How to build a temple in your heart: a love story

I was only eighteen when I met Demany and within a year we were married. At the time I was a nanny in California and after a hot and heavy romance I received news from immigration that my time in the States was up. We had two options: get married or break up. In the depths of our young love there was really only one choice. 

We said our vows in San Francisco City Hall with one guest as legal witness. We had told only our parents, determined that our shot-gun union wouldn’t change anything about our relationship. I thought of that piece of paper as permission to keep developing the love that we had. Yet within a month we told our close friends we were married and began teasing each other with the names hubby and wife. Within a few months we had moved in together and soon we had completely embodied the roles that I had promised myself we wouldn’t. 

I realised quickly that I loved being married. I thrived in the illusion of security that it provided, the safety of snuggling into him at night and knowing he would be there not just in the morning but the next one too. In the relaxation of our shared commitment (however un-real it had meant to be) we grew and adventured and explored together. Until the age of twenty-five when I decided I wanted to grow and explore the world apart. 

Of all the incredible things we did together (and there were many) there was one that stands apart from the rest: the day we drove south on Highway 99, the grass a spectacular green from a crisp California winter, and landed at a small farm house in the central valley. 

Demany, who was six years old than I, had always been a persuasive man. He wasn’t as enticed by truth as he was by pleasure and when he wanted something, he knew how to get it. For months he had been whispering in my ear about getting a dog and although I was absolutely, completely, one hundred percent against it, there I was about to visit a litter. 

I entered a bright homey kitchen by a side door and stepped into the room that held the beginning of my greatest love. On the floor inside a makeshift fence were two fluffy puppies, one black and one yellow, their fur draping in folds off their too-small bodies. They shone equally but in different ways; she like the full moon reflecting off a midnight sky, and he like sunshine on a golden sand beach. We bought them both. And at first touch I knew that it was he who had claimed my heart, my tiny puppy Bobo. 

From love came love. After Demany had packed his bags and vacated my heart it was Bobo who moved his things in. He didn’t enter playing small. Instead he went to work; renovating the chambers and building entire new rooms. He erected pillars and expanded walls until my heart was an elaborate temple, it’s doors magnificently wide and unguarded. He built with such craftsmanship that it could never shrink backward again; his handiwork was permanent. 

My love was unconditional. When Bobo ate the trash or dug a hole or barked at night I never gave him an ultimatum or replaced him with someone else. I said, this is how he is, and my love never waned. I cleaned the trash from the floor and put the bin back together. I returned the soil to its place or planted something new. I comforted him at night so he felt safe beneath my love. And he settled. 

He returned my love unconditionally too. When I would arrive home from work bereft from a night of drug overdoses or depression or death he would lay with me on the floor. He wouldn’t tell me what to do or try to stop my tears or judge me as weak or strong. 

As he grew older he needed me more: to lift him to places he could no longer reach, to pick him up when his back legs failed or in the end, to coax him to eat. Finally he needed me to help him to die. 

On the morning he passed I’d woken at 4:30am and found him cold on the floor, unable to get up. I pulled him onto his bed, covered him with a special blanket and moved the heater nearer. I made a bed beside him and I lay there for three long (but not long enough) hours. I did not dare to sleep and he kept his eyes wide open too. You must understand I have seen a lot of people die and while the mind does not know it, our soul surely does. As we lay cuddling I kept asking him, “are you dying buddy?” and he would stare right into me past my uncomprehending mind into the part that knows, and I would know it. 

Some time after 7:30am my mind took over and decided he must get up. I lifted him to his feet as best I could. He took a few steps into the kitchen and collapsed into a major seizure. This was a language my paramedic mind could understand. As his body wracked in violent convulses and his eyes bulged staring into nowhere my mind conceded into the truth.

I called the vet, “My dog is dying” I said, “can you send someone to my house to put him down?”. The angel on the phone talked me into coming to them and soon I was driving up the windy hill to the vet. We arrived just before 8am and for another two and a half hours I lay with him on the floor. It was the time we needed to finish our lives together. It was time enough for my dear friend Rachel to drive down to be with us. It was time enough to let my mind catch up to the soul’s knowing. 

Shortly before 10:30am he seized again. He regained enough consciousness to nestle his head into my lap, to snuggle into me in comfort the way he had one thousand times over. And there he stayed as he took his last exhalation- long and slow- and ending in silence. 

In yoga I sometimes tell my students to find the space at the end of their exhale, to not be in a hurry to take the next breath in. I ask them to rest their awareness there. “We assume there will be another breath”, I say, “but we never really know”. I leave space for it to sink in. 

“We assume that when a loved one leaves the house that they will return”, I say. “But we never really know”. I feel it for myself as I breathe. 

“We assume that tomorrow there will be another day, but we don’t really know”. I feel it again, this preciousness, this delicacy. I tell them to wait for that next breath in and when it comes to cherish it because it is gift: another chance at life that for some never comes. 

I have been present for many last breaths but only one was beautiful, and it was his. It was precious because it was steeped in love, the unconditional limitless kind. The kind that will keep the temple that he built in my heart expanded forever. 

It is not important what teaches us to love, only that we learn. It could be a child or a pet or a part of nature. When you find it keep it close. Call upon it anytime you are afraid and at risk of closing. The larger the space that this love builds inside of you the more wide open and unprotected you may feel. It can be scary to be like that. But I say let it all in, keep it open. 

Nothing is a mistake. Not a slapdash teenage wedding, not the accidental purchase of a dog. Not a heart wrenching divorce or the fear of taking away your pet’s last breath too soon. Everything is a lesson in love if you’re brave enough to keep the heart open. 

Let love build a temple in your heart. 

RIP Bobo 

2005-2018

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