Tell Me a Sad Dog Story: Part Two

[Part One of this essay is here.}

Punchy had settled at the far end of the dining room in front of the picture window, next to two hefty, branched out jade plants, and just a few feet from the cast iron radiator that threw off just enough heat to reach him. He laid full on his belly with his two front legs stretched in front as if he was holding on to the earth in some way, afraid to let go and curl up as a sled dog resting would do, nose touching tail.

            He was quiet. He rarely barked anyway, at least not with us. His musher owners told us he was a loud and insistent barker, yelping and leaping when he was getting harnessed to a sled dog team, and joining in the chorus in the dog yard every day. With us, he barked sparingly, just once in a while to another dog that got a little too intrusive with its sniffing. So, I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t bark now that he was so sick, but it seemed eerie that he didn’t whine. He made no sound at all. He just lay silent, his front paws gripping the carpet, staring straight ahead and then, just now and then, he’d rest his head on his front legs and close his eyes. He moved nothing else. Not his legs or his tail. He didn’t try to stand up or roll over on his side. He was still.

            I sat next to him on the rug. I fed him pieces of chicken and bits of kibble. His lips would move to take a single small morsel and then he’d swallow without chewing. I held a dish of water. He drank. And then he laid his head back down. It was late on Christmas Eve. I pondered what to do. Should I roll out a sleeping bag and sleep on the floor next to him or go upstairs with my husband to bed. He looked like he was sleeping so we left Punchy alone in the dining room. I didn’t say so to my husband but I hoped Punchy would die in the night.

            He didn’t die in the night, nor in the morning or the afternoon of Christmas. Because our adult kids were sick, we’d postponed the family celebration, instead spending the day watching old movies on TV and ministering to Punchy. Cooking Christmas dinner in the kitchen, we stopped all the second guessing about what to do and started eulogizing him, remembering how calm he always was when we were camping, how he laid down flat with his paws out in front in front of the campfire, like he was lying at the moment in the dining room, how no matter how loud the thunder or how close the lightening, he’d stay curled up in our tent while Swirl paced and panted.  We thought maybe Punchy was calm in a storm because he trusted us but we couldn’t be sure. Maybe that was just him.

We went upstairs to bed a second night with Punchy on the dining room floor and in the morning he was still there. Motionless but awake. I fed him bits of egg from our omelet and sat next to him like I had the two days before, petting his head, talking to him in a whispery death speak, telling him it would all be okay, but then feeling the ache in my hips and getting up to walk around. We watched the morning news in the living room. I checked on him, hoping he was sleeping, and then watched his back to see if he was breathing, like I did when my daughter was a baby.

            At 8:00 o’clock that last morning, as soon as the vet’s office was open, we called. Our dog was dying, we said. He needs to be put down today. No, he couldn’t walk on his own. We would carry him to the truck. Could they meet us outside to help us carry him inside? We are old, we explained, in our seventies, and though not weak, neither are we strong. My husband couldn’t carry the dog in his arms like he might have once. It would take both of us.

            We rolled Punchy on to an old, very thick blanket from the attic. And then, making a sling, we each took an end, and we lifted him off the dining room floor. Though not dead, he was dead weight, very heavy, but not moving or struggling, just still but awake. We carried him this way out the front door, down two sets of stairs, across the lawn to our truck. This is when I started to cry.

He was so heavy. I worried I would drop my end, that he would fall out of the blanket and be hurt again, and then when we got to the truck, it seemed impossible to load him on to the back seat but somehow, in a wrestling of the blanket and Punchy’s legs and my wanting to ride with him, we got settled. I sat with him like I was on the couch with a sleepy child’s head on my lap.

The dog that I wished would die the night before and the night before that was finally going to die. We were taking him there. He was on his way, and I was glad.