1.
In the first couple days of our emptier new life I tapped “dog average lifespan” into my phone (adding to a recent search history that included “dog unresponsive” and “dog rescue breathing,” entered in the stunned minutes between calling the emergency vet and waiting for my wife to get home to take us there; I did the rescue breathing; her nose was salty on my lips; none of it worked).
The answer was 11 years for a dog of her size. She had been somewhere between 11 and 12. So even if we could have done better in some way, we had at least not stolen time from her, statistically speaking.
2.
I needed little comforts like this because into each hour of this new life there were sifting a hundred little things to make me sad. A partial list of newly intolerable actions:
Highlighting something in yellow (she was a beautiful yellow dog, or red and yellow, or creamsicle-colored, depending on the light)
Moving two dishes apart from each other on the kitchen counter to cool (at rest she was usually nestled up against her sister, sharing heat)
Pumping the stubborn handle of a soap dispenser. Working the stubborn latch of a gate (she was a paragon of obstinacy, one of her many perfections)
Deleting a column from a table in a document. Deleting anything, turning off a light, throwing anything away.
Hitting ctrl-Z on my keyboard. Hitting it 20 times in a row.
3.
When it’s time to learn for certain that your dog is dead at the University of Minnesota animal hospital, you go into a special room. It’s bigger than you would expect. There are windows along one wall, with blinds open just enough to let in a little gray light from the winter outside. There’s a door that lets you exit into open air, without passing back through the lobby. This is for the benefit of you and anyone waiting in the lobby with hope still in their hearts.
After delivering the news, the doctor lets you sit alone for a time. She returns with a small menu of options for your grieving experience. We say yes to most of them. When she asks if we want hair clippings, I sniffle that her hair is already embedded in every corner of our house. Later I think about how many other people must have made this exact half-joke. A surge of wonder and gratitude hits me for everyone at this animal hospital, showing up to be deluged by people’s predictable grief week after week. I’m not really a hugger. I feel a strong urge to hug everyone I see there.
Once you’ve signed off on the logistics of having a dead dog, a tech wheels her into the room in a big wagon, the kind you might use for landscaping supplies. The tech tells you to take as long as you need and points out a button to press when you’re ready to go, a doorbell in reverse.
Then you are alone with your dead dog, which is somehow less alone than you’ll be once you leave the room. She’s wrapped in the blanket you wrapped her in after querying “dog unresponsive,” plus a couple more. When she was alive, she liked to be tucked in like this.
In fact, she looks completely, unremarkably content. Having a nice dream, we’d say if we saw her like this on the couch at home. I take a picture of her face. Back when film was new, people took more photos of their dead. For the first time I get why. To try to fix a final peaceful image in your mind.
We sob and talk to her and try to memorize the curve of her head beneath our palms, the feel of her fur against our cheeks, her good scent. I tell her that she was a perfect dog, that she did a wonderful job. When she was alive we told her what a good dog she was all the time (sometimes directly after grumbling that she was being a horrible dog). As she grew older I tried not to think of the end in too much detail, but I assumed I’d have the chance to tell her again and be sure she was listening.
I ease her collar off and slip it in my pocket. When her body starts feeling less like the body of our warm, live, sleeping dog, we press the button.
I fend off the impulse to hug the tech who sees us out, and we force ourselves to move through the private door and toward the car. A man from the neighborhood is walking his dog nearby. As we approach, I shrink and try to bend our path away from his field of awareness. Don’t look at our faces. Don’t put yourself in our shoes. Don’t let this rub off on you.
4.
I have had probably less than my fair share of grief so far in this life. Deaths have happened and they’ve hurt, but at a distance. I’ve wondered how to be useful to anyone in the foreign country of their mourning. So it has been interesting to learn what is actually comforting from this side of the border.
When I called my grandparents, my grandfather answered first. We were equally unprepared. I had to repeat myself louder for his hearing. Once the news registered, he couldn’t shift his tone fast enough to keep up, still sounding jolly as he exclaimed, “Oh, that’s too bad!”
I wasn’t offended. I have been carried astray by that same momentum before, barreling helplessly off the cliff of the conversation you’d expected to be having.
Then my grandmother took the phone, and neither of us could really talk after I got the news out. We listened to each other breathe and try and fail to keep it together. What words we found were mostly variations on “I know.” Just hearing and believing that somebody really does know—that turns out to be a significant comfort.
And so is the simplest of condolences: I’m sorry for your loss. Before, I would have hesitated to utter that cliche. Now, I appreciate it: simply pointing to the simple fact, the brand new hole in the world.
5.
In grief I am content to let the idea that this absence will someday feel normal hover hazily in the middle distance. Rousing my will to move toward it would mean moving away from the current moment, which is already so distant from the last moment in which we still had two dogs. I go limp in the current of time, not resisting but also not helping it carry me.
I keep reminding myself that it’s a natural enough thing, to have just one dog. Plenty of people make it in this world with one or even zero dogs to their name. I know that. I guess.
And everything would feel worse without the remaining dog. Hers is a hard position, having to now absorb twice as many human emotions. In many ways she has always been the easier dog: less needy, more biddable, more eager to please. But in the first days of her tenure as the only dog, these assets struck my wife and I as deficits. Why did she take up so little space, make so little noise?
We were being unfair, of course. She is a perfect dog, too. Go ahead, make more demands, I think at her as I gladly stumble out of bed at 4 a.m. to feed her the breakfast she somehow wants to eat at that hour, spring up from whatever I’m doing at the first sign she might want a walk. Anything you want. Anything.
This is so moving - thank you for sharing, and I'm sorry for your loss <3