A Letter to my Dead Dog

Dear Valentine,

It was two weeks ago today that you told me something was wrong and we took you to see the extra scary doctors. They took you from our car, poked you and prodded you, and brought you back to me. They told me that everything was OK except for how fast your poor little heart was beating, almost as if they didn’t know how hearts work around extra scary things. We went back home and I promised you we’d take care of things the moment you told me it was getting worse.

That night was when I found you, scared and alone, on the rug in the downstairs bathroom. You were hurting and couldn’t make it back up the stairs to tell me, but I could feel you missing and came to lay with you. We laid there all night, not sleeping a wink, me petting you and telling you all the important things I wanted to tell you before you were gone and you panting and occasionally licking my hand to comfort me. You knew I was scared. I had never seen you go to your hiding space like that while I was home before. I know you were scared too. You had never seen me cry so much.

At 5am I scooped you up, carried you to the car (even though you tried to tell me it didn’t feel good), and we went back to the extra scary doctors. This time I told them all about how much you were hurting, how your back legs weren’t working very well, and how we hadn’t slept all night. They took you from our car, poked you and prodded you, and brought you back to me. They told me that everything was ok, all your vitals looked good, but your back legs did seem to be hurting. They gave us some more medicine to take the hurt away and we went home again.

Was it really just your legs still?

That was the day the snow started. Since you couldn’t do stairs anymore I carried you to the music room in your favorite blue bed, brought your food and water so it would be easy to get to, and brought all my boring work stuff in to sit with you. You weren’t hungry, but you were drinking water when I held up the bowl for you and you didn’t mind too much when I hid your medicine in some cheese. We watched the snow fall together from the floor there all day. You watched from your bed as I got up and made your special chicken and rice for you, and I wasn’t even mad that you only ate the chicken.

By evening you were having a hard time standing. I would carry you out and you would try not to fight it even though it hurt and you would manage to hold yourself up just long enough to pee in the grassy spot I shoveled out for you. That was when the shaking started. When you were laying in your bed and looking like you were having a hard time holding your head up. I talked to the normal scary doctor about how worried I was about you and she said to bring you in first thing the next morning. I don’t know if you slept at all that night, but I finally snuck a couple of hours there next to you on the music room floor.

By 4am your shaking was worse. You seemed like you were really fighting to keep your head up. I kissed your head, asked you to hang in there, and went outside to try and shovel all that nasty snow so that we would make it to the normal scary doctors soon. It was still sleeting as I worked. I worried that you might hurt yourself trying to get up and follow me, but I found you later, still in your bed, still shaking. You looked at me with your eyes because it hurt to move your head. I carried you outside (you were not happy about this) and tried to help support you with a towel under your belly so you could pee, but you couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to make you stand for long, maybe I should have given you longer, but after a minute or so bent over you in that little patch of grass, trying to shield you from the freezing rain while supporting your back with a towel, I just carried you back in to your bed.

I told you it was ok to pee on the rug if you had to. Just this once.

The normal scary doctor was late opening because of the snow. We got the earliest appointment possible once they opened. Waiting was hard. You were fading, and all I could do was watch and try to get you to take your medicine so it didn’t hurt. You wouldn’t take it though. By the time Jimmy called to ask how you were doing I couldn’t even answer. I just started bawling. Jimmy sounded angry that I was trying to work and told me sternly that I was not allowed to work any more that day. Jimmy isn’t very good at male emotions. He means well.

By the time I wrapped you in your blanket and carried you to the car, you felt halfway gone. Seemed dazed, like everything was out of focus to you. Were you still able to hear me? Did you know where we were going? I thought to myself that this might be your last time home. And that means, after almost 8 years of not missing a single night together, the night before was your last night with me. Which means… I made myself stop thinking about it. First I needed to focus on trying to get you help. I promised you that we were going to do what was best for you no matter what, and that we were going to either make it all better or make the badness go away. I chose those words carefully.

When the normal scary doctor called me after looking at you, I could tell she was trying not to cry. We rushed back to the extra scary doctor. Somehow, in that one day we were home, your poor little heart had gone from “all vitals are strong” to “bleeding and probably half collapsed”. You were having a very hard time getting blood to the important parts of your body. You were in the oxygen box while I talked to the extra scary doctor about what we could do for you.

