Lost Dogs
In my home office hangs one of the seven photo-collages my niece made for my parents’ memorial ceremony. I picked it for the pictures of old cars and old pets: a Corvair and a Firebird; a cat, a kitten, and a dog.
The dog is medium-sized and stands across my mother’s lap. It probably has its back paws on her thigh and its front paws on the arm of the chair or sofa, though neither—thigh, chair —is visible. My mother has one arm under the dog’s belly and the other over its rump, something between a hold and a hug. Both my mother and the dog look at the camera. The dog looks happy. My mother looks proud.
It’s hard to say when the picture was taken. The kitten picture is easier to place: the washed-out, green-heavy palette of the late sixties and early seventies rhymes with the high chair the kitten is perched on, and with my mother’s outfit. But the dog picture is black and white, and my mother is very young, maybe in her twenties; it could have been taken in Argentina.
In some of the pictures my mother poses wearing different dresses: sitting on a post-and-rail fence, leaning against a tree. Another shows my father as the ultimate sixties science nerd, crooked bow tie, slicked hair, lacking only the tape on his glasses. There are pictures of them skiing, probably from their honeymoon in Bariloche, though it could be upstate New York. In another, my mother sits on the floor in front of my father, who sits in a chair, and a woman I don’t recognize sits in a chair beside them, likely the wife of another couple, her husband behind the lens. All three are laughing. My father’s head tilts left, the shadow of his head on the wall behind him. The other woman is covering her mouth.
When I remember this picture, I transfer that gesture to my mother. She had bad teeth and a nice smile. The teeth were part of it; the smile wouldn’t have been half as nice if she’d fixed them.
I know what kind of dog it is: an Airedale terrier, or a mix that looks mostly Airedale. As a child I used to pore over a thick red volume published by the American Kennel Club, called, with the sort of arrogant totalizing one expects from the AKC, The Complete Dog Book. As if anything that fell outside their specs wasn’t a dog. The book classifies dogs first by group, then by breed. I loved classification, and I spent a lot of time memorizing the different breeds, just like I did with dinosaurs and fish.
We had another book called This Is the Siberian Husky, which I think was part of a series of “This Is” dog books. On the cover is a picture of the grandfather of the dog I grew up with. The grandfather was a champion.
Our dog’s original name was Herman. His brother was Charlie. They had a sister, too, I can’t remember her name. Charlie whined a lot, so we took Herman. My parents renamed him Tidy, after their previous dog. He was three months old, a beautiful and gentle dog.
I am stalling.
I have no recollection of the first Tidy, but my sister does, if somewhat vaguely. He was a collie-German shepherd mix, but looked mostly collie. When my parents moved from Long Island to New Jersey, the house they rented didn’t allow dogs. My sister was six. I was one.
I ask my sister what happened to that dog, but she doesn’t know. “I try not to think about it,” she says, and I sympathize.
I’ve volunteered at a dog and cat shelter for the better part of a decade. Most of the dogs are transports from places where no-kill facilities are few and far between and the culture of spay and neuter has, for any number of reasons, not flourished. (Didn’t they watch The Price Is Right in Mississippi?)
We occasionally get surrenders, the term for when someone relinquishes their pet to a shelter. My immediate impulse is to judge the people. It’s hard not to when you’re around to see the results. The dogs don’t know what’s happening to them. They don’t know it’s permanent. Some whine for days, even weeks. Some won’t leave their kennels, or the blankets that followed them there. We keep their blankets and collars, their harnesses and St. Francis medals. We keep their old names.
I was there once when a young couple arrived with a dog. They were being evicted and couldn’t take the dog with them. They wanted to put him someplace where they could be sure he wouldn’t be euthanized. They were desperate.
We didn’t take the dog, I don’t know why, and I didn’t ask.
Maybe my sister knows but won’t tell me. Six is old enough to remember, at least something. Something like that. Maybe she used to know and made herself forget. Maybe my parents just never told her. They wouldn’t have lied; it wasn’t their style.
There’s a picture somewhere—not in the collage—of me in a red wagon with my foot bandaged. I burned it when I tipped my mother’s coffee thermos off the counter. Somehow, I remember a dog in that picture, next to the wagon. Except it would have been taken three or four years after my parents did whatever they did with that dog.
