My Last Big Dog

I will miss that long black body that was forever blocking, it seemed, my way around the house.  I would lift my knee and step over him and he would acknowledge me with a brief thwack of that long tail.  (I will not miss the tail, which had been known to knock small children off their feet and would clear wine glasses off the coffee table with a single sweep.)

I will miss his gravitas.  He liked things to be in their place and people and animals to behave  properly.  I got the first hint of this when he was ten weeks old.  At the end of puppy class the instructor threw half a dozen stuffed toys on the ground for the puppies to play with.  Wolfie retrieved them all, piled them up in the middle of the floor, and lay down next to them--not in a guarding, aggressive way, but looking pleased that order had been restored.  Once, when a boisterous puppy came to visit and was annoying Bisou, Wolfie quietly but efficiently, for the entire length of the visit, put himself between them, herding the puppy away from Bisou.  As he got older he became intolerant of even the mildest marital horseplay, and would streak to my side, with high pitched warning yips that clearly said "stop that at once!"

I will miss his gentleness.  He wasn't particularly big for a Shepherd, but he had a huge black head and pointy alert ears and white canines that looked like scimitars.  People who didn't know dogs found him scary.  Yet never once, in the eight years we were together, and no matter what I did to him, did he growl at me.  Whenever one of the hens escaped from the chicken yard he would dash after her looking like death on wheels, and catch and hold her down to the ground with his jaws.  Every time I felt sure that the hen would perish, but she never did, and I never saw so much as a drop of blood.  From earliest infancy Bisou entertained herself by leaping at his face, growling until he opened his mouth wide and yodeled, at which point she would stick her head into that great maw....

For the last four years, an insidious malady that five vets, including two specialists, could not diagnose slowly sapped his strength and made him lame in his front foot.  Our walks got shorter and shorter, and he became a silent presence around the house.  Then two nights ago, in the middle of a spring snow storm, I let him out and he lay down on the white ground.  When I asked him to come inside he didn't seem to know what I meant.  We had a long, uneasy night together.  By morning, I knew that he was dying. 

The vet came and could only guess at a "neurological event" that may or may not have been related to his mysterious illness.  It was clear to both of us what the right thing was to do, and he did it deftly and respectfully.

Now Wolfie is at rest, and so in a way am I.  There is relief in having the constant worry about him  taken away.  I will not miss the endless shedding and brushing (although the birds will feel deprived in the coming nesting season).  I will not miss the special diets, the pills and herbs that never helped.  I will not miss the guilt I felt every time I had to cut short his walk and then continue it with Bisou. 

My life just got a lot simpler.  But there is a palpable absence in the house, a dog-shaped black hole that my heart keeps falling into as I go about my day.

Fish Hospice

My Betta is in hospice.

For weeks he's been lying at the bottom of the big vase that's been his home for the last four years.  His veil-like fins are ragged and torn, and the iridescent blue scales on his tiny body have turned the color of sand.  Every morning I look at him and think, it's all over now, he's finally dead.  But as I stand there rehearsing burial scenarios I'll catch the flicker of an eye, or the slight shudder of a  pectoral fin. 

I bought him because he looked like a flower, with his creamy trailing fins veined with pink and blue, and his bright azure body.  And then I discovered that he wanted a relationship.

At first I only noticed that whenever I went near his vase, which I kept on the kitchen counter, he would swim towards me.  Then one day I idly stuck my index finger in the water and he swam straight to it.  I wiggled my finger and stroked a fin, then stroked again, and he stayed right there, like a dog.  After that I felt obliged to give him daily stroking sessions.  How could I not?  He was so much more than a flower.

"Want to pet my fish?" I would ask my friends.  And they would stick their fingers in and my Betta would swim up to them--but he only swam towards female fingers.  Let a male of any age, no matter how mild, put his finger in and the Betta would swish his lacy tail and swim away.

Now he's dying.  Every time I walk by his vase I think, he's probably suffering.  He's ancient for a captive Betta, and he'll never recover.  I should probably euthanize him.  But the days pass and I can't seem to do it.  Mind you, I have in the past done the right thing by my old and suffering dogs and cats, and taken them to the vet to be put down.  I have personally clubbed to death wolf spiders that were bigger than my Betta, and in the prime of life.  But this is different.

