Hound Dog Blues

by Peg Stomierowski Gould

  Still, this is how it may go down for us or our animals, with any test result or other surprising news—it can happen on a sunny or nondescript day gone darkly wild. Better have someone with you for such events or readings, to take notes, because you may not retain most of what the doctors say. The shock may be too much, and your first task is to remain anchored in hope and normalcy. Choose your company carefully.

  For now it is life at the crossroads. Time with your beloved is now. Now it is us, Duke, his canine companions Raven and Mac, and the Cancer that could take our Big Boy. How to prepare or respond?

  Well, first off it’s only a dog. For sure, no one says that aloud when it’s a parent, a child, a spouse or another human dear to us for life. They do say it when it’s a canine, a cat or a bird, and the sadness following a loss hangs on longer than a month or two.

  When I was younger, I wondered once or twice about the length of time people mourned a pet, but no longer. And yet it can be isolating to even acknowledge the loss. To receive even a single greeting card acknowledging the death of a treasured pet is a sure sign of unusually sensitive acquaintances. They can see how it was with the two of you and know the missing link may hang heavy for awhile.

  In our chaplaincy education, we trained to focus away from outcomes. In our faith, we counsel that where there is love, there is no real separation. While I find that to be true, and deeply comforting, I don’t often say it to people who have lost parents, children or partners. It might seem insensitive, a bromide, especially when folks are in the throes of grief.

  And yet, loss here and now is essentially a sudden void where there was another—a companion in time, human or otherwise. Our daily contract with normalcy is shaken or worse, broken. How we organized our time and expectations has to change, and fast. But first, before healing can occur, there is emptiness to be experienced, doggone aching loneliness, with quiet reflection, and to-the-core missing.

  And time does live up to some, not all, of its healing reputation. We sisters came to terms a second time with the loss of our mother’s kin when we met in her city to release family ashes, including those of pets, from home bookshelf repositories into the surging bay. Many burial services include the rhythmic reference “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” from The Book of Common Prayer. People spend a lot of time and money trying to avoid the inevitable, but no worry, it is there waiting, in one form or another, for when you finally are ready to acknowledge the moment, to speak what might need to be said, or to reverently honor nature’s silence in letting words go.

  Duke hoards his tennis ball for all of eternity.

  THE LOOK (5)

  The look Duke gives me, acknowledging betrayal, I’ll never forget. Our intent seems to ambush him. As I write this, I’m wanting to slip into third person, defending my complicit role in his euthanasia. (There. I said it.) I have an urge to keep using “they” and “them” to tell the story, rather than “I” and “we” for myself, my husband and the clinical staff at the animal clinic, so devoted to doing this joy-and-sorrow work. So true is our own distress, we have gut-wrenching doubts and regrets. And yet when our dog is taken into this neutral room in this modest building to die, we know being there is the very last act of love we can offer.

  On his final day on this good earth, we—Duke, Raven, our neighbor’s dog Mac and I—skip our joint car ride to the dog park and stick around the house as I work at the computer and reassure him on the bed behind me. Duke’s daily excursions seem to be over, and with that, we know his time is near. We make an appointment at the veterinary clinic, with the understanding we can back out without loss if we aren’t ready.

  Until a day or two earlier, we had kept up our morning visits to the park, feeling this last joy was keeping him going. In recent days, not far inside the gate, after awkwardly trying to do his business in three-legged fashion against a tree or bush, he plops down and doesn’t want to move. Getting him back to the car is a struggle, nudging, pulling, cajoling. We are warned he could refuse to move at all, and then what will we do? He never does that, so we never find out.

