Our story is not so unique, a million people fortunate enough to be owned by dogs can commiserate and empathize. Each one “gets” it.
But with a dog who lives to the ripe old age of 18, it seems a eulogy of sorts is in order.
When I married Richard, we already had two dogs, both strays — Tia, who had wandered around the village of Hamburg for months, hairless, eluding the dog catcher, and taken in by my then-unmet husband, and Deva, a black lab-esque puppy who just showed up on the property one morning during hunting season when Richard and I were dating.
We lived in a 720-square foot cabin in the woods, and had come home from our honeymoon to find that Deva had missed me (my anthropomorphism shining through) and thus chewed up several single (good, never-tasty-old-ready-to-be-tossed) shoes.
Despite being a dog lover, you could say I was slightly less than enthused a few days later when Richard called me after work to say he’d taken a drive to the pound “just to look around” and had a surprise for me. A gangly, shepherd-type dog with the saddest eyes, about a year old. I doubt he’d even been beaten but when he looked up at you, chin on your lap, his eyes told a tragic tale. As a peace offering, given my protests of a third dog in a very small space, I was given the opportunity to name him. “Ezekiel. He looks like a Zeke.”
Back in the day, our horse vet also took care of the dogs. Dr. Rogers was impressed by Zeke. What a good healthy dog, strong legs, vigorous heart. He predicted he would live a long, active life; he was right.
Zeke loved farm life, when we could keep him there. He’d happily wander the yard then would lock eyes on a rabbit, a deer, or some other woodland creature in flight and be off. I spent hours of frustrated and frightened time driving around the valley looking for him when he took off, never so grateful for a product as I was when we found our radio-controlled perimeter fence for the yard. It increased both our life expectancies but I suspect it significantly reduced the level of adventure in Zeke’s existence.
I was okay with the trade-off.
My nieces are 17, 15 and 13, which means they all experienced Zeke through their baby and toddler-hood. What they did not know until recently was that Zeke detested small children. Whether it was their unpredictability, shrill voices, sudden movements or if he’d been picked on by some little child prior to our adopting him, we’ll never know, but a raised lip or two and a growl was enough to convince us that Zeke and little people were not to be in a room together unsupervised.
He never bit anyone.
His life was a good and a simple one. He went to work with Richard at his office, mugged the vendor who filled the candy/snack box until he’d give up a Slim Jim with each visit, loved to go camping and anywhere that involved travel in the truck. He went all over the country with us on endurance rides.
He could take the plastic cap off an empty Pepsi bottle in record time.
Persuaded to stay on our acreage, he astounded us regularly with his ability to leap up onto vehicles, including into the pick up truck bed with the tailgate raised.
Tia and Deva passed, but Zeke lived on, just another member of our family, very few dramas once we figured out how to keep his wanderlust under control.
There was a mini-crisis that involved an emergency vet clinic trip and a trip to Cornell’s Oncology Department where we discovered that what was in Zeke’s skull pushing his eye out of his socket — yeah, that’s pretty disturbing — was not a brain tumor but in fact an easily drained abscess.
Zeke lived on.
But like the rest of us, Zeke slowed down. Less running, white around the muzzle, more trouble with the stairs, a script for Meloxicam, a series of Adequan injections, the need for stair runners so he could gain purchase with his weak hind legs, they all pointed to the fact that Zeke was getting old.
My husband, a fan of denial as a coping mechanism, used to argue with me when I would tick off the years indicating Zeke’s age. Just last year he was telling house guests he was fourteen years old, a mathematic impossibility, but perhaps a testament to Richard feeling like a newlywed? (We celebrated our seventeenth wedding anniversary last month.)
He slept more and more, and if we forgot to coax him downstairs in the morning, we’d find him like a teenager, sprawled out and snoring, out like a light, at 1 o’clock in the afternoon. One day at 4 p.m. we realized he was still upstairs, jockeyed him out for a tinkle and a trip to the barn to help do chores, then brought him back in for dinner and you guessed it, straight upstairs to bed. We were blessed that he apparently had a huge bladder.
At some point he wasn’t sure the kibbles he’d always eaten were really his thing, so we switched over to canned food, and then to ground beef and rice, then finally, chicken thighs.
Then the day came when he couldn’t make it on his own up or down the stairs. Richard carried him. Everyone, all three dogs, all three cats, we humans — the whole family –sleeps in the upstairs bedroom. It was only right that Zeke should sleep there too.
He had trouble getting up in the night to go get a drink of water. He barked as a means of asking us to help. We did.
Then he just had trouble getting up. That was okay. “There but for the grace of God, go I” I would murmur, lifting his hind end and steadying him. It wasn’t too much to help an old man get up from a reclined position, right?
We renegotiated the terms of “it is time” on a fairly regular basis, me the Grim Reaper, Richard in the camp of “he’s still okay.”
We finally agreed on and objective criteria. When he stopped eating, our line in the sand.
Last week, he had trouble getting around when our friend and critter-sitter, Annie, was here and we were traveling for business. Doing his business was becoming a struggle. We got a text to let us know he’d had an accident.
It was time.
When we got home he was happy in his quiet way to see us. I helped him up and he unsteadily came out to the barn to do chores with me, one of his happy rituals. The other dogs’ perimeter collars won’t allow them down to the barn, but Zeke was free to wander, fears of him running off no longer an issue. He tried to eat horse manure, I shooed him away. People used to ask us what made his coat so healthy and shiny — that was always the secret feed supplement I told them did the trick.
I left a stall door open as I cleaned it. Ned, always up for a game, sniffed at him. He growled and snapped, both of them feigning their territorialism — a ritual repeated countless times over the years. He wandered back up to the house with me in the dark, listing right as he did in the last few weeks.
Did he do that for me, or did he do it for him?
Isn’t that really the marker of when it is “time?”
He ate because we asked him to that night, a handful of chicken thigh, warmed in the microwave, but only with us sitting over him reminding him how yummy it was.
It was time.
We were blessed that our equine veterinary practice was willing to sent a vet on a house call on Monday. They’d vaccinated the farm dogs in years past, kept us out of trouble with the town clerk when dog licenses came due.
It was a long weekend. Waiting.
There were long periods on the floor, murmuring and stroking and there was the last everything. The last dinner (pork chops), the last time being carried upstairs, the last time helping him up for a drink of a water during the nigh, the last time being carried downstairs. And many tears.
Another pork chop for breakfast. Why not?
In the end, he went as sweetly and peacefully as one could ever hope, here in his house, on the living room rug, where he napped routinely for most of the day, never a frightened moment or bark of alarm when the vet came in. We let the other dogs come in to sniff him, so they knew he was gone. Echo, never still, lie beside me, beside him, between us, still. Truly licked his nose then curled up on the couch for a nap.
For them, I suppose, it is not like us. There is no ‘what if’ and no heartbreak. Death is a part of life and we would all do better to live so honestly, so frankly. I am comforted we have the other two dogs; there’s no choice to be made in extending our hearts again to another.
We are already a part of a pack. I cannot imagine life any other way.