Belvedere died on March 17, 2010. I never met him, but I miss him.
I never met him, though I've seen a photo. He was a sort of shaggy-haired fellow, long in the tooth, and feeble. He had deep, rich eyes, when you could see them beneath the hair.
I miss him because my friends miss him. His death leaves a giant sheepdog-shaped hole in their hearts.
I've never met my friends, either--not these friends, at least. The Internet does strange things to how one defines a relationship and what constitutes a friendship. Twitter in particular is among the oddest of ways to communicate. When you are limited to 140 characters, you have to distill your thoughts and feelings down to something that fits. You either wind up with trivial banter or you wind up tapping into someone's soul. There's not a lot of room for middle ground in 140 letters.
Here's what delivered the punch to my stomach:
This is a very sad week for us. We have made the decision to put our very feeble Old English Sheepdog to sleep. #Ouronlychild
We have been known as the "Sheepdog" couple for over 13 years...afraid we are losing our identity
I felt the weight of all the times in my life when it could have been me saying those words. Across the years I've let many an animal into my heart, and every one of their deaths rips a hole in me and leaves a void that even my tears cannot fill. And so, when I read:
...All I do is sit there and bawl and he just stares at me and licks my face. Can't take it
I could see that loyal dog, looking up at his person's stricken face and trying to comfort him, with what little strength he had left. A little while later he was gone.
And so I miss the dog I never knew, who belonged to the friends I've never met. And I don't care how much I like these people, I am not going to take over for the dog and lick the tears from their faces. Internet friendships are weird, but they're not that weird--at least mine aren't.
Bryan, my online friend, has touched many lives in this ethereal online world, both professionally (he's a travel agent) and personally. One of us got to thinking, and others gathered, and we moved the conversation from the 140-character confines of Twitter to the roomy realm of Google Wave (which none of us even completely knows, but it seemed a good place for collaborative scheming), and a plan took shape.
We knew what part of the country our friend was in, and we knew what breed of dog he'd had. Each of us determined we'd send a donation, in Belvedere's name, to the Missouri-Kansas Old English Sheepdog Rescue organization we'd searched out online. A couple emails later, their donations coordinator was in touch, and he even offered to take on the extra work to make a special donations page for Belvedere and us.
And so, for Belvedere, for Bryan, for all this magic technology that brings together people who may never meet and builds bonds that distance cannot break, and in hopes that maybe a stranger or two among you might take up the idea to join our efforts and bring a bit of warmth back to our friends' grieving hearts, I present our donation page:
http://www.mokanoesrescue.org/adopt-a-dog/special-events/67-in-memory-of-belvedere.
Here is the last word I received from my friend.
We are trying to adjust and we know we will over time.
Perhaps this will, in some small way, help.