It’s a morning like any other. I see her in the mirror fixing her hair and she says, “Do we take the dog to the vet?”
and I say, “If we do, they’ll kill her.”
“Not if we don’t let them.”
The dog woke up in the night and found that her hind legs no longer worked. I heard her nails scratching the floor and the weight of her body hitting the floor and then scratching and flop and scratching again and again. I turned on the light and she looked up at me like a lost child and I got out of bed and tried to help her stand. She fell into my arms and then started to spin around like a dying shark. She crashed back to the floor and emptied her bladder. Now she was lying in a pool of urine and panting and drooling in a panic. I spent a while just sitting on the floor petting her and calming her down and smelling the piss and she just kept looking at me. Staring at me. I found it somewhat odd. I spend a lot of time accompanying the dog on her explorations of neighborhood urine smells, but I’m essentially unfamiliar with the smell of hers. Now I think I’d recognize it anywhere. Once she was calm, we cleaned up the puddle and when I came back from the trash can she immediately threw up on the floor. More cleaning and more petting and the other half says to me, “This could be it.” Because the dog is fourteen and has some strange cancer of the lymph nodes and she’s already lived a year longer than we ever expected and we’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I shoot back, “No Kidding!”. I spend some time on the floor with the dog to make sure she doesn’t panic again and somewhere around dusk I go back to sleep
When the necklace is on, she says, “Well?” and I say, “I don’t know.” and she says, “Can she walk?” and I say “I don’t know.”
She goes to the kitchen and gets some dog treats and the beast pops to its paws and wags it’s tail and all is as it ever was, but for bit of a limp in one leg. Charlie horse, I suppose. There may be more nights like this ahead: confronting mortality and those pleading eyes.
