07.30.08
Ode To A Good Dog
50 inches long. 24 inches wide, and about as deep. Sides nice and straight, bottom flat, probably not deep enough, but it will have to do. After all, I’m an overweight, middle-aged computer geek living in the country. The grave seemed to take forever to dig, and broke one wood-handled spade besides. And digging a hole of any size with a square-nosed shovel and a digging fork goes painfully slow. I can only tell you this from hard-won experience.
How do you fit six years of enjoyment, frustration, anger, fear and sorrow (and, oh yes, six years of fur) into such a small hole in the ground? This year has been a bad one for the animals living with us at the ranch. Starting with all of this year’s lambs and kids dying over the winter and early spring, and now our Siberian Husky (named Zoe), 2008 hasn’t been good to us on that front. No sir, it hasn’t.
The dubious benefit of living on a large patch of dirt in the country is that you can keep your dearly departed pets nearby. For most of this year, the task of digging and burying our dead animals have fallen to The Boss. She’d taken this task upon herself, either as penance or atonement for somehow failing to have brought the animal into the world in the first place. But just last week The Boss gave birth to our son, Baby Max. This means that Zoe’s grave would be my task to accomplish. All mine.
The circumstances of Zoe’s departure from this life were intensely frustrating, in that there was little we could have done to help her. There’s no cure for cancer, just treatment and hope of remission. But given the economic environment, our finances, the new baby and all of the other activities of the ranch, our choices were limited to one. We are not independently wealthy in order to afford several thousand dollars of analysis and chemotherapy. And it sounds insensitive inside my head and my heart when I say that we certainly couldn’t afford it for our dog. All the same, our choice was the most compassionate one we could make in our situation.
For her last day, we took Zoe from the vet, let the kids pet her and say goodbye and took some photos. After dropping the girls off with a friend for a playdate, we returned to the vet, took Zoe out again, and walked her all around downtown Sonoma. One person standing at the side of the road mentioned to us as we walked by, “that’s a beautiful dog you have there.”
He had no idea how beautiful she is.
She looked happy, sniffed wherever she wanted, we’d stop or go where she lead us. This was her walk, her swan song, her coda before the end of the performance. As we got closer to returning to the vet, my heart sank deeper and deeper, my mood darkened despite the gloriously good weather. I knew the moment of truth was approaching, slow and inevitable, step by step. My eyes misted over several times throughout, as my heart swelled with love and remorse for this wonderful and sometimes vexing dog. Of course Zoe noticed none of it, and other than the significant swelling on her left jaw and down her neck, she looked and acted just like the dog we always knew, perhaps turned down a couple notches due to the pain meds and the exhaustion of a long walk.
When the time came to euthanize, it was my hand that signed the papers saying we had chosen this. It was my signature on the line saying that my dog was going to die. It still didn’t seem real, somehow this was happening to someone else, and I was just bearing witness. The Boss and I cried. We hugged, we talked about what a good dog she is. We talked about how hard it was to do this, that it was going to be okay, even though it didn’t feel that way at the time. I finally told The Boss that I couldn’t be there when it happened, so I took Baby Max (barely five days old) and went outside to sit on the porch of the vet’s office and sing lullabies to him, while The Boss was with Zoe in her last moments.
It seemed to take forever, and then The Boss came out. It was done. We went to the truck and opened the back. The Boss said that Zoe was on her lap when she was put to sleep, which squeezed whatever composure I had left out of me. I sobbed. I grieved. The vet techs and the vet brought her out a few minutes later, wrapped in a shroud. I thanked everyone for their help in this, and hoped that they understood that this choice was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.
Zoe was a sweet dog, gregarious, frustrating, taxing, always loving, sometimes hyper, sometimes impossible. She was around for the births of all of our children, barely six months old when Ellie was born, all the way to now. She had the breed’s tendency to run away from you like a shot if she was off the leash and not somehow cajoled or convinced to come back inside the fence. But despite the inevitable and common doggish flaws, she was a sweet soul and an undeniably good dog.
She was too young to go, way too young.
Zoe now rests by our greenhouse in a hand-dug grave that is just wide and long enough, a bit too shallow perhaps, but which will serve as the basis of a flower garden that we’ll place at the site so that we can visit. And remember.