Maybe I’m really thinking of the brace I wore during the first six months of my life, for my congenital hip. The joint had to be immobilized to develop properly. The first Tidy would have been there, then. Maybe the somatic memory of the earlier immobilization bled into the later one, transferring the ghostly image of a dog along with it.
In 1970, the no-kill movement was still in its infancy. North Shore Animal League, in Port Washington, New York, opened the first no-kill shelter in 1956. Smithtown, where I was born, is about a half-hour drive away. In 1974—roughly when I burned my foot—Elisabeth Lewyt, a member of North Shore’s board of directors, started driving a rescue van around. In 1980, the year the second Tidy turned two, she began relocating animals from local pounds to their facility, paying twelve dollars a head.
There’s another place closer to Smithtown, in Huntington, called The Little Shelter. It was founded in 1927 but didn’t become no-kill until 1990, the year Tidy 2 died. All the other no kill facilities in the area opened their doors later, in the ’70s and ’80s.
Suffice it to say there were few options, or good ones.
Still, it’s possible my parents heard about North Shore.
Possible, but unlikely.
The spirit of that dog weighs on me, like the spirit of the boy my mother miscarried, the brother to whose unviability I owe my existence. He stands across my lap, just like the nameless dog in that picture, except that I don’t hold him, and I don’t smile.
I want so badly to judge them. It’s easy, looking back: the unimpeachable authority of the present, the invitingly soft underbelly of the past.
I can’t fault them for what they did, the difficult choices they made. We’re responsible, too, my sister and I, even if we were too young to participate, or complain, or even remember. Income to support a family. Affordable living arrangements. A safe neighborhood to raise kids. A good school system. The dog couldn’t know all the variables against which its fate was being weighed. Sacrificed, for our future prosperity. I’m sorry. We’re all sorry.
The intake form at the shelter asks: What would you do if you had to move and couldn’t take your pet? I guess the answer they’re looking for is that you’d bring it to a no-kill facility. In fact, it’s my shelter’s policy to take back any animal that their owner can’t keep; the question might be included on the form primarily to educate potential adopters.
When we adopted our dogs, I wrote something to the effect that I would find another place, one that took pets. I would keep the animal, come what may. I think of those surrendered dogs, think, I would never do that. I’d be homeless first. It’s clearly how some people end up that way. Most homeless shelters don’t allow pets.
But maybe I would do that. Maybe anybody would, given the right circumstances. I think about the privilege that enabled me to write what I did on the adoption application. I think about the end of Kelly Reichardt’s film Wendy and Lucy, where Wendy, busted flat in Oregon and drifting toward Alaska, manages to locate her lost dog Lucy, only to decide to leave her in the hands of a foster. She swears she’ll be back, when she has some money, but we know she won’t, and she probably does, too. And even if she does make it back, the dog won’t be there. The film ends where so many Hollywood melodramas begin; the arc is not toward reunion, but surrender.
The animal thing is a family malady, at least on my mother’s side. In Tostado, Argentina, her father took in a puma cub after a hunter killed its mother; it slept at the foot of my mother’s bed, until a neighbor poisoned it.
Once, my mother told me, when her family was on a day outing in Paraná, a stray dog started following them around, and her brother had a tantrum because they wouldn’t let him bring it home. When I met him in Buenos Aires in the nineties, he had three dogs, all strays he took in off the street.
Growing up, I watched my mother nurse more than one songbird back to health.
My sister, who lives in Louisville, has a menagerie of dogs and cats. One cat belonged to their neighbors; her husband found him on the porch of a neighbor’s house a couple of days after they moved away. It was the middle of winter. Of her two dogs, she found one wandering on the side of a highway, took her to a shelter and, realizing she would probably be euthanized, adopted her. Her other dog is blind.
Didn’t they watch The Price Is Right in Kentucky?
It feels like a crime of which I never imagined them capable, imagined us capable, and that I blinded myself to, in much the same way that my sister did. I knew, later on. I just never asked. Had I been my sister’s age when it happened, I don’t know that I would have forgiven them. Maybe she didn’t, and that’s why she doesn’t think about it. Or tries not to. Because when she does, she realizes she hasn’t, and can’t, and then she has to do all the mental and emotional labor of trying to lay it to rest again, even though it won’t rest, and she knows it. Maybe I think knowing will help me to forgive them. Forgive all of us.
I try not to think about it. But here I am, thinking about it. Worrying it. The reason I took that collage in the first place: to have something to stick in my mouth.