  Still, on his last day, at home he is drugged and in relatively good spirits, sprawled out on our California king bed, on the soft red bedspread. Just like in some of the grassy resting spots at the dog park, he would happily stay and die here. We helped him to get up there, but now we notice that after six, seven, then eight hours on his throne, he is content not trying to relieve himself. His swollen leg looks like a volcano ready to erupt. We don’t want to prolong his pain to the point of cruelty. And so, when Todd gets home from work, we leave for the evening appointment with the veterinarian as scheduled, not really sure what we are intending. Surely our Big Boy can’t go on for long without being able to relieve himself. Yet I can’t believe I’m thinking this way, even suggesting this line be drawn. It’s not enough.

  We drive in silence and emptiness away from home and up the pass after 6. Duke occupies the back seat, sprawled out on a blanket. It is icy cold out, befitting this tragic evening. When we arrive and check in, the staff wants him to relieve himself, if he can, outside the clinic before he loses every last bit of control. And so we numbly, compliantly walk him through the snow drifts behind the low redwood building. He does what they want, ever the reasonably good patient. He probably thought this was a substitute for the dog park and a vote of confidence in him, but it wasn’t. It was preparation for more cold stillness to come. I don’t think he really sees it coming until it does. Then, there is no question. He knows what we are up to. Me? I’m still resisting full self-disclosure.

  And can a dog really know? Can any of us, when we pull out of the driveway for an appointment? Wouldn’t think so, and yet his eyes suddenly pin me to the wall in icy disbelief. Helpless is what I feel before his comprehending countenance. The vet and my husband leave the examination room. I am sitting on the cold floor with Duke half swaddled in a blanket, against a corner. The sedative shot is taking effect. We have been stroking him and whispering sweetly. But when they go out the door, he rises up with a burst of adrenaline and tries to follow them out. Before he can take more than a step, he slumps down. He can’t muster the strength. His dignity is diminished. Still talking in reassuring tones, now with a hint of panic, I restrain him from standing or lurching.

  He wants nothing to do with what is afoot. He seeks only to go home. And now I feel as alone, wilting, and abandoned as he must. No one told me he would look at me this way, in icy indictment, as if to say he was shocked and disappointed beyond belief. I am letting him down.

  Duke left collar and tags behind.

  THE END (6)

  What happens next, when they return to the room, is a blur. Duke, with us and them holding him still like we did for the diagnosis such a short time before, is given the critical injection. It is all so fast. His eyes close, as if he is falling asleep. In a flash, his consciousness has left the room. Call it the details of daily dying. Your mind blocks against taking in too much of the stone cold detail.

  With Todd’s help, the staff struggles to carry his limp body to the car and pile it on the blanket again in the back seat where he so often rode with his head happily sticking out the window. Not today. His spiritless form weighs more than 100 pounds, and to them probably feels like even more this day. We turn the key, fire up the engine, and limp home like his cancer was our own. Nothing to say, nothing to do. It is over, and we don’t tell most friends for a few days. Shame lurks, in the dark uncertainty of being without a more comforting escape. That we let him go—that no, we led him to slaughter despite all of our fancy ideas of ourselves being better than that. No chemo drips, no amputation, no lessons in walking or running on three legs. Just bailed out in the first trench.

  At risk of being grossly misunderstood, I can say now the numbing sensation I felt wasn’t that different from when Mom died, except for the look he fixed me with. With her, the consciousness ran silently from her pa
le face, chin to brows, like blinds rising, then dropping, when you pull on the cord. This was decades ago, one of the final days of my vacation visit. She had been restless all night in her cool sheets and covers. The bed had been relocated to the dining room of our family home, with the oxygen tank dutifully gurgling beside it, reassuring us we weren’t alone in our responses to her needs. We had resources. They weren’t enough. I slept with her, but she didn’t sleep well. She repeated that her time was running out. She then was bored all day, the clock was ticking, and the potty chair was waiting for her when she needed it. Moments before her death, not comprehending how close we were, we sat her up on the cool seat.

  The clamminess of the situation was similar. While the doctor we called did not arrive, the ambulance did. At the hospital, they shocked her chest, but it didn’t help, and it shocked us watching them shock her like a ragdoll. Her slipper fell onto the floor when they moved her inside, and before long, that’s about all we had left of her to console us. A single, soft, well-worn cozy slipper instead of a weathered collar and leash. And a thin brown snap clutch purse with a few tissues and her old glasses in it.