So for the moment, I'm giving my fish palliative care, trying to keep him comfortable but avoiding extreme measures.  I change his water regularly.  I make sure his heater is on.  And now and then I look into his eyes, which still appear to look back at me, and I tell him that he's the most amazing fish I've ever known, and that it's all right to let go.

Last Day

I knew last night that today would be her last day.  I made the call first thing in the morning, to get it over with.  I showered and dressed and didn't dry my hair.  My spouse unfolded the ramp for the last time, and I put on her old leather leash and the collar with the "canine good citizen" tag and led her up the ramp into the back of the station wagon for the last time.

At the vet's they'd worked us in from sheer kindness, and we had to wait in the parking lot a while.  Every few minutes I'd look in the rear-view mirror hoping that she'd fallen asleep, but I could see her German Shepherd ears still sticking straight up, like the bell-towers of Chartres. 

I'd not had time for my morning meditation at home, so sitting behind the wheel I put my hands on my knees, breathed, and watched my thoughts and my heart twist and swirl with sadness, fear for what was soon to come to Lexi and eventually to me and to my loved ones, guilt that I was doing this, more sadness.  Then I tried to visualize a kind of golden glow inside the car, enveloping both Lexi and me.  (Here I would like to express my gratitude to all those who have worked to bring Buddhist meditation to this  frantic land.) What can I say?  It kept me sane.

My dogs never will expire peacefully at home.  For the last four, I have had to make the decision, the appointment, the drive.  I have held them to the last, stayed with them to offer the last comfort I could, but also to expiate my guilt.  Why should I feel guilty about putting an end to the misery of a terminally ill dog?  Because of the immense relief that comes as a result of this action.  Nothing makes you feel free like getting rid of an old, sick dog.  No more calling in vain;  no more endless waiting at the door;  no more struggling to brush coat and file nails;  no more cleaning  up the rug....

The vet came out shivering--it was sleeting--with a needle in her hand.  "I'll give her a sedative first.  It usually takes about ten minutes to work.  Then I'll be back."  I held Lexi while she got the shot.  Then I crawled into the back seat and reached over and rubbed her third eye the way my husband used to rub our babies to put them to sleep.  She kept sitting up, looking more and more crumpled, and I thought maybe I would have to help her lie down.  But she finally did it by herself, and I kept rubbing and stroking and not talking because I didn't want to make myself cry.

When the vet and her assistant returned, I held Lexi's head, and she never felt the needle going into the vein.  Over the next few minutes, very gently, she subsided.   The vet listened to her heart and said, "she's gone."  I closed her eyes and we slipped a pink blanket under Lexi and carried her inside.

You'd be surprised what an empty space a dog leaves who's been mostly asleep for the last three years.  Wolfie--who learned from her how to be a good dog, who never once tried to mount her but kept all other males away from her, who used to wait by the door for her to return from her aimless wanderings in the yard--has been staring out the back door a lot.  When time came for the afternoon feeding ritual, I didn't quite know where to place the two remaining bowls.

Old Ladies

One is ninety-four.  The other will soon be fourteen.  One is my mother;  the other, my dog Lexi.

Every time I step over Lexi's recumbent form on my way to or from the kitchen, I think of my mother.  And often, as I worry about and mourn my  mother, my thoughts return to Lexi, lying on her spot in the middle of the kitchen.  Both my mother and my dog amaze their doctors and vets, respectively.  "Her vitals are better than mine!"  the nurse practitioner at the nursing home exclaims about my mother.  "I can't believe she's still walking around," the vet said the last time she saw Lexi.

Both, at their advanced age, look forward to their next meal, and instead of shrinking are putting on weight.  For a long time I kept Lexi skinny because of her arthritic hips, but for the last several months I've let her have (almost) all the food she wants.  Why deprive her of her one remaining pleasure?  Since her bout of encephalitis almost two years ago, my mother has been immobile.  Lexi too is practically immobile, though she does still manage to get to her outdoor bathroom.  I used to think that lying down for months on end spelled doom for man and beast.  But apparently there are exceptions.

