by John Grogan
I didn’t say so to anyone in the room, but I found myself clinging to the moment, knowing there would not be too many more like it. Marley was in the quiet dusk of a long and eventful life. Looking back on it later, I would recognize that night in front of the fire for what it was, our farewell party. I stroked his head until he fell asleep, and then I stroked it some more.
Four days later, we packed the minivan in preparation for a family vacation to Disney World in Florida. It would be the children’s first Christmas away from home, and they were wild with excitement. That evening, in preparation for an early-morning departure, Jenny delivered Marley to the veterinarian’s office, where she had arranged for him to spend our week away in the intensive care unit where the doctors and workers could keep their eyes on him around the clock and where he would not be riled by the other dogs. After his close call on their watch the previous summer, they were happy to give him the Cadillac digs and extra attention at no extra cost.
That night as we finished packing, both Jenny and I commented on how strange it felt to be in a dog-free zone. There was no oversized canine constantly underfoot, shadowing our every move, trying to sneak out the door with us each time we carried a bag to the garage. The freedom was liberating, but the house seemed cavernous and empty, even with the kids bouncing off the walls.
The next morning before the sun was over the tree line, we piled into the minivan and headed south. Ridiculing the whole Disney experience is a favorite sport in the circle of parents I run with. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve said, “We could take the whole family to Paris for the same amount of money.” But the whole family had a wonderful time, even naysayer Dad. Of the many potential pitfalls—sickness, fatigue-induced tantrums, lost tickets, lost children, sibling fistfights—we escaped them all. It was a great family vacation, and we spent much of the long drive back north recounting the pros and cons of each ride, each meal, each swim, each moment. When we were halfway through Maryland, just four hours from home, my cell phone rang. It was one of the workers from the veterinarian’s office. Marley was acting lethargic, she said, and his hips had begun to droop worse than usual. He seemed to be in discomfort. She said the vet wanted our permission to give him a steroid shot and pain medication. Sure, I said. Keep him comfortable, and we’d be there to pick him up the next day.
When Jenny arrived to take him home the following afternoon, December 29, Marley looked tired and a little out of sorts but not visibly ill. As we had been warned, his hips were weaker than ever. The doctor talked to her about putting him on a regimen of arthritis medications, and a worker helped Jenny lift him into the minivan. But within a half hour of getting him home, he was retching, trying to clear thick mucus from his throat. Jenny let him out into the front yard, and he simply lay on the frozen ground and could not or would not budge. She called me at work in a panic. “I can’t get him back inside,” she said. “He’s lying out there in the cold, and he won’t get up.” I left immediately, and by the time I arrived home forty-five minutes later, she had managed to get him to his feet and back into the house. I found him sprawled on the dining room floor, clearly distressed and clearly not himself.
In thirteen years I had not been able to walk into the house without him bounding to his feet, stretching, shaking, panting, banging his tail into everything, greeting me like I’d just returned from the Hundred Years’ War. Not on this day. His eyes followed me as I walked into the room, but he did not move his head. I knelt down beside him and rubbed his snout. No reaction. He did not try to gum my wrist, did not want to play, did not even lift his head. His eyes were far away, and his tail lay limp on the floor.
Jenny had left two messages at the animal hospital and was waiting for a vet to call back, but it was becoming obvious this was turning into an emergency. I put a third call in. After several minutes, Marley slowly stood up on shaky legs and tried to retch again, but nothing would come out. That’s when I noticed his stomach; it looked bigger than usual, and it was hard to the touch. My heart sank; I knew what this meant. I called back the veterinarian’s office, and this time I described Marley’s bloated stomach. The receptionist put me on hold for a moment, then came back and said, “The doctor says to bring him right in.”
Jenny and I did not have to say a word to each other; we both understood that the moment had arrived. We braced the kids, telling them Marley had to go to the hospital and the doctors were going to try to make him better, but that he was very sick. As I was getting ready to go, I looked in, and Jenny and the kids were huddled around him as he lay on the floor so clearly in distress, making their good-byes. They each got to pet him and have a few last moments with him. The children remained bullishly optimistic that this dog who had been a constant part of their lives would soon be back, good as new. “Get all better, Marley,” Colleen said in her little voice.
