Finishing what I started

Back in May 2002, I had to put my best buddy, Fred the dog down. He had lived with me for over 16 years. That is pretty damn old for a dog. I had just turned forty years old, and he was truly the best and most loyal friend a guy could have had. (Spouse doesn't count here.)

I sat down at the desktop computer a couple of times during my journal writing and composed what ended up as a seventy three page story of our life together. It was a basic outline, with some events more detailed than others.

Last November at a writers guild meeting, I learned about a local publisher who was looking for new talent. So I went to the workshop, and for my sample I read my retelling of events at the Veterinarian's office the day I put him down.
When I was done, there wasn't a dry eye in the room.

I sorta knew then that maybe I had something, but I figured too many of them had read Marley and Me by John Grogan, and seen the movie, so I blew off the accolades.

I was not going to write this book. The Editor from Woodley Books, a very nice older woman, Ellen Roberts, called and emailed me repeatedly, trying to convince me to do it.

The problem for me was that to do Fred justice, I had to revisit the most painful and difficult times of my life. The years when I struggled with alcohol. A time when I dealt with stress by drinking myself numb. During that time, before I met my wife, I suffered the worst heartbreak I had ever thought possible, the death of good friends, and the death of my father.
In January, over the course of a weekend, I wrote a one hundred and seventy page hot draft outline covering what Fred and I went through together. It was painful, and I found myself in tears many times, but I pushed on.

Who really wants to go back there and look at that again? I didn't. But something inside me realized I was at a point in life where I could revisit it all, and put it to bed on my terms, not on the terms of my good friends Jimmy Beam, Jackie Daniels, and my old pal Coors light.

We still make conversation at times, those three and I, but we are not near as close as we once were. There were many nights in the first half of the book in the Spring where I put a few beers away and did a couple of shots to loosen up the inhibitions and write what I needed to.

That was the biggest thing, I was reluctant to write the story with me being the asshole I really was. So with encouragements from my editor, I wrote the story as fiction, using my life experience as a guideline.

That did the trick. I compressed the story of the struggle from 16 years to ten, and created an altar ego to play the narrator. I could disassociate myself from the character, so I had no problem attributing all the cruddy things he did to people to him. I changed all the names and places, to protect the guilty as well as the innocent.
The book is a work of fiction, loosely based on my life experiences, but the story of Fred that I tell within is pretty dead on, about a dog who acted as a guardian angel, a canine sponsor for a lost soul.

Tonight I finished the last chapter. And I cried when I was done. So sue me.

Do Dogs go to heaven? I sure hope so, because that is where they deserve to go.