Their minds are fading, along with their sight and hearing.  For a while this meant that they gradually and gently withdrew from reality, my mother into a place that held her long-dead husband and parents, with whom she would have long chats, and Lexi into wherever old dogs go to remember.   For a long while, things were peaceful in our kitchen and in the room in the nursing home in Mobile, Alabama.  But that has changed.  Now we give Lexi Valium at night, so that she won't spend it in anguished, wheezy, endless barking.  My mother has become aggressive towards the people who take care of her, and is having to be sedated.

Sedatives seem to take the edge off mental misery.  They also keep my  mother's caretakers safe from her teeth and, I hope, more disposed to treat her kindly.  But sedatives are not good for the body, and the pace of her deterioration is increasing.  Are we, her family, by condoning the use of these drugs allowing a kind of gradual euthanasia?   If Lexi's dementia were to take an aggressive turn there would be no doubt as to the next step:  we would take her to the vet who would gently and quickly put an end to her distress.  But there is no such clarity where humans are concerned.

Through all this, some shreds of their former selves still cling to my mother and my dog.  In the last photo of my mother, her mouth looks oddly crooked, and I worried that she'd had a stroke.  "No, no," my sister, who took the picture, said.  "She told me that she didn't want to smile because she was afraid she had food between her teeth." 

On her part, Lexi still reigns over an invisible territory that the other dogs dare not cross.  If I call them and they don't immediately appear, or I hear them whining in the kitchen, I know that it's because they're stuck behind Lexi, and I have to go liberate them.  "Lexi, I'm watching you," I say, and they sprint past her.

But lately her domain has been shrinking, and Wolfie and Bisou can get past her almost any time they choose.

The Story Of Jesse, My First German Shepherd. Part The Last

The day after that shameful exam, I signed us up for basic obedience again. And at the end of that course, we passed the test.

But Jesse was becoming harder and harder to handle at the vet's, where he went for his weekly shots. The techs were plainly afraid of him. When I walked him in town he didn't like men anywhere near me, and let them know it. When the mailman put the mail through the slot in our front door, Jesse attacked it. There was something about him that didn't feel quite right to me, so I kept signing up for more advanced obedience classes, figuring that this was the only way to keep him under control.

I also took him running—I was running 25 miles a week at that time—assuming that a tired dog is less likely to get into trouble. We used to get a lot of comments, Jesse and I, on those runs. They came invariably from men, and every last one of them went something like, “Ain't nobody gonna bother you, lady, with that dog alongside....”

At home he periodically would do amazing things. One time, the girls and I were sorting through their outgrown toys to give to charity at Christmas. In the middle of the attic we made a huge pile of magnetic alphabet boards, a Fisher-Price farm, a little cart you could ride on, a stack of Dr. Seuss books...all the detritus of a 1970s childhood.

Jesse came clicking up the stairs, took one look, and clicked back down. Two minutes later he was back with his nylabone, which he dropped on the pile of toys. He left, and while the girls and I stared at each other open-mouthed we heard him coming up again, this time with his ball, which he also put on the pile.

That was when we started saying that inside Jesse's head was a slightly retarded human, who sadly had never learned to speak.

But the good times did not last.

One afternoon I came home from the College to find my daughters looking shaken. (By then we had left our house in the country and moved to the center of the small town where I worked.) A friend of the girls had been visiting after school and left the front door open as he went home.

Jesse had rushed out, crossed the street, and jumped on an older woman who was walking by with her husband. He latched onto her arm and tore her coat—though thankfully not her arm—before passers-by pulled him off her.

The woman and her husband, who lived in the neighborhood, were terrified. The first thing I did was to get their version of the story, and write a check for the coat. Then I sat down, put my head in my hands, and tried to think.

An older couple out for an afternoon stroll were surely the least threatening of strangers. Most importantly, they had not been anywhere near our house or yard, but across the street and in front of the Court House, where dozens of people walked every day.

