They Took My Dog

I woke up this morning to a call from my Mom. This isn’t a rare occurrence, since I often sleep past the hour when most people deem it appropriate to make a phone call, and my Mom loves making phone calls. When she makes them, she likes to talk about a lot of things, many of them slightly trivial. So, I wasn’t all that worried about it, I didn’t panic and immediately assume something was wrong.

But then she told me that she and the other four members of my family not including me were all going to the vet early that afternoon to put our dog, Tori, to sleep. I met this with a surprising amount of stoicism, since she was my first real pet and I’d pretty much grown up with her. She’d just turned 14 1/2 the day before. I told my Mom I thought it was the right thing to do, because she’d been sick with an aggressive cancer that had started in her right hind leg sometime during the winter and had been spreading ever since. Also because my Mom immediately revealed to me that Tori was bleeding rectally. This combined with the fact that she could only barely use three of her legs, had lost more weight than Jared Fogle and would spend a pretty good chunk of her day (when she wasn’t sleeping, which was rarely) either laying in her little bed or barking at things that weren’t there convinced me that what I was telling my Mom I meant with all my heart. I’d already come to this conclusion when I went home last weekend, and had found her in a terrible condition. I had to pick her frail, bony body up -- she was sickly, supermodel skinny, with more hair -- and take her outside to do her business, and she struggled greatly even popping a squat, because of her useless leg and low energy levels. I was further convinced that it was time for her long and, I like to think, good life to end when my Dad, who was the closest to Tori of any of us (as soon as he came home from work, she followed him like, well, a puppy), said he thought it was about time to put her to sleep.

All of this confirmed for me what I’d always really known, that my first pet was going to die really soon, but I still had a glimmer of hope that maybe she wasn’t that bad and would continue to stick it out. This changed when my best friend Evan, who has known Tori for almost as long as I have, came over. In the 11 or so years they’ve been acquainted, and in the hundreds of times Evan has walked into my house, Tori has never not given him an unbelievable amount of shit. She fucking hated Evan, with every fiber of her tiny being, and she would bark and bark and bark incessantly at him anytime he was in her domain. She could sense his arrival, and she would find him. This time, though, she acted like she didn’t even know he was around, and I suppose she probably didn’t. When he was near her, she didn’t even bark, except when she would growl or let out a little yelp at the wall, which definitely wasn’t Evan. She was at that point where she didn’t know her best friend from the people she hated the most. If she didn’t want to hassle Evan, I knew she didn’t really want to live anymore. Since she was a small, indoor dog, he was her equivalent of the postal worker or paper boy. She’d lost the ability to fight her own fights, realized it, and unlike many bitches the world over she decided she didn’t want other people to fight them for her. She’d become dependent and docile, and that wasn’t my dog’s personality (dogonality?).

When I said goodbye to her that Monday before I headed out of town to go back to my job and, I guess, my new life, I knew it was probably the last time I would ever see her. I told her a bunch of shit about dog heaven that I’m not even sure if I believe or not. Firstly, I don’t know if there is a heaven, and I’m alright with not knowing for many, many years. Secondly, I don’t know if, when a dog does go to heaven, they get to eat as many Milk Bones as they want. (Who can really be sure if canine obesity exists in heaven? If it does, there’s got to be a ration on treats and Beggin’ Strips.) But I told her both of these things, and I told her I’d miss her. I gave her a kiss and she returned it. I’d like to think she knew whose nose she was licking at that point, and I do. (If Evan had come that close to her face, she would’ve bit his off, no matter how low her energy level might be or how shitty she was feeling.)

A little while after I got off the phone with my Mom, she sent me a picture of Tori (the same one as above). She was in the bed she frequented, and she was wrapped in a towel. She looked so skinny, skinnier than I could ever remember her being before. Even on the night we brought her home, when she was pretty close to being a newborn and tiny puppy. I remember it vividly. We played with this little puppy we were so happy to have, that we thought we’d never have, and we watched “The Haunted Mask” episode of the short-lived Goosebumps television series. When I saw this picture my Mom had sent me, I cried a little bit. I’m not ashamed of that, because I think that’s an appropriate action. Also, it takes absolutely nothing for me to start crying, unlike most self-respecting men, but there’s not a thing I can do about it, so hey. I cried mostly because I would miss my dog, but also because she was going to die while everyone in the family was around except for me. I dwelled on this for a bit, then went for a run, showered and went to work. I wanted to act status quo, and I wanted to try and not think about the fact that, in a way, I was glad I didn’t have to be there to see the family dog put down.

Most of the day went reasonably well. I knew what was going to happen, and knew it was the right thing. I waited for the text message to come from someone in my family to tell me that the deed had been done. My big brother texted me, told me she was dead and that she hadn’t seemed very opposed to a lethal injection. He said she went quietly, and my family took that to mean she was ready. I have no doubts that she was.

Later in the night, I had to go to the conclusion of a little league baseball game for something I was doing at work. When I got there, it was pouring down rain, and the game was delayed. I decided to wait it out in my car. When I was sitting there in the rain, I started thinking a lot about Tori. At first, I was thinking about the times when she was sick, and I got kind of upset. Then, I decided I’d think about all the good things I remembered about her. I got out a notebook and sat in my car writing down some of my fondest memories of her. I thought about how intelligent she was. She could shake with both paws and do all the normal dog tricks like sitting and playing dead and rolling over. I especially remember how, when she wanted something, she would “dance.” She would get up on her hind legs, and drape her front paws out; she looked vaguely like someone dancing without a partner, like she was learning the steps in an introductory ballroom dancing class. She would look at you and continue to dance until she got what she wanted. She wasn’t unlike many people in that respect. I thought about the times we’d taken naps on my bed or on the couch, and the time I taught her to modify her normal handshake skills into a “pound” or “daps” fist-to-paw bump. I thought about a lot of things.

Then, I got back to thinking about how I hadn’t been there for her death. I realized after a while that this was a stupid thing to get caught up on, because her death had taught me more about life than maybe her entire life put together had. For years now, I’ve been a pseudo-emo kid who kind of adopted the idea that when every living thing in the world dies, he, she or it dies alone. (I attribute this to way too many sad songs, books and viewings of Donnie Darko.) The important thing about Tori dying was that she was surrounded by almost everyone she’d spent significant amounts of time with. To dwell on the fact that all of my immediate family had been there at the time of her dignified death when I was unable to be was the wrong way to look at it. I needed to look at it as a lesson. Everyone doesn’t die alone, and it’s important to keep a group of people close to you who you might want to have around when you do die, regardless of whether there’s a heaven, hell, that place the people from LOST were hanging out or anything else.

She taught me that, among other things, and so I guess her work here was done.

It just kind of sucks that Evan can come into my house now and not suffer any hysterics or hassles, but so it goes.