Jun
26
My friends. Thank you for your kind words about Dog. Thank you.
Some of you asked how the boys are doing; they’re completely fine. Dog was a sweet and patient creature but she wasn’t particularly interested in loud rambunctious children (we adopted her after she had been retired from breeding, I always suspected she took one look at Riley when we brought him home as a newborn and thought, lord, not these things again) and they were never particularly emotionally attached to her. I think if she’d been a younger dog the relationship would have been different, you know? As it was, they seem to accept with no great amount of sorrow that she was very old and her life had come to an end.
For me her absence is strangely tangible, an insistent lack of something that keeps catching the corner of my eye. The wood-chip padded area next to the house where she slept during the day, her doghouse (disassembled and packed away yet somehow still there, an invisible outline), the carpet where she would lay at night. The click of her nails on the floor, the awkward scramble of her getting to her feet in the morning. I don’t know how an empty or missing thing can feel so commandingly present. Here I am, not here.
I very much wish I could unsee the minutes that happened after we were ushered into that sad little room at the veterinarian’s office. Everything was done with professionalism and kindness and I do not believe that she suffered. But oh. Oh, my god.
At first it seemed like that’s all I was ever going to be able to think about again when it came to remembering her—the haunting machinations of her death—but that afternoon seems to be fading bit by bit (please, go away) and I am trying to instead conjure up all the happy things we did with her throughout the years.
I have been adamant that I do not under any circumstances want another dog any time soon but … well. The owner who we originally adopted Dog from told us she has another female Lab that she’s hoping to find a good home for. The dog is three years old. JB thinks we should just go to the owner’s house again, just to visit. I think that sounds like an absolutely terrible idea and I refuse to even consider it. For now.
Anyway, I wanted to post a follow up and I mostly just wanted to say thank you, thank you, thank you. For those of you who have ever loved an animal, you know there’s no such thing as “it’s just a pet.”
Jun
22
People told me I would know when it was time, but we never really did for sure. I can tell you that a few months ago we noticed that Dog was … the best words I can use are winding down, which makes me think of clichéd metaphors involving dying clocks, but that’s exactly what it was like. She was slowing down. She started coughing and making messes in the laundry room where she sleeps at night. The vet told us her heart was failing, which was creating excess fluids she was too weak to fully expel from her lungs. They gave us antibiotics and not much hope. She was a very old dog, after all.
In the last couple weeks something changed in her. She stopped wagging her tail, she stopped circling the kitchen looking for dropped treats, she stopped expending any energy at all. She barely moved all day long. I wouldn’t go so far as to say there was a sense of despair about her, but there was a sort of silent, sad, enduring resignation. She would eat, but with no interest whatsoever. She had lost so much weight she had this awful gaunt appearance around her back, like her flesh was barely covering her spine.
Last night JB walked her to the park that’s about a block away, and she nearly couldn’t make it back. I watched her, later in the evening, as she lay on the carpet nearby; you could see the effort of her chest rising and falling. I put my hand on her and I could feel her watery, labored breathing. Her overworked heart.
She slowly put one paw up to touch my hand, a broken version of the robust and silly Dog handshake she used to do, and I guess I did know, or maybe I didn’t for sure, maybe I’m just trying to convince myself. We can’t know what she really felt like, we can’t know what she would have wanted. But I believe she had passed some sort of point of no return, that her days would have become increasingly painful. Exhaustion, suffocation, drowning.
The vet helped ease her out of this life today. JB and I were there to comfort her and pet her as she went. It was the worst thing I’ve ever done. Oh, Dog.
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