With Jenny’s help, I got him into the back of my car. She gave him a last quick hug, and I drove off with him, promising to call as soon as I learned something. He lay on the floor in the backseat with his head resting on the center hump, and I drove with one hand on the wheel and the other stretched behind me so I could stroke his head and shoulders. “Oh, Marley,” I just kept saying.
In the parking lot of the animal hospital, I helped him out of the car, and he stopped to sniff a tree where the other dogs all pee—still curious despite how ill he felt. I gave him a minute, knowing this might be his last time in his beloved outdoors, then tugged gently at his choker chain and led him into the lobby. Just inside the front door, he decided he had gone far enough and gingerly let himself down on the tile floor. When the techs and I were unable to get him back to his feet, they brought out a stretcher, slid him onto it, and disappeared with him behind the counter, heading for the examining area.
A few minutes later, the vet, a young woman I had never met before, came out and led me into an exam room where she put a pair of X-ray films up on a light board. She showed me how his stomach had bloated to twice its normal size. On the film, near where the stomach meets the intestines, she traced two fist-sized dark spots, which she said indicated a twist. Just as with the last time, she said she would sedate him and insert a tube into his stomach to release the gas causing the bloating. She would then use the tube to manually feel for the back of the stomach. “It’s a long shot,” she said, “but I’m going to try to use the tube to massage his stomach back into place.” It was exactly the same one percent gamble Dr. Hopkinson had given over the summer. It had worked once, it could work again. I remained silently optimistic.
“Okay,” I said. “Please give it your best shot.”
A half hour later she emerged with a grim face. She had tried three times and was unable to open the blockage. She had given him more sedatives in the hope they might relax his stomach muscles. When none of that worked, she had inserted a catheter through his ribs, a last-ditch attempt to clear the blockage, also without luck. “At this point,” she said, “our only real option is to go into surgery.” She paused, as if gauging whether I was ready to talk about the inevitable, and then said, “Or the most humane thing might be to put him to sleep.”
Jenny and I had been through this decision five months earlier and had already made the hard choice. My visit to Shanksville had only solidified my resolve not to subject Marley to any more suffering. Yet standing in the waiting room, the hour upon me once again, I stood frozen. The doctor sensed my agony and discussed the complications that could likely be expected in operating on a dog of Marley’s age. Another thing troubling her, she said, was a bloody residue that had come out on the catheter, indicating problems with the stomach wall. “Who knows what we might find when we get in there,” she said.
I told her I wanted to step outside to call my wife. On the cell phone in the parking lot, I told Jenny that they had tried everything short of surgery to no avail. We sat silently on the phone for a long moment before she said, “I love you, John.”
“I love you, too, Jenny,” I said.
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I walked back inside and asked the doctor if I could have a couple of minutes alone with him. She warned me that he was heavily sedated. “Take all the time you need,” she said. I found him unconscious on the stretcher on the floor, an IV shunt in his forearm. I got down on my knees and ran my fingers through his fur, the way he liked. I ran my hand down his back. I lifted each floppy ear in my hands—those crazy ears that had caused him so many problems over the years and cost us a king’s ransom—and felt their weight. I pulled his lip up and looked at his lousy, worn-out teeth. I picked up a front paw and cupped it in my hand. Then I dropped my forehead against his and sat there for a long time, as if I could telegraph a message through our two skulls, from my brain to his. I wanted to make him understand some things.
“You know all that stuff we’ve always said about you?” I whispered. “What a total pain you are? Don’t believe it. Don’t believe it for a minute, Marley.” He needed to know that, and something more, too. There was something I had never told him, that no one ever had. I wanted him to hear it before he went.
“Marley,” I said. “You are a great dog.”
