TASK #42: DEATH BE NOT PROUD
” ‘Arliss!’ I yelled at Little Arliss. ‘You get that nasty old dog out of our drinking water!’ “ Fred Gipson, Old Yeller, Chapter 3
I’m not a dog man. I regard them suspiciously. I don’t like how people talk to them like they are furry, four-legged humans, or worse, ascribe human characteristics to them. I think they are dumb, but smart enough to fuck with us.
I think the origins of my feelings about canines goes back my childhood. Back then, in rural Ohio, dogs weren’t around for psychological support; they didn’t get on airplanes, they weren’t welcome in grocery stores, people didn’t carry them around in oversized purse, and they didn’t wear sweaters. Or any leisure wear for that matter…
I’m not a dog man. I regard them suspiciously. I don’t like how people talk to them like they are furry, four-legged humans, or worse, ascribe human characteristics to them. I think they are dumb, but smart enough to fuck with us.
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What did they do back then? They chased squirrels and other food predators away from my mother’s garden; they guarded the yard against unsolicited salespeople and kept the postman hones; they rooted out pheasants in the fall, and they buried things in the ground, then dug them up.
They lived in dog houses. Which were outside. And when it snowed, which it was prone to do in Northereastern Ohio, the drifts would cover the dog house, and it was my job to go outside with a shovel and clear a space around the dog house.
I don’t know where my dad would get the dogs, or if they just showed up and stayed around, and it didn’t matter to my father, who fed them either way.
There was an exception, of course. “Lady” a border collie. Border collies are smart. My dad would tell me that Lady was so smart that she could use a typewriter, which I never saw her do, but she could roll over and play dead on command, which pleased my father to no end. Lady was allowed to stay in the house, but not in the house proper–she was allowed to sleep in the mudroom, which was like sleeping outside.
Anyway, all these years later, and I’m married to a dog person. Over my strenuous objections she has brought dog after dog into our lives, all rescues, all Labs, and all a pain in the ass.
About six, seven years ago she finds Zoey. Zoey is a Lab, maybe…and we don’t know how old she is. She was rescued from an abusive home in Orwell, Ohio. Some jerk owned her and her twin sister, and liked to burn them with acid. Zoey would repeatedly run away, and the owner would get her back, and she’d run away again until some animal rescuers went out there and took her, put her up in a foster home, and that’s when we got her.
Zoey proved to be the biggest pain in the ass of all of them. From the first day, if I accidentally left a door open, she was gone, and my wife would cry and scream at me to go find her, which I would do, although finding her wasn’t easy. I could generally trace her by the sound of screeching car brakes, and eventually I would find her eating out of some other dogs food bowl a few miles from home.
And she shed. On a daily basis she would shed enough hair to make another Lab. I’ve been through three vacuum cleaners over the past few years.
And eat? She could eat like a teenage boy. And my wife would laugh and say, “Oh, that’s what Labs do!”. I frankly wouldn’t have cared about the eating if she kept it to her own food, but she went after anything left unattended, even if it was up on a counter. One day (it was July 12th, 2015) she jumped up and grabbed my large submarine sandwich that I had left on the stove, on a plate–I had just literally walked five feet away to take a piss, but but the time I returned the submarine sandwich was gone, the plate broken, and Zoey lying on the floor, surrounded by remnants of the tin foil that the sandwich had been wrapped in.
She saw the anger in my eyes and bolted for the backyard, with me in pursuit.
And that’s the way it was with Zoey. My kids loved her. They would roll around with her. My wife treated her like she was her best friend–she would chat with her while she cooked or worked on the computer; they would go out for long walks, and my wife would fuss if Zoey had an earache (which was every week), or needed to be brushed, and she would laugh if Zoey ate something bad for her and barfed on the rug and ask me to clean it up…
And that’s the way it was, until it wasn’t.
Last week, on Tuesday, my wife called me at work. She said, “Zoey can’t get up. She’s just lying on the floor–and she won’t eat!” Which was startling, and disconcerting.
The vet would put her down there, on the kitchen linoleum. I held her head as he administered the drugs, and she went peacefully. And I cried. I don’t think I have ever cried as hard as I did that morning, and I am crying now as I write this.
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My wife called a vet who made house calls. I came home. The vet looked Zoey over and said that he was going to give her an X-ray. Which he did. Then he looked at us, and like it’s done in the movies, he slowly shook his head…
Huh?! Her spleen was ruptured. She was bleeding internally. And there was a mass of something in her stomach.
He lay out the options. Thousands of dollars in exploratory surgery or…
We chose the “or..”. To put her down. Was it a financial decision? Yes, sadly. But we could see that she was suffering, and that wasn’t acceptable to either of us…
My wife went for a walk. The vet would put her down there, on the kitchen linoleum. I held her head as he administered the drugs, and she went peacefully.
And I cried. I don’t think I have ever cried as hard as I did that morning, and I am crying now as I write this.
Life is so miserably short and cruel. When I left for work she was herself, the she was dead.
TASK
As I have said before, take NOTHING for granted. Look around your life and enjoy the people–and pets–that are close to you, and remember that things change quickly.
Photo courtesy of the author