Our front door opened directly onto the sidewalk. If insecurely latched, it could be pulled open by a child. What if the woman Jesse had attacked had been a toddler—would we have a major mangling, even a death, on our hands?

The unprovoked nature of the attack, and the thought of a child as possible victim forced me to conclude that the only responsible action was to have Jesse euthanized.

“Euthanasia”: good death. True indeed for those in pain or so weakened by age that life holds no joy or pleasure. But for our Jesse, five years old, full of vigor, affection and smarts? How could I live with the decision to put him down?

But then, how could I live with myself if he, out of the blue--despite the two years of obedience classes, the exercise, the vet care—seriously damaged a child?

That night Alison, the one Jesse had so unmercifully herded when she was little, took him for a last long walk around the neighborhood. I let her go. I knew she would be safe with him.

The next morning I made an appointment with the vet, and asked my husband to go with me. The only way I could deal with what was happening was to shut down emotionally. We walked Jesse into the clinic and told the vet what had happened, and our decision. He did not argue, and asked if we wanted to be there while he gave the injection. I said...no.

Over the years, I have had several dogs and cats euthanized for health reasons. I have always held them and comforted them until the last sigh, and the final closing of the eyes. But with Jesse—my smart, beautiful, prime-of-life Jesse—I couldn't do it.

We left him there and went to our offices, and the girls went to school, and life went on.

But oh, Jesse, what a mark you left on us, and how sadly we remember you.

In Which I Euthanize An Orchid

I brought an orchid home from the grocery store last March, to help with the winter blues. It was an ordinary Phalaenopsis—you know, the ones that look like butterflies in flight. The blooms, four on each of two long, stiff stems, were the size of ping pong balls, white with purply pink veins in the center, and I thought they were magical. It was my first orchid ever.

I put it in a nice cachepot, in a light but not too sunny spot, and feasted my eyes on it for a full 48 hours. Then, with a single swish of his tail, Wolfie decapitated one of the two stems.

I refrained from scolding him—after all, it's not his fault if he's bursting at the seams with joie de vivre. The remaining stem was doing fine, and those flowers hung on until Thanksgiving. The same was not true, however, of the leaves, which should have been a deep green and turgid but instead were thin and wrinkled and had an unhealthy yellow tinge.

Plant books tell you that the most common cause of plant ills is overwatering, so I watered less. But the leaves looked the same. I went back to regular watering and one leaf turned completely yellow, so I cut it off. A friend who has a great hand with orchids recommended regular plant food (as opposed to special orchid food) to give the leaves a boost. But they continued to droop.

I was about to throw in the towel when, sometime after the last winter solstice, I saw two buds on one of the stems. The orchid was going to bloom! Full of hope, I misted it with special care, watered it, fed it, moved it to a warmer spot.

But that orchid could have been made of stone, for all the life it showed. The buds, still green, developed at a glacial pace. The leaves, still thin and wrinkled, worried and depressed me every time I looked at them. The plant might eventually flower, but how would it sustain itself with those sick-looking leaves?

This morning, at plant-misting-grooming-and-chatting-up-time, I faced my feelings. That orchid was giving off negative energies, and I was absorbing them. It had to go. And so, it went.

Meanwhile, on the kitchen windowsill, an ancient zonal geranium has been making poppy-red blooms all winter long. It loves showers, and every time I put it in the sink and run the hose over it, it rewards me with another bloom.

Geraniums are a peasant flower. They look good in rustic surroundings, next to stone and old brick. They go on and on no matter what, and manage to look cheerful unless they are at death's door.

Next winter (in Vermont it's never too early to start planning for next winter) I think I'll try having more than just the one geranium in the house. I'd especially like to have a bunch of those barely-pink ones (NOT the horrible salmony-pink kind) that are so hard to find.

In the meantime, just in case the barely-pink ones don't materialize, I'll try rooting some cuttings from my old red friend in the kitchen.

October 21, 2008, "Wolfie's Work"

In the house, I'm always stepping over one or the other of my dogs, for they love to position themselves in strategic places from which they can monitor the household activities. I am told that this is typical of German Shepherds, who are apt, on their own initiative, to take responsibility for all kinds of things.

