Bill Simmons on dying doggies

I know this is an odd person to link to on this subject, and an odd thing for me to post about period… but I lost my doggie in March and am still not really over it.  And I’m masochistic enough to have to read about others’ lost dogs.  And I am deeply touched each time.

I would recommend anyone who has an under-appreciated dog to read the article in its entirety, but one passage seemed specifically relevant to me. From my (and every college kid’s) favorite sports columnist, Bill Simmons at ESPN:

“We couldn’t tell how much she was suffering. There was no way to know. Dogs can’t speak. Dogs have a huge threshold for pain. You just don’t know. You can’t know.”

My dog was a real trooper and never made a squeak despite eighteen years of poor care (I was nine when I got him and not very responsible).  He waited diligently for us to arrive home in my parents’ big empty house, even though all the kids and grown ups were too busy to pay attention to him when we were around.

And then something weird happened.  As my dog grew old, and so did I, my tempo began to match his.  And suddenly my quiet, loyal, and simple dog became my backyard companion on sunny days when I wanted to lie back in a lawn chair with a book.

Or when I read articles online on my laptop in the kitchen, and wanted to be able to reach under the chair every few minutes to tease my doggie behind his ear (like all dogs, he seemed to have permanent itchy spots).

And by the time I began to appreciate my dog as a person (and I did appreciate him as an impressively good-natured and strong person), my dog was already late into his teens and losing his mobility and sight.  But he never whimpered.  And he never wailed.  And he never whined.  And perhaps because of that, he lived a few days longer than he was ever supposed to.

In a bit of fortuitous timing, I capriciously quit my job at the start of March 2008.  With my sudden surplus free time, I began to spend more of my days with my dog.  Or so I intended.  The day after I quit my job, my dog had a turn for the worse.

Suddenly he could no longer support his weight on his rear legs and seemed, perhaps because of the lack of mobility, almost totally blind.  He had exhibited some problems with arthritis in the past, especially in the cold, but never to the degree that he could not hold himself up indoors, or lift himself up off of the ground.

Like Simmons, I had no idea how to tell if he would recover (as he provided glimpses of hope for the final week of his life).  My dog loved nothing more than to eat and run around chasing me from one end of the room, only to turn around and be chased by me to the other.  When he lost his ability to stand – let alone walk – half of his life was effectively over.  I knew that when he lost his desire to eat, his time had come.

He lost his appetite probably within a day or two of his initial turn for the worse.  He would lie on his stomach all day, unwilling to even approach the food left out for him.  Naively, I assumed it had everything to do with the strain moving to the food dish was putting on him so I began to hand feed him with some success.  He even had a fair appetite for the first few meals (for a dog who lied on his stomach all day and slept).

It was not long before he lost even his taste for food fed straight to him with a spoon.

Largely due to my own guilt of having never treated him properly, or appreciating him enough, I was unwilling to let it end that way.  I ended up preserving the faintest glimmer of life in my dog for several more days, bundling in towels and placing a block heater next to where he spot.  Buying special leashes that would hold his hind half up when I needed to bring him outside.  And mashing up fatty, greasy, oily food into water to pick up with an eyedropper so I could provide him water and some nutrients even if he was no longer strong enough to chew.  Or willing to eat.

For the last few days of my dog’s life, I cradled him for hours a day, with him wrapped in towels, as I tried in vain to feed him what amounted to little more than a thin gruel, soaking my shirt with worthless tears over the dog I had for eighteen years but failed to appreciate.

I still remember the look of puzzlement on his face those last few days: probably blind, doubtlessly enduring the pain of a failing body in silence, perhaps in abject confusion as to why someone who paid so little attention would suddenly force him to live on against his own wishes.  And against the wishes of my own family.

I did relent on March 11, 2008, about a week after he lost mobility, to have him euthanized.  I cradled my nearly-stiff and motionless dog from my car into his most hated place, and laid him on a cold metal table to have a needle full of poison injected into his tiny body.  He didn’t blink.  He merely looked at me as I looked at him.  Perhaps not seeing me but I am certain knowing that I was there.  He said nothing as he was dying, hardly anything as long as I knew him, and gave a single convulsion and gasp several minutes after the injection as I waited for his life to ebb away, alone in that hated veterinarian’s operating room.

For eighteen years, my dog was – at best – peripheral to my life.  And for one week, he was the center of my every waking hour.  And almost a year later, I still miss him more than I miss any of my deceased family.  I still hear his claws on the floor of the kitchen.  I still expect to see him lying by the door.  And I still reach down under my chair to play with his ear as I read at my kitchen table.  And I just miss him so much.

… and the cow goes moo