it matters

Murray Day 2005

Murray was not an ordinary dog. He was very calm, very sweet, and oh so brilliant. He mattered. He mattered to a lot of people, not just me. He mattered most to me, but he touched a lot of lives.

At my school, 1/3 of the student population of the entire school has had contact with my baby. Every single school year, for the past 10 years probably, has ended with Murray Day. Murray Day is a day when Murray came to school and spent the whole day just being in the classroom with all of the kids. It was an important day. Kids even dressed up for it. I’m not kidding. Some kids wore their nicest church clothes while other kids wore anything and everything that they owned that had a graphic or picture of a dog on it. They brought gifts and they counted down to Murray Day as eagerly as they counted down to the winter break. Really, it was one of the greatest tools to hold over the student’s heads for discipline: Boys and girls, if this is how you are going to behave today, I don’t see how I could possibly allow Murray to come for Murray Day! You will frighten the pants right off of him!

But it wasn’t just Murray Day that mattered to the students. An image of my baby is on the cover of every single homework assignment. He is on the front of the homework folder. And pictures of him, on Murray Day and otherwise, are posted all throughout the classroom When I work in the classroom on weekends and over the summer, it is NOT unusual for the door to open and a random family to appear in the doorway, the parents always explaining: We saw your car and the kids demanded we stop in to see Murray! And I don’t think that a week goes by without someone, either a current or a past student, stopping in to bring Murray a treat, a note that they have written to him, a picture that they have drawn, just for him etc… In fact, on the day that Murray’s stomach flipped, I suspect that the sheer number of people who had brought treats with them to school when they went to find out who their new teachers would be, had at least a little to do with the incident. They just all knew that Murray would be there. They expected him to be and he was.

Even the kids from this year’s class, the class that I made clear from the start would NOT be having a Murray Day (I knew it was getting too taxing for him so last year I declared it the last) are head-over-heals in love with my little boy. The last week of school, they asked me every day if he was at school. At recess, they gave up their play time to stand by the fence and catch a glimpse of him when I took him out of The Daz for a potty. I snapped a picture of this and, as it is a cell phone shot, i expect it is distorted enough to include here and that the individual student’s faces cannot be made-out.

watching from the fence

and these are the kids who never really even MET Murray!

The point that I am trying to make is that, I keep trying to analyze why I care so much that some people do not treat this loss as valid as the loss of a human child. I mean the people who know us and love us understand the depth of our loss so what should it matter that the rest of the world doesn’t get it?

But here it is: If Murray, who has touched the lives of so, so, so many children, had been a human child, his loss would demand a certain care upon the return to school. There are so many, many children who see Murray as, in some small part, their very own. They care deeply about him. This is proven to me on a regular basis. Just the other day, Murray got an email from a former student who knew that he had been sick and just wanted to send an email to say that she hoped he was all better now. What other dog on earth receives mail and emails from children?

And former students, whose parents are in my email address book, will hopefully be told by their parents. I will include a message to the parents of current students in the newsletter that I will send before we return to school. But none of these are the children that I worry about. The ones to which Murray had a special importance are the children who are sometimes known or described as the ‘lost’ children, or the ‘at risk’ kids. Kids with little to no guidance from home. These are children who felt especially special and important from Murray’s love. And make no mistake, Murray could single out a ‘lost’ child in the blink of an eye and make them feel like the most important kid in the world. I didn’t train him to do that. He just had a gift. He would spend Murray Day following the loneliest, saddest, most academically challenged kid in the room and wagging his tail at them and rubbing his perpetually itchy chin against them in a way that was so obviously affectionate.

These are the kids who will find out that Murray is gone by hearing it on the playground. They will be the ones not to know for weeks until they show up in the classroom with some mangy dog-biscuit that they discovered and immediately thought to bring to him, or with a picture that they drew just for him. They will hear it from friends or they might not ever find out- which may be lucky.

If Murray, who has impacted the lives of so many children… has inspired so many lost children, has been loved by so so many… if  he were a human child, this would call for the need… would demand the necessity of a humane means of notification regarding his loss.

But he was not a human child and therefor, his loss will not be seen as ‘important’ enough to be compassionately expressed to those who loved him. And because this matters, to me, I feel that I am failing in my ability to honor my baby’s memory!

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