I also spend time pondering the mysteries of their dog-to-dog relationship. Lexi is ten. She is a very girly bitch, too smart for her own good, and with an independent streak. She is also beset by age-related aches and stiffnesses. Wolfie, not quite two years old, big of head and black of fur, outweighs her by some 15 pounds, and loves her with all his heart.

Wolfie has learned most of what he knows from Lexi. He watches her constantly, sniffs where she sniffs, barks when she barks. When we are outside, and she ranges far afield, he positions himself between her and me, looking anxiously from one to the other, worrying that we'll get separated.

Most of the time, she pays him no mind, hardly looks at him, except to occasionally take a bone away from him (she, who hasn't chewed a bone since she was a pup). She will no more let him lie down close to her than she will let him lick her bowl.

Wolfie badgers her a lot, sometimes roughly, to play, but in their games he's the only one I've ever heard yelp. When she's had enough, she nips his leg, and that's the end of it. In every way, Lexi with her fine muzzle and her big eyes lords it over her galoot of a companion. Until recently I would have said that if they were to be separated, Lexi would hardly notice, whereas I would worry about Wolfie's sanity.

Lately, however, I've begun to wonder. I first noticed something odd when I took both dogs to the vet a few weeks ago. Since they were only going to get their bordetella immunizations, I took them into the examination room together. Now Lexi in her long life has had blood taken and thermometers stuck under her tail innumerable times, and as a result she is apprehensive about the vet's. She paces restlessly while we're waiting, and though she never growls, she does her best to elude the hands that are trying to give her a shot or take a blood sample. This time, with Wolfie in the room, it was different. There was no anxious pacing during the wait. There was no trying to get away when the immunization was administered.

But it was during nail-trimming that I realized that something was really going on. If there is one thing that Lexi hates even more than going to the vet's, it's having her nails trimmed. Not that I trim her nails. I file them. This is the unsatisfactory compromise that she and I have settled on since the day I nicked her toe ten years ago.

When it's nail-trimming time, I put her on a down/stay, give her a treat, grasp a paw and start filing. It takes forever. My own fingernails get messed up in the process, and Lexi, even with the aid of treats, does not cooperate. She wiggles, she pulls her paws away, she struggles, she whines. I alternately encourage, implore, command, center myself and breathe, administer more treats, and eventually give up and let her go.

Wolfie on the other hand gets his nails done with a regular dog nail clipper. When I tell him to, he plops down on his side, leans his head on my thigh, and heaves a great big sigh. I give him a treat, and in a couple of minutes the job is done.

I used to put Wolfie in his crate while I worked on Lexi's nails, worried that he would upset her by coming near her, go for the treats, or otherwise disrupt the precarious balance of the procedure. But we've put away the crate because Wolfie no longer needs it, so the last couple of times I decided to trust that he would stay out of the way while I filed Lexi's nails.

And here is the strange thing. Wolfie did not stay away. Instead he plopped himself down right next to Lexi, almost touching her, and put his nose down on his paws. I was steeling myself for major snaps and growls from Lexi when I realized that, instead, she was lying placidly on her back, her paw limp in my hand as I filed away, a look of utter relaxation on her face. Well, I thought, this will all change when I start to file her hind paws (always the more problematic), or when Wolfie gets antsy and starts moving around.

But nothing changed. Lexi let me work on her hind paws and Wolfie kept his nose millimeters from her fur, his body pressed against my leg. He was so relaxed that he could have been asleep, except that his eyes were open and alert. If I hadn't been afraid of interrupting the moment's magic, I would have hugged him, for seeing a job that needed doing, and stepping up to the plate.

Large dogs age quickly, and the day will eventually come when we will have to do Lexi the mercy of euthanasia. I have often wondered how I will plan it so that she will not feel stress or anxiety, for even more than about losing her, I am appalled by the thought that she might be afraid at the end. Now I know that, when that day comes, Wolfie will be there to ease the moment for his old friend, as well as for me.