Tomorrow afternoon, I have to put down one of my dogs. I'm heartbroken, which is no surprise. I've had him for sixteen months, though shortly after I adopted him, I was told that he had between two and six left. I had been volunteering at the shelter where the manager kept him behind the front desk — the spot for special animals that don't deserve the frazzled nerves of being back in the kennels. As we left for a walk, we stopped at my car for a leash and he propped his two front feet up on the runner. I knew then and there.
An elderly man with mobility issues, he could never jump, but he's done a damn good job of using his front legs to compensate. For much of our first year, he would pull himself up the steep stairs of my 130-year-old home, insistent on sleeping upstairs. (I didn't protest.) I would lift his front legs onto the bed, then run my hands along his sides and down his back legs, grabbing his back ankles and lifting those into bed, too.
Shortly before I adopted him, he had surgery to remove eight or so tumors growing in his body. Shortly after I brought him home, an x-ray showed a grapefruit-sized tumor growing under his intestine and the vet said he likely had only a few months left. Almost since the beginning, I've been preparing for death.
The last sixteen months haven't been easy. He's a 14-or-15-year-old dog with mobility issues, which means he wasn't able to come hiking with me and my other dog. The two of us would venture out only for the day, always sure to be home to hang out with Vito. He forced me to compromise, to grow up a little. It was brutally hot for several weeks last summer, and I did something I had long been morally opposed to: bought an air conditioner. Anything for that dog.
After many months of him being relatively mobile, his back hips started to get worse. I decided to let him sleep downstairs on his heated bed, and I put a gate up at the stairs to make sure my other kept him company. I did my best to cover my wood floors with something to make it easier for him to walk. I bought traction socks. He takes pain medication each night, usually wrapped in some lunch meat.
But time takes its toll. The grapefruit is now a football. He no longer stands at the window and barks at the neighbors as he once did incessantly. He can no longer control his bowels, so he goes when he needs to. (This hasn't be a problem as it's easy enough to clean up.) His back left leg goes out if he stands too long while eating or getting a drink. His dark skin is beginning to show as his soft winter undercoat has started shedding. A few days ago, I came home to him collapsed by the back door, unable to get up.
I know it's time, yet I'm unprepared. How am I unprepared?
I've been preparing for this for the last sixteen months. I've been emotionally on edge most of that time, if I'm honest, and I'm exhausted by it. My life has radically changed — my world gotten much smaller, more contained — because of him. In the literal sense, he's been a labor of love.
Now it's time to send him on his way. To put him down. To have him killed. To let him die.
I called the vet yesterday and scheduled it for tomorrow. Now that I have, I'm both relieved and anxious, sure that I'm doing the right thing punctuated by moments of doubt. His eyes haven't changed since the day we met and he's every bit as "in there" as he was 16 months ago. Yet his body is giving out, his breathing labored. He's tired.
I wonder what his life was like before me, all those 13 years. I was told a story about his past, though I presume much of it is apocryphal (as stories in small towns like these tend to be). Did he seem so thankful to be home with us because he had been neglected, abused? On the eve of our last day together, I want him to lay next to me and tell me his life story.
He has been such a good friend. I'm going to feel lost without him.