Away with Words

The Dogs Died, Then Johnny Did Too

Away with Words is a raw, unflinching personal essay about grief and the thin margins of kindness in a chaotic world. It begins with two stray dogs on a busy road — and ends with the narrator confronting a loss far more permanent.

Told with sharp prose and aching restraint, this is a story about moments you wish you could take back, words you wish you hadn’t said, and the people who show up even when it’s too late.

Read with tissues nearby.

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Away with Words I remember asking Johnny if he ever felt compassion for anything. I was pretty upset at the time, but now I’d give anything if I hadn’t said it.

We’d been coming home from a lunch and movie date when I saw two stray dogs prancing along on the shoulder of Golf Links Road, a boxer and something that looked like a Maltese—small and fluffy and white. Rush hour was starting, though, and none of the cars were even slowing down.

I remember it was springtime and the smell of orange blossoms permeated the air.

John would have kept driving home too, just like all the other drivers, if I hadn’t insisted we go back. “What if it was our dog—Gracie? You’d want someone to help her, wouldn’t you?”

He sighed and said he’d been hoping I hadn’t seen them and started working his way across four lanes of traffic so he could make a U-turn.

That’s when I made the snarky remark about his lack of compassion.

“It’s already too late for the little one,” he said.

He needn’t have told me. I’d seen what happened in the right-side mirror, and I was gasping for breath. The Maltese had scooted jauntily into traffic and got rolled under the wheels of a Ford half-ton and flipped out the back. It resembled a bloody white rag on the asphalt now. The next car hit it too, and then I lost sight of it.

“I hate people,” I said. “They didn’t even try to avoid her.” I started to tear up.

I released my seat belt and turned around, straining to see the boxer, my knees on the bucket seat. John had finally managed to maneuver our truck into the left-turn lane and he was waiting for a gap in the flow of cars so he could turn around.

I saw the boxer as we drove back the other way. She was standing at the curb, staring at her little dead companion, panting and looking confused. I caught a glimpse of a collar on her, metal dangling frit. I prayed for her. Just a few more minutes . . .

John had to go another half-mile before he could make a second U-turn. After he did, he took the right-hand lane and turned on his emergency flasher and drove back toward the dogs about twenty milesper-hour, trying to protect the lane ahead of us by holding back the people behind. The trouble was that cars would zip past on our left and accelerate into the open lane in front of us, some of the drivers flipping him off. Driving slow wasn’t protecting the dogs at all. As soon as he realized that, he sped up.

The speed limit is forty there, but everyone goes faster of course, especially late in the afternoon.

We were too late. The boxer lay in the road like a dappled brown and red grocery bag, a few feet away from the white pile of rags.

John parked just shy of the poor dogs, blocking traffic and inflaming a lot of anger.

“Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” he said. Not particular about word choices, my Johnny. He often said I made him a better man, but I could never get him to curtail his coarse, cut-to-the-chase responses to people who’d offended him.

He walked back along the road for a hundred feet or so and put out a flare. Then he returned, and we lifted the silent and bloody dead dogs into the bed of his Dodge. I was sobbing by then.

Both of the dogs were wearing tags, and we called the owners when we got home.

The boxer’s master came and got his bitch that night—Candy. The Maltese’s owner scheduled a time but didn’t bother to show up and claim his own dog’s remains. Some people are plain stonyhearted.

Not everybody though. The guy who killed John apologized profusely, begged my forgiveness in fact . . . tears running down his face, sobs shaking his body as if it were a rag doll.

It was raining hard that night, Thanksgiving Eve, roads slick, visibility low.

Apparently, John had pulled over to rescue a Rottweiler who’d gotten riled up by the storm and jumped his fence. The terrified Rotty had run out into the street and John chased after him.

The Rottweiler survived, though she needed two surgeries. Her owner sent me a nice sympathy card, around Christmas, and he even came to John’s funeral. Brought his dog too, thinking it might lift my spirits. It didn’t.

I’d take a living Johnny any day over the better one I apparently created that fine spring day. After all, with most people, compassion is probably just a word.

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If you like the above story, check out Right There in Black and White by author Jim Christ. Grab it here… Paperback