Today I said goodbye to my dog. I took her to the farm – a place she loves -- and I had the farm vet euthanise her in the back of my car while I held her in my arms, and then we buried her in a grave I had dug earlier. I did my best to ensure it was the most peaceful and stressless way I could let her go. She was frail. She was losing feeling in her back legs, and she didn’t know where she was putting her feet anymore. She fell a lot, wobbled, couldn’t run, dragged her feet, couldn’t squat properly to go to the bathroom, was becoming incontinent. But her mind was still sharp. She didn’t think anything was wrong with her. She still wanted to play, still wanted to chase the squirrels and bark at the dog next door. She even roused herself from sedation to have one last bark at the farm cats.
Euthanasia – good death. It’s a lie, you know. There is no such thing as a good death. Death is horrible, even when it is “just a dog”. She went from a vibrant, muscled, alert creature to a slack and sagging mound of flesh in a matter of moments. Her eyes went from bright golden shoe buttons to clouded opacity in the time it took me to draw a breath. Her great and loving heart stilled under the assault of the drugs in her veins. Death is not good. It is heavy and hideous. Her fur is still soft and her body is still warm but it is so horribly loose. I can hardly lift her, and she flops and slithers where before, even in her weakness, she leaned and loved and held her own weight.
Good death. It’s not a good death. It’s just death and I miss her so much I am startled by the hugeness of the hollow in my heart. She’s “supposed” to be just a dog. It isn’t “supposed” to hurt this much. But it does. So much of my daily routine is wound up in caring for her. I don’t even know how to go to bed without the routine of taking her out for one last potty break, making sure the gates are up so she doesn’t sneak into the front rooms at night, getting her Kong and a handful of kibble and the can of dog food from the fridge and preparing her nightly treat. She sits and waits until I give her the spoon to lick off (two pills tucked inside the pasty canned meat she loves), and then runs to her bed and jumps on it, waiting, eager. And now I am to just get up and go to bed? How? And how do I face tomorrow, coming down the stairs, with no dog to greet me at the bottom and lean against me for pats and scratches? I am dreading almost to despair the long months of a lockdown winter without my dog lying on the rug beside me as I work alone from home and getting up every so often to put her great head in my lap and look up at me just because I am there, and she can.
Good death? Damn death. Damn this whole horrible, broken, miserable, pandemic-blighted year. Damn the devil who laughs at disease and death, even if it is just the death of a dog.
Aye, but isn’t that the crux of it? Because it is all damned, groaning under the agony of the curse, the curse of my sin, our sin, the sin of this broken world. But, for the grace of God, it is all damned, and I am damned with it, and the curse crushes, and when I think about it, it is not anger I feel but deep, deep sorrow, not just for a dog but for the whole of this world crying out for redemption. It is not damnation I desire but redemption, a longing for the curse to be finally broken, for death to be done, for my faith to be made sight. Oh, God, when? How long, O Lord? “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here. O come, thou Rod of Jesse, free thine own from Satan’s tyranny; From depths of hell thy people save, and give them victory over the grave. O come, thou Key of David, come and open wide our heavenly home; Make safe the way that leads on high, and close the path to misery.” O come, Emmanuel. Emmanuel, come back!
But there is more than brokenness in this world. There is joy and laughter and love. Every good gift is a foretaste of the new heavens and new earth. My dog was a gift. She had a good life. She was larger than life, living with an intensity that sometimes drove me mad but mostly brought me joy because in so many ways, it mirrored my own. She was smart, eager, always ready to play. I could never train her not to eat the toilet paper or to sneak into the rooms she wasn’t allowed to be in or to bark at the dog next door, but she learned to spell r-a-b-b-i-t and to recognise the Starbucks logo without our even trying to teach her. She came with me to the barn every time I went, for years, waiting patiently in the car until it was her turn, then running with abandon through the woods, playing in the puddles, finding the biggest sticks she could carry to take me out at the knees when she ran by at full speed. She went on many, many road trips with my housemate and me, travelling on motorboats, pontoon boats, ferries, busses, and tractor-drawn wagons. She’s been all over southwestern Ontario with us, has been camping and cottaging and hiking. She lived life to the full – no, more than to the full, and when she wasn’t frustrating us, she was making us roar with laughter. If she could leap, she leapt. If she could run, she galloped. If she could dig, she’d dig trenches like the Grand Canyon. If one ball was good, three were better. Everything was over the top. She wrested every drop of joy and love and life out of every day she had, right up to the end.
Good death? Never. Good life? For sure.
Maybe she was just a dog, but I miss her.
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