Good Dog. Stay. by Anna Quindlen

Quindlen, Anna. Good Dog. Stay. New York: Random House, 2007.

It started with the cover. I’m not sure it is a picture of Beau, the Labrador retriever Quindlen memorializes in this essay, but I guess it could be. It resembled Lucky, my Lab mix, with glossy black fur and the hoary muzzle of maturity. My wife bought the book and read it quickly; I got around to it weeks later.

In the six years we’ve had him, Lucky and I have both acquired quite a few white hairs on our chins. My wife jokes that the dog and I a growing to look alike. He is still cute in fashion of dogs. I hope I am cute, too, but in the way the husbands are attractive to their wives.

Quindlen writes about Beau, and dogs, and the relationship between people and dogs. Like many pets, Beau lived happily, simply and briefly. He wasn’t like another child, but he was part of the family, a solid presence in their home. It was hard for the family to put him down when he was to feeble to continue.

That gets more to the heart of the essay: mortality. The duration of a dog’s life is only a fraction of most of ours, but it is long enough for us to share many years and experiences with a dog and become very attached to one. The death of a dog can feel like the ending of a phase of our lives and a foreshadowing of our own passing.


I’ve lost pets to death, too. I remember them with bittersweet longing, particularly childhood pets that I feel I should have treated better. I thought about them as I read about Beau.

The family and friends who have died are a different matter. That is almost too weighty to contemplate. The loss of affection is sad; the loss of love is painful. The could-haves are much more costly. The bitterness of loss is sweetened with some of these people by the hope we share in Christ. It’s not the hope of a vague spiritual reunion in an immaterial heaven, but a hope for resurrection, where those I loved as a spirit and a body, the way we were made, I will know as a spirit and a body again, but ageless and eternal.

Quindlen doesn’t address that issue in this essay. She ends it at death, with hope that she has learned something about living and dying well from her relationship with Beau.