I know three people who lost a dog yesterday, one who lost a dear friend, one who lost their mother. Here is my response to death… reflections based on having been left behind more than once.
Sometimes you achieve a wonderful insight. Sometimes one comes to you. A man training for a battle that will almost certainly kill him talks quietly to a young woman. He struggles to explain what their love means to him, especially now, in a time of world war and when he had come to the age when he didn’t expect love any more.
He smiles finally, and says “Nothing Good is Ever Lost”…
I discovered this line in Rosamunde Pilcher’s novel “The Shell Seekers” while browsing through the book during a holiday visit to my inlaws’ home shortly after my husband and I were married. It has resonated ever since.
Two Persian kittens became Arthur and Dax during my last year in college. They came with us when we married and moved into an apartment, and they moved with us four years later when I graduated from medical school and started an internship in a different city. They comforted me when I had my head injury and was home, frightened and fragmented, for five years. They missed me when I tried new work, this time in medical publishing.
We moved to our house when the boys were 14 years old. They loved having stairs to run up and down and were rejuvenated. I hadn’t noticed they had grown old. One weekend, we came home to find bloody spittle on the basement floor. Days later, our vet did an endoscopic exam on Arthur and told me he probably had cancer somewhere near his stomach, but she was not able to get a biopsy because he stopped breathing and they had to resuscitate him.
Jeff and I started him on supportive medication. Arthur loved visiting the vet. People would go “AHHHHH” when I opened the carrier to take him out: I felt like Elvis’s girlfriend. Six months later, we boarded the boys at the vet’s. When we picked them up, Arthur seemed great, as if he had been at the spa, but Dax was gaunt. The covering veterinarian thought he might be slightly hyperthyroid but implied that I was making too much fuss over an elderly cat. Tests showed that he had end-stage kidney failure.
Over several weeks, we got up at 5 AM to make up IV fluid, giving some under the skin to each of the boys, followed by the first of the day’s pills. Our vet called every evening to ask about them. One night I told her I had learned that Jeff had never seen anyone die, and I wanted to discuss euthanasia options with her before we came to the end. She said we were there.
The next day we relaxed all rules, let Dax eat whatever he wanted, and they came to bed with us. Arthur slept beside me, purring through the night. Our vet came to the house in the morning wearing jeans and a sweater, played with them, gave them an injection of anesthetic through the wall of the abdomen, and sat with us until they died.
The house was an open tomb without them. I quickly moved from feeling unsure I wanted to start another chapter of life with pets to telling Jeff that we would have to move forward soon or I would kidnap somebody’s cat.
One night I came out of the bathroom and told Jeff he had always wanted a dog. If he still wanted a dog, this was the time to do it. Three months later Teddy came home as an 8-week-old puppy. (Before the year ended, so did Rufus and Jacob, two more Persian boys.)
Teddy was special. He needed me in the way an infant needs you, unabashedly and completely. He greeted me from his exercise pen when I came home at lunch time to feed and play with him, and he comforted me when I was laid off work shortly after becoming pregnant. We stayed in shape walking together, and he learned to sit beside, instead of on, me. When Joseph arrived, he was Teddy’s baby, the sheep my bearded collie, a herding dog, instinctively knew would be his to safeguard.
Teddy died after a long battle with lupus, an autoimmune disease. He was 7 years old but looked more than twice that. Joseph will turn 20 years old this Spring. A different pair of dogs look after him now when he comes home from school. I fret because Joseph is limited by his autism, seizures, and other challenges, and some day I will have to count on the fact he can charm his way into almost any heart. Mine won’t be there any more.
Some say love makes everything easy. It doesn’t. Sometimes life is very hard. Love makes all things bearable. Love brings strength and hope. Love outlasts everything else, even death. Love is never lost.