In one of the car pictures, my parents lean against their Corvair like greasers, looking surly as hell, my mother in tight-fitting capri jeans and typically lovely shoes, my father pudgy in his white polo shirt and slacks. They are American; I mean, check out that car. It even has a racing stripe.
Below this is a head-on color shot of our yellow ’73 Firebird in its dotage. The hood is so big the picture looks like it was taken with a wide-angle lens. That car had such an endearing front end—more a snout, really. You wanted to pet it.
With the second Tidy my parents said something about wanting to know what they were getting. They were careful to select a reputable breeder. Pedigree: it doesn’t fit my mother as I understand her, as I imagine her, mutt that she was. And yet, somehow, it does.
They weren’t so vain as to think of the dog as a status symbol. But there was just a touch of that, I think. They wanted a dog that reflected something that, as immigrants, regardless of their level of education and culture, they could never quite achieve.
Maybe the first Tidy, a mutt, was advertised as a German shepherd, and looked shepherd as a pup, but then grew up to look more collie. My parents liked shepherds but were agnostic about collies. Anyway, they wouldn’t have given up the dog over something like that. Was there something else? Was he a biter, nervous around kids?
Was it really just about a fucking house in fucking New Jersey?
I want to blame my father. I want to imagine him persuading my mother, she adamant at first, but slowly relenting. She wanted him to be happy. She would have said yes for him, and for us. She did it for him, they did it for us, and the dog, the dog …
I’m not sure why I’m so desperate for my father to play the villain. Perhaps simply to have one; it would make things so much easier.
I can’t blame him. Prosperity was the reason he emigrated. He had severed all ties already, my mother the same; what was one more (and such a minor one) amid so much dislocation, so much loss?
My mother assured me he cried when the second Tidy died. He didn’t go with us to the vet that day. (He might have had to work. By that point he worked from home.) She said it was why they never got another dog: my father refused to go through that pain again. But then after the angioplasty my mother was always looking out for his heart; maybe it was her decision, and she just said it was his. Another sacrifice, willingly made.
After that dog, they only had cats. My mother loved their cats, but she said the bond wasn’t the same.
Watching my father spend time with his last cat in the years before he died, after his unforgiving exterior had softened, I believed my mother in a way I hadn’t quite before.
My mother would imitate the way the puma broke the necks of her father’s chickens with one swat of its big paws, her wrists limp. Maybe it killed the neighbors’ chickens, too, and that was why they poisoned it; but she thought they were just afraid.
They didn’t abandon the dog, obviously, or kill it, though my mother and quite possibly my father would have felt it as such. Felt responsible. They were responsible people. Maybe they found someone to take him. A nice family, with young kids, a fenced yard, another dog to play with. Long Island. The sound was so close. The gentle sound. Maybe he had a nice long life with that family, chasing tennis balls and frisbees in the surf, the kids growing up around him, feeling their hands and their feet get bigger, smelling their changing smell. More likely they took him to whatever facility was nearest, like pretty much everybody did in 1970, and crossed their fingers he wouldn’t be among the millions of dogs destroyed that year. The number peaked in the 1970s to somewhere between thirteen and fifteen million dogs and cats per annum. (Destroyed: not a euphemism, like put to sleep, but not quite the intensifier it appears, either, since we only speak of destroyed human lives in terms of their quality.)
I can’t blame them for doing what everyone else did, in this new country they were so busy assimilating to. Blame is cheap and easy. Everyone loves to think they won’t, until they do. I can’t even blame people for thinking that; the alternative is too ugly.
I wonder how many days, how many miles, it took to put it behind them. They hugged him before letting him go. Of course they did. Maybe they broke down in the parking lot, before, after. Maybe they had to pull over to compose themselves. Maybe they almost turned the car around and went back.
Almost.
I can imagine dozens of such exculpatory details, alternative narratives. But I’m much more interested in tracing the contours of a wound, the outlines of the shadow of a time before I was, how what shaped them shaped me, the hole whose gravity continued to tug at my parents long after that day, warping them slightly, one of a cluster of little tragedies they carried forward into my life, whose reverberations might help explain them.
If I can trace that wound with my finger, come to know its shape a little better, maybe, just maybe, I can leave it alone.