She told me that they would try to rush you to the heart doctor so they could take pictures of your poor little heart to try to find out what’s wrong. If they weren’t available right away, then a tap would be done to remove all the extra blood that was putting pressure on your poor little heart and THEN you’d go see the heart doctor. You’d be kept for a night or two in that extra scary doctor’s, on tubes and IVs, to try and keep you alive in the meantime. She said that, since it was the second time this had happened to you, there was almost definitely a tumor in your poor little heart, even though they couldn’t find one the last time. If by some stroke of luck that wasn’t the case, then you would need heart surgery so that the next time this happened the blood would go to your belly instead of getting trapped around your heart. We would have to be extra careful. We’d have to keep you more calm when the evil Mailman walks around the neighborhood. We couldn’t let you almost catch the squirrels with your blinding speed (but then let them go at the last second because compassionate wolf). If we got extra extra lucky and put you through multiple heart procedures and made you stay with the extra scary doctors during this extra scary time, we might have been able to buy you a few more years of cautious existence.

I stopped them. I didn’t want you to have to go through all of that. I didn’t want you stuck in that place where I couldn’t visit you. I didn’t want you to have to fight through heart surgeries. Even if we got lucky and it all worked, I didn’t think you’d be happy not being able to do all those things you loved doing. I wanted so badly to tell them to do whatever it took to keep you here with me. I would be so much happier if you were still here with me. But I promised you that we were going to do what was best for you, not for me. Once I started asking these sorts of questions, the extra scary doctor agreed. She wouldn’t choose to make her dogs go through this. I told her that I wouldn’t make you go through it.

I am so, so scared that I might have made the wrong choice.

What if you might have been ok? What if, in trying to be selfless, I actually gave up on you too soon? What if you’d have been content to take it easy with me as we slow down together in our old age? What if you could have had 3-4 more years and I cut that short? Took that from you? What if, after I fought tooth and nail to be with you as much as possible, refusing to go on flights because I wouldn’t be apart from you and fighting the rules at work so you could go to the office with me, what if I just gave up because I went in feeling like you were already gone? Can I even be trusted to make this sort of decision when the previous 48 hours included 3 of sleep and 24 of crying? Worst of all, what if I subconsciously made that choice because I didn’t want all that pressure and responsibility anymore?

Can you feel how hard I’m crying again, wherever you are?

Vally, the reason I’m writing all this to you today is because I need to say that I’m sorry. I know I promised, but I don’t actually know if what I did was best for you. Maybe had I insisted that you were not well on those first two extra scary doctor trips they could have done something sooner. Maybe it was the stress of those appointments that made your poor little heart go all wrong again. Actually I think that's probably exactly what happened, that something was going to trigger it and my taking you in for a hurt back was the thing. Maybe I was making things worse trying to carry you around when you were telling me not to. Maybe I should have told them to do all those things to you so that you’d have a chance to be here with me still. Being together meant everything to us, and I chose for that to end, and now there’s no way for me to know if that was the right thing to do.

I’m sorry I couldn’t make it all better, pretty puppy. I’m so sorry that I didn’t know how to fix it. I hope you could tell how hard I was trying, even when I didn’t know what was right. I hope you could feel how hard it was for me to let you go like that when they made it not hurt anymore. I hope you were still conscious enough to feel how much I loved you as we sat there, waiting for them to put the final needle in. And I hope your energy is still out there somewhere and able to feel how much I love you now. Still. How hard it is to not have you here with me.

Thank you for everything, little wolf. For comforting me when I tried to make things better for you but didn’t know how. For all the love and care you showed me over the years, even when I don’t know if I deserved it. I hope I did right for you, but I need you to know that, even if I was wrong, I was trying my best for you. Also, that this was not what I wanted. Letting you go was and continues to be the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I’m going to keep fighting. I’m going to get up out of this chair right now and go for a walk even though it’s dark and cold and then I'm going to come home and get ready for a workout because I know you didn’t pick me up and carry me through those rough years just to have me fall on my face the minute you’re gone. But I miss you, and I wish you were still here more than anything.

I love you, Vally, and I'm sorry if I ever got it wrong. You were everything to me.

-M