I found the doctor waiting at the front counter. “I’m ready,” I said. My voice was cracking, which surprised me because I had really believed I’d braced myself months earlier for this moment. I knew if I said another word, I would break down, and so I just nodded and signed as she handed me release forms. When the paperwork was completed, I followed her back to the unconscious Marley, and I knelt in front of him again, my hands cradling his head as she prepared a syringe and inserted it into the shunt. “Are you okay?” she asked. I nodded, and she pushed the plunger. His jaw shuddered ever so slightly. She listened to his heart and said it had slowed way down but not stopped. He was a big dog. She prepared a second syringe and again pushed the plunger. A minute later, she listened again and said, “He’s gone.” She left me alone with him, and I gently lifted one of his eyelids. She was right; Marley was gone.
I walked out to the front desk and paid the bill. She discussed “group cremation” for $75 or individual cremation, with the ashes returned, for $170. No, I said; I would be taking him home. A few minutes later, she and an assistant wheeled out a cart with a large black bag on it and helped me lift it into the backseat. The doctor shook my hand, told me how sorry she was. She had done her best, she said. It was his time, I said, then thanked her and drove away.
In the car on the way home, I started to cry, something I almost never do, not even at funerals. It only lasted a few minutes. By the time I pulled into the driveway, I was dry-eyed again. I left Marley in the car and went inside where Jenny was sitting up, waiting. The children were all in bed asleep; we would tell them in the morning. We fell into each other’s arms and both started weeping. I tried to describe it to her, to assure her he was already deeply asleep when the end came, that there was no panic, no trauma, no pain. But I couldn’t find the words. So we simply rocked in each other’s arms. Later, we went outside and together lifted the heavy black bag out of the car and into the garden cart, which I rolled into the garage for the night.
CHAPTER 28
Beneath the Cherry Trees
S leep came fitfully that night, and an hour before dawn I slid out of bed and dressed quietly so as not to wake Jenny. In the kitchen I drank a glass of water—coffee could wait—and walked out into a light, slushy drizzle. I grabbed a shovel and pickax and walked to the pea patch, which hugged the white pines where Marley had sought potty refuge the previous winter. It was here I had decided to lay him to rest.
The temperature was in the mid-thirties and the ground blessedly unfrozen. In the half dark, I began to dig. Once I was through a thin layer of topsoil, I hit heavy, dense clay studded with rocks—the backfill from the excavation of our basement—and the going was slow and arduous. After fifteen minutes I peeled off my coat and paused to catch my breath. After thirty minutes I was in a sweat and not yet down two feet. At the forty-five-minute mark, I struck water. The hole began to fill. And fill. Soon a foot of muddy cold water covered the bottom. I fetched a bucket and tried to bail it, but more water just seeped in. There was no way I could lay Marley down in that icy swamp. No way.
Despite the work I had invested in it—my heart was pounding like I had just run a marathon—I abandoned the location and scouted the yard, stopping where the lawn meets the woods at the bottom of the hill. Between two big native cherry trees, their branches arching above me in the gray light of dawn like an open-air cathedral, I sunk my shovel. These were the same trees Marley and I had narrowly missed on our wild toboggan ride, and I said out loud, “This feels right.” The spot was beyond where the bulldozers had spread the shale substrata, and the native soil was light and well drained, a gardener’s dream. Digging went easily, and I soon had an oval hole roughly two by three feet around and four feet deep. I went inside and found all three kids up, sniffling quietly. Jenny had just told them.