To whom it may concern: (Or: Dear shelter name:)
I hope this email finds you well. I am writing to you today with a rather strange request. I was born in Smithtown, Long Island, not too far away from your facility. In 1970, when I was just one year old, my family moved to New Jersey. Unfortunately, Sadly, the house would not allow pets, and they were unable to take our family dog. I am trying to find out what happened to him.
I don’t know if you keep records of surrenders, and if so how far back they go. But I was hoping you might be able to tell me if the dog had passed through your facility, and if so, what eventually happened to him. Maybe it’s a simple matter of doing a search on a spreadsheet, I don’t know.
The dog’s name was Tidy. He was a collie-German shepherd mix, but looked mostly collie. My family’s last name is Bernardini. Tidy Bernardini.
My parents passed away in 2019 and 2023. Regrettably, I did not think to ask them before they passed. I don’t know what, if anything, they would have remembered.
I completely understand if this is impossible. I do appreciate your time.
Please help me.
Sincerely,
How many times do I have to write that I don’t blame them before I admit to myself that I do?
I have no idea where the name came from, Tidy, just as I have no idea where he came from—a family whose dog had puppies, a pet store, the pound. But I think that whatever happened to him must have clinched the name of the second: a name that buried and commemorated the first, wrote over him.
There was nothing tidy about it. A mess left behind in their conscience. It did as much as a name could, I guess.
From the day we brought the second Tidy home until the summer he died twelve years later, my parents never moved. I can see my mother, making my father promise they weren’t going anywhere until that dog died.
And she hated that house.
They had another dog. Before the first Tidy, in their first house, in Rochester. Stranded in a new country, her English halting at best; of course my mother would have wanted a dog. I asked her about it, once. The cellar of the house, she said, was infested with ticks. They didn’t realize it until the dog got sick. The explanation felt insufficient, but her distress at recounting it was palpable; I didn’t push.
Maybe she felt what happened to that dog was her fault, she so busy at the hospital, my parents still settling into their new house, their new life. Maybe she persuaded my father to get a dog, and only later realized she hadn’t taken their situation fully into account. She was so good at blaming herself: the coffee thermos full of boiled water that burned my foot, for example.
As a doctor my mother must have been aware of the diseases ticks carried. And yet, they weren’t on the radar the way they are today, with the explosion of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases. It wouldn’t have occurred to her, for example, that their house was built on newly cleared land, or that the property abutted a state park.
I know nothing about that dog, its name, what breed it was, its color or sex or where they got it. My sister and I never discussed it. She would have been too young to remember, like I was the first Tidy. It might have been before she was born, or right around when she was born: my mother, juggling the hospital and a baby, hardly notices when the dog starts limping, stops eating, notices and then forgets, notices. Remembers.
Maybe, when she stopped working to focus on raising her kids, she wasn’t just thinking about my sister and me, but about that dog.
I know people aren’t supposed to grieve for pets, not the way they grieve for people. But they do, anyway. Knowing their grief isn’t taken seriously makes grieving harder. Grow up. Get over it. And so, afraid of inviting ridicule, they end up swallowing it.
Which is why I wanted to open up a space for grieving here, open it wide, even to the point of inviting ridicule.
What if I say that this is my way, or one way, of grieving for her? Would that make it okay?
I’ve never found a picture of the first Tidy. I know the one I’m looking for: the palette of the kitten photo, a silent collie beside a toddler in diapers and a little girl in red pants with short hair. Such a gentle dog.
Maybe my mother destroyed them all.
And the first dog, the nameless one in Rochester? Could that be the dog in the collage? Who are you? Who are you, sweet pea?
My mother is so young. The picture could be from Argentina. The dog could be anybody’s.
All the easier, then, for it to stand in for all the dogs my mother loved and lost. The person holding the dog in that picture is the person she was. Every dog made her happy in just that way. It would have destroyed her, having to give up a dog like that. But then the way she holds that dog was the way she held all of us, everything. She gave so much blood, you see, cathected the world so deeply.
Maybe, if I can just focus on their joy in each other, I can forget about the pain of what happened to the ones I do know, and the mystery of the ones I don’t.
About the Author
Recent work by Craig Bernardini has appeared in Conjunctions Online, The Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, and Remains. His collection "12 Oxen Under the Sea" (2025) won the New American Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Big Other Book Prize for fiction. He teaches English at Hostos Community College, a City University of New York school in the Bronx, and lives in the mid-Hudson region of New York with his partner, dogs, and chickens (cats RIP).