This will not, in any way, be uplifting.

Dog's Death – John Updike

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog!
Good dog!"

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.

I met with a student this morning about a narrative essay. His teacher had given him this poem to read as an example of what he wanted the narrative essay to accomplish. Lofty goal, I think.

My heart is crumbling after reading this. Knowing that Updike passed away, just recently, makes this more painful to me -- even though I've only ever read one short story by him and don't know a thing about the author as a person.

My brain can't help but relate the indignity of the death in this poem with the possible and probable indignity of the death of John Updike, who passed away from lung cancer earlier this week.

I read an article that included a poem by Updike that will be published later this year. It sums up one of my fears. I can't really say anything else about it but I'll leave you to read the poem and take away your own meaning.

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
‘Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise – depths unplumbable!’

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
'I thought he died a while ago.'

For life's a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.