  Off and on for years and years, at silent moments I wore these spectacles over my nose, and despite being old and crotchety, they fit my needs well enough. It wasn’t about seeing well, anymore than her lipstick was perfectly applied when they prepared her for final viewing. Why worry about functionality and appearances now? She wasn’t much for that.

  Susan says goodbye to Pierre.

  MEDICINE WHEEL (7)

  One day more than a year after Duke’s death, getting home from the dog park with Raven and Mac, I hear from our friend Margrit that her dog Panda is gone. Panda, a shelter dog of Burmese descent, was almost 17. He had long manifest a sizable tumor. Margaret, in her seventies herself, had been treating it naturally … as she did most of her own ailments. But now she realized she had to let him go.

  I am standing out front, discussing Margrit’s upset with mutual friend Susan near the mailbox, when another neighbor steps out of her house. Through tears, Lulu relates in a shaky voice that she and her partner are having their long-haired Chihuahua Pierre put down that day. They have cared for this rescue dog, who might be 18, for some 13 years. She asks if we want to see her Pierre one more time.

  Of course we do. Susan and Lulu hold Pierre close and stroke his little head. On a smart phone, we snap photos. Lulu bemoans that he looks so good, but with congestive heart failure, is weak. His heart is working hard. I nod. Mom, with her similar condition, comes to mind. Watching a loved one labor to breathe engenders a helpless feeling; thankfully, so far with Pierre, they have been spared respiratory crisis. Lulu says they hardly have left the pup alone for more than an hour for weeks. This is love, about to be loss. Clearly the sadness of their vigil is taking a toll.

  Margrit, an athlete and massage therapist working from home, had arranged a day or so earlier for her dog to be euthanized at her place nearby, where he felt most comfortable. But she, too, feels Panda fixed her with the look when the first shot of sedative didn’t do the trick, and another was administered, she says, with obvious difficulty in locating viable veins.

  Like Duke, she laments, Panda tried to gather himself up and return to normal before struggling to take a few steps, and then slumping to the carpet. Although she had planned massages all day to keep busy amidst her grief, Margrit already was regretting that she didn’t shut normal operations down for the day for some honorary reflection.

  It is easy to underestimate the impact that an animal’s death—any death, surely—may have on us, shielded as we are by denial and a sense of ourselves as the masters of most conditions and situations. Because life is messy, there is scant preparation for these imperfect endings in linear time. In this instance our neighborhood of pet lovers was suddenly hit hard—a scourge of grief, with still another tumor-ridden Golden Retriever departing her devoted caregiver and three-legged canine companion.

  But it is hardly all cancer, of course, that takes the blame for robbing so many years of life potential. And try as you might to erect your own walls or moat, there is no hiding place where loss will not find you. The sense of sadness, longing, even regret for what could have been—so often associated with disease, with early, sudden or unexpected death—eventually bares itself to all, ever so starkly to surviving spouses and parents whose children predecease them.

  Near the end, we continue to feed our reluctantly ailing companions, exercise them as best we can, and organize our days around their needs. Those needs tend to be in stark decline with age, disease and inactivity. When older or infirm relatives become frail, the challenges of nutrition, activity, care, mobility and connection are similar to our end-of-life struggles in behalf of treasured pets, especially when we are determined to care for them at home with some sense of normalcy. Rest assured, precisely because we are human, there is no care-taking path without occasional pain and remorse. Besides the enormity of emotional connection, or lack thereof, there’s the survivor’s sense of not knowing how to go forward, with everything suddenly up-ended. Like Duke hid his weakness, you may hide moments when you want to just come undone. There are days it can tempt you to curl up in a ball and not get up yourself to feed your normal interests and passions.

