Where to Bury a Dog – thought-provoking ideas from Ben Hur Lampman

Beautiful and thought-provoking – sent to me by a local friend and supporter

‘This is quite sad to read, but so beautiful. I’ve mentioned before
that our little fella didn’t live to walk into our new bungalow but he’s
buried overlooking “our” valley sandwiched between cherry and apple
trees…..read on…..

Where To Bury A Dog

There are various places within which a dog may be buried. We are
thinking now of a setter, whose coat was flame in the sunshine, and who,
so far as we are aware, never entertained a mean or an unworthy thought.
This setter is buried beneath a cherry tree, under four feet of garden
loam, and at its proper season the cherry strews petals on the green
lawn of his grave. Beneath a cherry tree, or an apple, or any flowering
shrub of the garden, is an excellent place to bury a good dog. Beneath
such trees, such shrubs, he slept in the drowsy summer, or gnawed at a
flavorous bone, or lifted head to challenge some strange intruder. These
are good places, in life or in death. Yet it is a small matter, and it
touches sentiment more than anything else.

For if the dog be well remembered, if sometimes he leaps through your
dreams actual as in life, eyes kindling, questing, asking, laughing,
begging, it matters not at all where that dog sleeps at long and at
last. On a hill where the wind is unrebuked and the trees are roaring,
or beside a stream he knew in puppyhood, or somewhere in the flatness of
a pasture land, where most exhilarating cattle graze. It is all one to
the dog, and all one to you, and nothing is gained, and nothing lost —
if memory lives. But there is one best place to bury a dog. One place
that is best of all.

If you bury him in this spot, the secret of which you must already have,
he will come to you when you call — come to you over the grim, dim
frontiers of death, and down the well-remembered path, and to your side
again. And though you call a dozen living dogs to heel they should not
growl at him, nor resent his coming, for he is yours and he belongs there.

People may scoff at you, who see no lightest blade of grass bent by his
footfall, who hear no whimper pitched too fine for mere audition, people
who may never really have had a dog. Smile at them then, for you shall
know something that is hidden from them, and which is well worth the
knowing.

The one best place to bury a good dog is in the heart of his master.’

by Ben Hur Lampman