When My Dog Died
When I found out my dog was sick, and was going to die from being sick, I wanted to kill him myself. I don't know why, but I couldn't stand the thought of someone else, a stranger, coming in from somewhere else to put my dog down. A stranger's hands taking his life, pulling plastic wrap off some clinical, commercially sterilized needle, my dog surrounded by by all this strangeness, dying bewildered. It all felt like such an enormous betrayal.
The thought of it was just impossible. But something had to happen; he was profoundly ill, his back legs were giving out, and soon he wouldn't be able to walk. It could be days, it certainly wouldn't be more than two weeks before his slow crippling was complete. His appetite was already fading. My God, the brutality of cancer. It seems like it kills everyone in my family.
There was never a clear vision on how to do it. I had vague notions of a quick poison, a knife, something fast. I didn't have a gun.
None of it mattered in the end. My grandmother was ill as well, and we left over Thanksgiving to visit her. My dog had to remain at the vet's, under special care in the kennel. He died there, in the company of strangers, held by a caring and wholly unfamiliar nurse. I cried so hard when they took me in to see the body. Everything had gone wrong with the way he died, and now he was lifeless, a corpse, and I missed him, and I stood over him crying with my mom at my side, unhinged by the tiny sliver of pink tongue jutting out just below his nose.
And that was the last time anyone saw what remained of my dog. He was burned up and put in small plastic container; it sits on a shelf in my mom's bedroom, alongside old videotapes and photographs of people we once knew in New Jersey. That was the death he got, and it made me weep to see it.
There were tears of shame also. I hadn't cried like that for any human being in a long, long time.
The thought of it was just impossible. But something had to happen; he was profoundly ill, his back legs were giving out, and soon he wouldn't be able to walk. It could be days, it certainly wouldn't be more than two weeks before his slow crippling was complete. His appetite was already fading. My God, the brutality of cancer. It seems like it kills everyone in my family.
There was never a clear vision on how to do it. I had vague notions of a quick poison, a knife, something fast. I didn't have a gun.
None of it mattered in the end. My grandmother was ill as well, and we left over Thanksgiving to visit her. My dog had to remain at the vet's, under special care in the kennel. He died there, in the company of strangers, held by a caring and wholly unfamiliar nurse. I cried so hard when they took me in to see the body. Everything had gone wrong with the way he died, and now he was lifeless, a corpse, and I missed him, and I stood over him crying with my mom at my side, unhinged by the tiny sliver of pink tongue jutting out just below his nose.
And that was the last time anyone saw what remained of my dog. He was burned up and put in small plastic container; it sits on a shelf in my mom's bedroom, alongside old videotapes and photographs of people we once knew in New Jersey. That was the death he got, and it made me weep to see it.
There were tears of shame also. I hadn't cried like that for any human being in a long, long time.