  On the other hand, there are moments of intense spiritual clarity. Weeks after her dog’s death in Colorado, where Native American ways are largely respected, Margrit picked up a stone to leave for Panda on a medicine wheel rock formation in a field nearby, and said she was flooded with love for her deceased canine when carrying the stone close to her torso. Afterward, she swears she could hear a little voice begging, “Mommy, don’t leave me!”

  Another hound of ours whom she, too, might remember, died years ago after a night of agonizing pain. Belying his more rustic name, this was a majestic Afghan hound who should have lived in the Taj Mahal, not in our humble abode. Near the end, the glands in his neck were swollen to the touch like weathered rocks.

  As I reclined with him on the bathroom rug in the wee hours of morning, trying to comfort him in his moaning, I realized more acutely why people decide to proactively, as they say, put dogs down. We probably should have called for help, despite the night hours, for both this dog and Reebok. We lost them both by surprise within a short time—Reebok upon our late night return, riding an emotional high, from a Bob Dylan concert. We had recently moved across town and speculated about the possibility that they could have been poisoned, but never knew with any certainty what had caused the demise of either dog.

  When the Afghan was given to us, it was a dream come true. A manager at work, frustrated with his lack of progress with the dog after several courses of canine training, in relief or resignation—we’re not sure which—had turned this comely, caramel-colored creature over to us with his brown leather leash and collar. He was a fancy dog for us, possessed of an elusive, almost imperial spirit. He was so impulsive, he was hard for us to train, too, and would snatch food off any table or run in a flash for the hills when unleashed outdoors. Still, he was sensitive, and would squeal in horror over a toe being even so slightly stepped on.

  What altered this pattern one weekend morning was a terrible injury. With scant provocation, our newest dog was kicked by a passer-by who was walking a smaller dog off-leash while we were tying to load ours into our vehicle to go run and do his business. With the force of the blow, his bladder burst into stray shreds like a broken water balloon, and he screamed in agony. In the panic that ensued, we didn’t pursue the perpetrator’s identity. After the vet in this emergency put the poor guy back together, he really was our dog. He seemed to accept our presence as more than mere circumstance, and to better trust our caretaking.

  And when he was X-rayed, we were met with another surprise. The image revealed that a pellet had lodged in him. Apparently he had been shot by a BB-gun, how or by whom we’ll never know. Duke’s X-ray also showed a pellet lodged in
his soft tissue, so they could have been together out in the woods on a camping trip when it happened. How could we not have known? As with people, random scary and hurtful things happen to dogs that may never surface for professionally guided attention and healing. Because they can’t be seen or known, these wounds silently alter the animal’s internal climate and may or may not cause storms over time.

  Duke and Raven walk a dog park trail.

  CARRYING ON (8)

  After Duke’s startling diagnosis, for the most part we keep up our daily visits to Bear Creek, our off-leash community dog park. Duke is plumb crazy about the place, and has plenty of company in that. Considered to be one of the best dog parks in the country, the 25-acre fenced park in El Paso County draws an estimated 100,000 visitors annually, with canines in tow. It is open year-round, displaying the change of seasons, and includes walking tracks and wooded trails, open prairie, hills, a creek, deep pools, an agility park, a small-dog area, poop-pickup-bag dispensers, a water fountain, picnic tables, and shaded rest areas. Only the heated restrooms and a canine memorial don’t allow the dogs inside. They don’t mind. We’ve been taking Duke and his buddies here for years since discovering its wonders by word of mouth.

  In hindsight, I’m not entirely proud of our blind drive to keep our routines going, but at the time it seems like the thing to do, to keep his interests and passions alive. Never mind our own. Call it stuck in normalcy, which I guess equates to more than a mild degree of denial. Duke, too, seems to crave this more than not, and is anxious to get out the front door and be helped into the low back seat of our beat-up silver compact, to hang out the window and occasionally bark at the passing parade. We just wonder now whether we were even capable of altering this personally comforting routine for more than a day or two.