I’ll lose my job. And no sloppy drinking or you’ll lose the privilege.”  

Some mothers might have balked at Finn’s permitting their daughter into a bar before she was of age, but I was grateful to him for laying down the law. Nothing was going to keep Daniele from drinking with her friends. The way I saw it, Finn was helping to ensure that she drank responsibly.

As I stood at the front door to leave that day, Finn said, “Even on my worst days, I don’t have the guts to do what Daniele did.”  

Over the years, I’ve considered whether taking one’s life is courageous. If courage means taking an action despite having to risk sacrificing something valuable, then the question of Daniele’s courageousness turns on how much she valued her life before her death. I believe that her life had become intolerable, suggesting that self-destruction did not necessarily signify courage. Had she believed in hell, her suicide could be considered a courageous act. Ultimately, though, I don’t believe courage is a useful framework for understanding a self-incurred death because of its opposite — cowardice and weakness — which so often infuses the judgment of others that stirs a person to harm themselves.