Seeing them grieving—their first up-close experience with death—deeply affected me. Yes, it was only a dog, and dogs come and go in the course of a human life, sometimes simply because they become an inconvenience. It was only a dog, and yet every time I tried to talk about Marley to them, tears welled in my eyes. I told them it was okay to cry, and that owning a dog always ended with this sadness because dogs just don’t live as long as people do. I told them how Marley was sleeping when they gave him the shot and that he didn’t feel a thing. He just drifted off and was gone. Colleen was upset that she didn’t have a chance to say a real good-bye to him; she thought he would be coming home. I told her I had said good-bye for all of us. Conor, our budding author, showed me something he had made for Marley, to go in the grave with him. It was a drawing of a big red heart beneath which he had written: “To Marley, I hope you know how much I loved you all of my life. You were always there when I needed you. Through life or death, I will always love you. Your brother, Conor Richard Grogan.” Then Colleen drew a picture of a girl with a big yellow dog and beneath it, with spelling help from her brother, she wrote, “P.S.—I will never forget you.”
I went out alone and wheeled Marley’s body down the hill, where I cut an armful of soft pine boughs that I laid on the floor of the hole. I lifted the heavy body bag off the cart and down into the hole as gently as I could, though there was really no graceful way to do it. I got into the hole, opened the bag to see him one last time, and positioned him in a comfortable, natural way—just as he might be lying in front of the fireplace, curled up, head tucked around to his side. “Okay, big guy, this is it,” I said. I closed the bag up and returned to the house to get Jenny and the kids.
As a family, we walked down to the grave. Conor and Colleen had sealed their notes back-to-back in a plastic bag, and I placed it right beside Marley’s head. Patrick used his jackknife to cut five pine boughs, one for each of us. One by one, we dropped them in the hole, their scent rising around us. We paused for a moment, then all together, as if we had rehearsed it, said, “Marley, we love you.” I picked up the shovel and tossed the first scoop of dirt in. It slapped heavily on the plastic, making an ugly sound, and Jenny began to weep. I kept shoveling. The kids stood watching in silence.
When the hole was half filled, I took a break and we all walked up to the house, where we sat around the kitchen table and told funny Marley stories. One minute tears were welling in our eyes, the next we were laughing. Jenny told the story of Marley going bonkers during the filming of The Last Home Run when a stranger picked up baby Conor. I told about all the leashes he had severed and the time he peed on our neighbor’s ankle. We described all the things he had destroyed and the thousands of dollars he had cost us. We could laugh about it now. To make the kids feel better, I told them something I did not quite believe. “Marley’s spirit is up in dog heaven now,” I said. “He’s in a giant golden meadow, running free. And his hips are good again. And his hearing is back, and his eyesight is sharp, and he has all his teeth. He’s back in his prime—chasing rabbits all da
y long.”
Jenny added, “And having endless screen doors to crash through.” The image of him barging his way oafishly through heaven got a laugh out of everyone.
The morning was slipping away, and I still needed to go to work. I went back down to his grave alone and finished filling the hole, gently, respectfully, using my boot to tamp down the loose earth. When the hole was flush with the ground, I placed two large rocks from the woods on top of it, then went inside, took a hot shower, and drove to the office.
In the days immediately after we buried Marley, the whole family went silent. The animal that was the amusing target of so many hours of conversation and stories over the years had become a taboo topic. We were trying to return our lives to normal, and speaking of him only made it harder. Colleen in particular could not bear to hear his name or see his photo. Tears would well in her eyes and she would clench her fists and say angrily, “I don’t want to talk about him!”
I resumed my schedule, driving to work, writing my column, coming home again. Every night for thirteen years he had waited for me at the door. Walking in now at the end of the day was the most painful part of all. The house seemed silent, empty, not quite a home anymore. Jenny vacuumed like a fiend, determined to get up the bucketsful of Marley fur that had been falling out in massive clumps for the past couple of years, insinuating itself into every crevice and fold. Slowly, the signs of the old dog were being erased. One morning I went to put my shoes on, and inside them, covering the insoles, lay a carpet of Marley fur, picked up by my socks from walking on the floors and gradually deposited inside the shoes. I just sat and looked at it—actually petted it with two fingers—and smiled. I held it up to show Jenny and said, “We’re not getting rid of him that easy.” She laughed, but that evening in our bedroom, Jenny—who had not said much all week—blurted out: “I miss him. I mean I really, really miss him. I ache-inside miss him.”