A Moving Tribute to a Lost Companion
Woodrow on the Bench, by Jenna Blum
Harper Collins, 2021
198 pages
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion recalls the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The event is so sudden that it happens in less time than it takes her to fetch something from the kitchen. The transition is so abrupt, that she recalls feeling, “There was a level on which I believed what had happened remained reversible.” In the days and months that follow, she finds herself reluctant to dispose of, or even move, his clothing and possessions, believing that he might yet need them. Didion’s experience of grieving is by no means unique, but neither is it universal, and it was her blending of the particular with the global that made her book such a sensation. There nonetheless remains considerable space for other authors to add their contributions. Hence Jenna Blum’s new memoir, Woodrow on the Bench: Life Lessons from a Wise Old Dog, first published in 2021, and now available in our shop.
Blum’s book explores the question of grieving and loss from a different vantage. What does one do at the other end of the spectrum, when the end looms, unavoidable, a decade or more in the future? And what does one do when the life-partner in question isn’t another person, but a pet?
The eponymous Woodrow is a black lab who comes into Jenna’s life in the autumn of 2004, when her new boyfriend drives her to a farm on Cape Cod to visit a litter of puppies. “I had not intended to get a dog,” she writes, stating that at first she doesn’t feel ready. But then sets those feelings aside, reasoning that “it’s never a good time to get a dog. You might as well dive right in. And who could resist those puppies.” She takes home one for herself, and a second for her mother. The boyfriend doesn’t last. Woodrow, on the other hand, becomes one of the more enduring and meaningful relationships of her adult life.
Alternating chapters contrast the second half of 2019, when Woodrow’s health begins to decline, with recollections from healthier times. By all accounts, Blum really did need a dog in her life. During the summer of 2000, recently divorced, she found herself living in a small apartment on Beacon Hill in Boston. It was an incredibly lonely time for her. “I wasn’t teaching. All my neighbors were gone, my friends, too. […] I started going to the Starbucks every morning so I could hear the barista say, ‘One venti iced espresso, have a great day!’” One day, while waiting for the T, she describes a man crashing into her on the platform, not so much an accident, as the result of her having “become invisible.”
Adding the puppy turns this situation around. Woodrow is something of a celebrity on Blum’s stretch of Commonwealth Avenue, known to everyone from casual passers-by, to the doormen at the Raj Hotel, to an array of deep and caring new relationships with neighbors, forged over the common bond of pet ownership. Having a dog invites people into your orbit. In Blum’s narrative, the dog park isn’t a place so much as it is a network. People get to know your dog, and as a result they get to know you. With Woodrow by her side, Blum’s life goes from “invisible” to filled with happy one-time encounters, fond acquaintances, and deep friendships. As Woodrow’s health declines over the course of the summer and into the fall this community assembles to provide support to both Jenna and Woodrow.
The months-long struggle is not merely psychologically debilitating for Blum, but physically demanding, too. Woodrow is a big dog, over eighty pounds, and getting him outside to complete his daily routines becomes progressively more difficult. First his back legs struggle to bear his weight and she has to assist. Later, though, Blum must carry him down several flights of stairs from her walk-up flat to reach the park across the street. Finally the author is compelled to enlist the help of the many connections she has made through Woodrow, allowing her to realize once more how great an impact he has had on the last fifteen years of her life.
Woodrow on the Bench represents a departure for Blum, whose previous novels—including the historical narratives, Those Who Save Us (2004), and The Lost Family (2017), and the psychological action-family drama The Stormchasers (2010)—all top out at over three hundred pages. This pocket-sized memoir delivers a solid punch, presenting readers with a rich narrative of community, companionship, and loss. And ultimately this is a story of loss. From the beginning we know that the author and her pet are fighting a losing battle, with the best possible outcome being just a little more time with a loved one.
Blum’s elegy to her lost companion will likely remind you of others you have read. For me, it was Didion’s Magical Thinking, and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illych. Early in the book, Blum observes that having first noticed white hairs growing in Woodrow’s fur, that, “I stood in the shower and cried because I knew I would lose him.” This is a feeling so common to pet owners, that in a later chapter she reports a friend having described nearly identical feelings about her own beloved dogs. In “Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead,” John Berger observes that the idea of the inevitability of dying used to be something common to all people, and that “all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete.” Although modernity may have stripped this common experience from us, perhaps, this book suggests, we still experience it through our pets. The long-anticipated ending is no less heartbreaking for its inevitability. Among the many accomplishments in Woodrow on the Bench, the most potent is Blum’s thoughtful exploration of what it means to love a creature that we are almost certainly doomed to outlive.