drmstream[writing]

Some­times the dogs in this neigh­bor­hood start an alarm chain.  Lit­tle Char­lieDog is the ful­crum.  The dogs back across the pond begin to bark, the dogs across the street bark, and Char­lie runs from one side of the upper yard to the other, trans­fer­ring the barks with his pecu­liar stri­dent yelp.  His mus­cles get taut and he squares off his paws.  A hint of bull­dog reshapes his merged genes, and he barks and barks and barks.  As unpre­dictably as it starts, the bark­ing chain stops.

Last night on Twit­ter I engaged with a woman about her dog.  Her con­ceit, and per­haps her actual state of exis­tence, is that her dog is the glue that holds her life together.

The inter­ac­tion made me remem­ber bring­ing McDou­gal to Dr. Israel, the Bed­ford vet, to put her to sleep.

She’d been fad­ing for a long time.  She was neglected in those final cou­ple of years.  I trav­eled every week to Cal­i­for­nia and had some­one come in to look after her.  My ex-wife had decided that she wouldn’t take McDou­gal any longer; she’d got­ten her own dog.  That one week­end, when my son and daugh­ter were home, I picked McDou­gal up and lay her down in the car.  She couldn’t move any longer.

Moments like those, we like to think that the dog under­stands what is hap­pen­ing, that there is a shared res­ig­na­tion, an accep­tance of the inevitabil­ity of the roles that each of us has to play: her to die with dig­nity, me to be gen­tle but deter­mined that the end has come.

She was just a dog though.  She could under­stand that she was fail­ing, in the way that an organ­ism is over­whelmed by the recog­ni­tion that its cel­lu­lar com­po­si­tion has stopped regen­er­at­ing, that its sys­tems are no long repair­ing, and the sen­sa­tions of the world are dim­ming by incre­ments each day.  I wished for a deeper shared under­stand­ing, but I know that it wasn’t there.  The one thing that was there was a recog­ni­tion of the order of our world, a rela­tion­ship of dom­i­nance and affec­tion, of a two-mammal pack that had been con­stant for close to 15 years.

The con­stancy didn’t mean that there was con­stant care.  She had spent too much time alone at the end.  I was try­ing to live a life that was unnat­ural: build a busi­ness in Cal­i­for­nia and return to New York every week­end to take care of my kids.  Remem­ber­ing it makes me tired.

She was light in my arms.  I hugged her high to my chest.  She didn’t have enough strength to hold her­self up.  Her head was nes­tled in the crook of my elbow.

We walked straight into the treat­ment room and I put her down on the metal table.  Dr. Israel and I talked briefly.  She wasn’t eat­ing.  Her body was eat­ing itself.  It was time.

He gath­ered the syringe and the med­i­cine bot­tle.  The liq­uid would kill her almost instantly.  The long dog life would come to an end.  The pain and uncer­tainty would stop.  That would be it:  McDougal’s story.

Before he gave her the shot, he stood by her head.  He leaned down and kissed her, buried his nose for an instant in her fur, rubbed her front haunch.  “You’re a good dog,” he said.  “You’ve had a good life.”

She died as the fluid streamed into her body.

I had a blue sheet.  I wrapped her in it and brought her to the car.  When I came home, Becky and Will were wait­ing.  I slung the sheet over my shoul­der and we went to the far back cor­ner of the yard, to the lit­tle clear­ing just beyond the pool.  We buried her under a garbage can top.  I put rocks on top of the plas­tic so that no ani­mal would be able to dig into the ground and root out the rot­ting corpse.  We put a grey rock over the spot.  I painted the words McDou­gal, Dog of the Uni­verse, on the stone.  It was a bad job.  The words didn’t fit evenly and the paint dripped, obscur­ing some of the let­ters.  We knew who it was though.  It was our dog.

In the 15 years of her life, my life had traced an arc from domes­tic ten­sion to for­lorn lone­li­ness.  My dog was my stub­born com­pan­ion.  She was dis­tinct, a mutt of uncer­tain ori­gin, a mid-sized dog that seemed to have a lit­tle bor­der col­lie in her, an ink-stain of black, a cheer­ful wan­der­ing lady who spent hours in the woods walk­ing with me, off some­where deep, obliv­i­ous to my loud calls, McDou­gal, McDou­gal, McDou­gal, over and over, more and more frus­trated, until the yelling wasn’t for the dog any more, as the frus­tra­tions of a failed mar­riage and a relent­less tor­ment and a des­per­ate desire to know love, a wide, gap­ing cry out of my heart that wanted to cast doubt and defi­ance and depres­sion out of my life got all mixed up with the sim­ple, lyric act of call­ing out to a stray dog who was fol­low­ing the trace of uncer­tain scents, try­ing to find her own nature, feel­ing the deep instinct stir, rush­ing here and there, and then, just as sud­denly, turn­ing, and rac­ing back through the under­brush, fallen trunks, rot­ting leaves, to me.