The Dusty Dog

Last Night's Dream

I had a dream last night. It was about Zuki, the Dusty Dog. I just keep reliving it, over and over. Fact is, I'm consciously trying to relive it. I am trying to remember every last detail about this dream. It's the only way that I can still feel like Zuki is with me. Sure, I have tons of photographs of her. I'm a photographer, after all. But, photographs only take me so far. They enable me to see her as she literally was. They enable me to remember how beautiful she was. They enable me to hold a piece of her forever in my heart.

But, dreams are different. Dreams, when vivid, carry along into the daytime an emotional thread that photos will never do. Granted, dreams distort that life she actually led. But, I don't care. It works for me.

I woke up with a piece of her, a piece of the emotional attachment that we had. And, that is a piece that is so hard to hold onto. It gets diluted over time, whether I want it to, or not. It becomes a memory that I will always and gratefully have, but absent some emotional impact. Maybe, I keep trying to hold onto that emotional impact of the day she died. Nothing is more emotional than that. Nothing. And, as painful as it is, it's a pain that I hold near and dear to my heart. It somehow keeps it a bit real for me.


I know that the same holds true for my brother who died May 3, 1978. That's a long time ago, but a day that I refuse to ever let go. It holds the emotion of my sadness that he died, but also the total love that we had. But, I digress. This article is about Zuki.

The dream was, as most dreams are, quite odd. I dreamed that she was physically disabled, as she was before she died. She was not able to get up on her own. She needed the help of a scarf tied around her rump. Her spinal stenosis robbed her of the strength to push herself up into a standing position. But once up, she could walk.

In the dream, I pulled her up, and she took off into a run with her best buddy, Luka, my friend's German Shepherd. This is where it gets odd. From the view of these two dog's rear ends, as I was running to catch up with them, it was obvious that they were both males; both were intact males. How odd is that? They were two beautiful male German Shepherds running down the street, past houses and other odd events.


Another dream oddness was the three WWII German soldiers who were struggling to fire some kind of archaic and damaged weapon, like a mortar gun, at the two dogs. They escaped the soldiers' efforts, and kept running down the street, me running behind them. And, that's when I woke up. I just stayed in bed, hoping to remember every single detail of the dream, including the houses they ran past and the street trees. That's all I can remember.

Zuki was a very special dog. She was a German Shepherd, but she also was part wolf. She was a human construct of an animal, a beast caught between two worlds. I rescued her from a no-kill shelter, being her fourth owner in her then short 1-1/2 years. She lived to be 7-1/2 years old, being ultimately struck down by a horrific disease that rendered her a quadriplegic, FCE. I already wrote about this in a previous post, dated October 15, 2008.


I'm not sure why I'm writing this. Maybe it's cathartic. I think I just need this little photo blog article about her. Maybe, it's my way of keeping her "alive." I don't know. I'm not sure it matters. It just works for me.

Labels: death, Dusty Dog, German Shepherd, grief, GSD, photography

posted by Dusty Dog at 12/14/2008