the dog in the freezer

all dogs go to heaven, but some go through hell to get there.

I found out about the death of my childhood dog through an Instagram post.

I’ve barely spoken to my parents since moving away, and it occurred to me as I swiped through a photo montage of Noble’s best moments on my sister’s account that she would only have posted something like this if something horrible had happened to him.

“There was nothing I could do, except watch you take your last breath as I gave you the head scratches you liked,” the caption read. “I’m sorry for the pain you endured.”

He had endured a lot. At 13 years old, this mangled, blind war vet of a Lhasa Apso had already given up his will to live six years prior.

The nurse said I should have gotten him euthanized long ago, but I didn’t know how to explain to her that my mother had broken down in shrieking wails at the suggestion, asking me if this was how I’d treat her the moment her own quality of life started to decline.

I considered sharing the crudely drawn line graph I had made—delineating the exact point at which euthanizing my dog would have been an act of mercy—to convince myself that letting one die could ever be more Christlike than letting two suffer, but it didn’t seem like a good time for that.

And so Noble died the hard way: not just from heart failure, but from his owner’s attempt to appease their mother’s abandonment issues.

I didn’t get to process my sister’s Instagram post before I received a text from her asking me to come home. I also didn’t get to process the following text she sent me before I left through the front door.

“Don’t tell Mom that we put him in my room’s fridge.”

I had entered my car when I received another—this time from my dad.

“Don’t ask where the body is in front of Mom.”

Hiding from each other was a common pastime in our family. I found my sister doing just that, staring at the floor from the edge of her bed as I entered her dimly lit room.

I attempted to say something, but there was a mind-numbing hum in the room that made it hard to think—a hum that I had never heard before.

And then, I saw it: a stainless steel Magic Chef mini-fridge that hadn't been turned on in years, lit by a faint glow leaking through several haphazardly wrapped layers of painter’s tape. A real feat of blue-collar Dadaism.

I walked right past it despite the spectacle, but Vienna stopped me, eyes puffy from a night spent crying alone.

“You’re not going to look inside?”

Not only had this teen just seen her beloved pet die in front of her very eyes, she had also been forced to bear witness as its corpse was unceremoniously stuffed into a freezer not even half her size.

Who was I to deny her request?

Cursing God, I peeled back the layers of tape keeping the doors sealed. Without them, the fridge looked like it was about to burst. I took a breath and pulled the door back.

At first, I was confused by what I saw. There was no white, mangy dog; only a large, amorphous, black mass shoved against the fridge’s chamber. The realization eventually set in.

My dad had double-bagged my dog using two 13-gallon Great Value trash bags. And because my dog was the size of a child's casket, my dad wasn’t able to position him horizontally inside the fridge, as one might with a pizza box.

No, my dog was stuffed vertically against the inner side of the refrigerator door, held in place by nothing but blue tape and a father's refusal to drive to the emergency vet at 10 PM.

Saying nothing, I closed the fridge and sat next to my sister in silence. And then, I drove back home.

They say dogs tend to resemble their owners. Whenever I broke down in silence, trying to hide my panic attacks from my parents, he would quietly look the other way. And when I caught Noble staring at the wall for an hour straight, head bowed like a Catholic in confession, I did the same. Noble was a miserable bastard living in a house of miserable bastards.

So perhaps Noble and I truly were one and the same—at least to my father. The apathetic frugality that nearly convinced my dad to ration out my mom's remaining bronchitis antibiotics to treat my sinusitis before I begged him to take me to the doctor was the same frugality that had led him to stop taking Noble to the vet, even after dermatitis cases, ear infections and maggot infestations.

Despite the six figures on his paycheck, money could not afford my father a heart, so I would pay for Noble’s treatment using whatever money a 20-year-old student could have saved up in their moving-out fund.

For what love a child could have for their dog, I did everything I could, but everything isn't enough when you're just someone whose very sanity is contingent on successfully taking 50 milligrams of Zoloft every night. Eventually, I ran out of money—and patience.

The circumstances of Noble’s death, much like the suffering his owner endured from living under the same roof, was preventable—it was just that no one else in the house had cared enough to help it. And so, both of them left.

There is no profound lesson or moral epiphany to take away from this. A child was left traumatized and estranged. An animal died at the hands of a dysfunctional family. Perhaps if I wasn't so preoccupied with trying to save myself from the same sickness that was killing my dog, I could have saved him from rotting away in a makeshift morgue. But we were both just trying to survive, and something had to give.

When I finally secured the apartment that was going to solve all my problems, I was put at ease for the first time in years. But as I walked down the linoleum-tiled floor of the kitchen and saw the 13 cubic foot chasm in the wall, it dawned on me.

I needed a fridge.