Loving
Every family is unique, and some are also quirky — unusual, unconventional, unorthodox. Ours meets that test in plenty of ways, but one stands out: we have four dogs. If you know the Coles, you probably know our oldest, Hank and Sunny, and our younger ones, Pippa and Pinky. Each is a rescue. Each is part chihuahua — Hank entirely so — and all of them are beloved.
Most of the time.
Losing
Hank is our oldest, and he is dying. He has congestive heart failure and the other indignities that come with age. This past week has been hard — he sleeps more, eats less, his breathing is more labored, and his walking is more deliberate. He still likes his short walks, though. His tongue has hung out the side of his mouth for years, the result of having most of his teeth pulled when we got him — a casualty of long neglect before he found us. Hank is 14, or 98 in dog years. That’s a good run, by any measure. Most of us would gladly sign the life contract that offered 98 relatively healthy and happy years. I know I would.
And yet I’m not ready to lose him. When are we ever ready to lose someone we love? We can soothe ourselves with phrases like he’s had a good run — and I’m not against self-soothing — but we reach for comfort precisely because we’re in pain. The Coles are in pain, watching Hank move steadily toward his end.
Learning
My former colleague Lewie Donelson, when facing the loss of his own beloved dog Skipper, said with wet eyes, “I have an obligation to Skipper. We made a pact. He’s my dog.” My close friend Jordan Steiker lives that same conviction. Every morning at 7:30, rain or shine, Jordan walks his three dogs. Sometimes I join them.
For most of his life, Hank was the alpha — smart, sweet in his own selective way, and memorably aloof. The Alpha title passed to Pippa a couple of years ago. Now Hank spends most of his hours on his perch: a wooden box filled with blankets, accessed by a small staircase my wife Tracey found at Goodwill. He took to it immediately, as though it had always been his.
Living
Watching him there, I find myself thinking about obligation. I worry it’s becoming unfashionable — not to sound like the old man pining for better days, but I do wonder whether enduring obligations are being quietly edged toward the margins of modern life. I see it in workplaces and social spaces, in schools and churches alike. The weight we give to disposability — in relationships, in commitments, in one another — troubles me. And I include myself in that critique.
Walking with Hank as he declines keeps calling me back to what obligations mean.
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote about the ethical obligations that arise between human beings in the face-to-face encounter — when two people look at one another genuinely, openly, without pretense. Levinas argued that something fundamental shifts in that moment. The change is both ontological and ethical. Out of that encounter is born an obligation: a commitment to the other’s wellbeing and full humanity. And critically, that obligation precedes personal autonomy. It comes first.
I know this to be true. My obligations to Hank, Sunny, Pippa, and Pinky — and to Tracey, my daughters, my mother, my extended family, my colleagues, my friends, and the Parkinson’s community — are real. They are not peripheral. They are the architecture of my life.
The truth, of course, is that all of us are dying. Just at different speeds. Watching Hank decline is sad, but it is also clarifying. It reminds me of my own finitude, and of the finitude of everyone I love most. It reminds me not to treat my obligations as disposable or optional — but as the very things that form and transform me, that point me, and all of us, toward the fullness of our shared humanity.
I’m going to go share these thoughts with Hank this morning.
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Allan Cole is Dean of the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin, where he also serves as the Robert Lee Sutherland Chair in Mental Health and Social Policy, the Bert Kruger Smith Centennial Professor in Social Work, and as Deputy for Medical Humanities and Technology and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Dell Medical School.
Diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2016 at the age of 48, he is the author or editor of 15 books on a range of topics related to chronic illness, bereavement, anxiety, and spirituality. His latest books include Lyrical: Poems that Could Become Songs (Resource Publications), co-authored with his daughter, Meredith C. Cole, Jumping to the Skies: Additional Lessons from Parkinson’s Disease (Cascade), and Riding the Wave: Poems (Resource Publications). Other recent books include Discerning the Way: Lessons from Parkinson’s Disease (Cascade), In the Care of Plenty: Poems (Resource Publications), and Counseling Persons with Parkinson’s Disease (Oxford University Press). With filmmaker and his creative partner Vanessa Reiser, his documentary “The Only Day We Have” aired in April of 2024 on PBS. You may watch it here.