Signing On The Dotted Line

the grief of losing your childhood dog

You enter a contract when you adopt a dog. The contract states that you (the owner) will get an undisclosed amount of time to spend playing, walking, cuddling, and engaging in the general companionship activities of dog-owning, and then, one day, some day, you will be the one to decide when its life has come to an end.

It’s the humane thing to do.

But the years pass, and you forget about the contract. The timer, quietly ticking down, starts to blend right in with the hum of the air conditioner and the rattling of the car speakers.

Sure, there are moments where we are reminded of mortality’s existence — an emergency trip to the vet when your dog got into the box of Jordan Almonds, or a run-in with an unfriendly skunk — but those moments are soon tucked away for a rainy day we never truly think will come.

And that’s so human.

And I love that we’re the only species on earth that seems to be able to radically reject the idea of death because we don’t want things to end. But dogs don’t do that.

Dogs know the inevitability of death, and perhaps that’s why they aren’t so bummed out all the time.

Cowboy knew.

He knew before we knew. But like humans always do, we never know how to let a good thing end. Experimental trials, gentle exercise, feeding him sodium-free sliced turkey from Sprouts because it was the only thing he would eat — anything to squeeze a few more months of Cowboy.

Because that’s so human.

We’re so human that we forget they’re not. That’s why it hits like a truck when they die. Because, to us, they aren’t a pet anymore, they’re a member of the family.

We are made uncomfortable by our dogs’ animality, so we anthropomorphize them. We give them human traits because our pattern-oriented monkey brains need things to fit in neat little boxes with labels we create. I always wondered if dogs felt the same glee when we acted “dog-like.” Like when I’m aggressively scratching my ass, my dogs were like “Oh my god, he’s just like me.”

. . .

After spending fourteen years with Cowboy, we learned to read his looks pretty well (or at least, so we thought). We knew when he was hungry, or had to pee, and when he wanted to get up on the couch. That’s why it was such horseshit when we tried to claim plausible deniability when he told us it was time to die.

Though we are piloted by both the thinking mind and the feeling heart, “the right hand rarely knows what the left hand is doing.” We hear the words “the time is coming,” and they just turn into a mess of letters in our hands. Some truths we simply just don’t want to face.

But even denial has a breaking point. My mom picked me up from the airport on December 17th with a somber look of finality. “It’s gonna happen in the next couple of days,” she said.

I was floored. Where was the lead-up? It was all so sudden. Something like this seems years away until it’s right in front of your face, and, even then, the reality of the situation is intangible. I knew I was gonna come home and Cowboy would be there to greet me. I was prepared for that.

I wasn’t prepared for when he wasn’t.

. . .

He got nightmares towards the end, and I would sit with him by his bed and stroke his ears until he stopped heavy breathing. Because that’s what family does for each other. Because I’m an animal and he is an animal.

The day we put him in the rest was not unlike any of the other days. He lay in the grass in the backyard, and life went on…But I swear to fucking god he gave me a look. A different look. And I don’t know what it meant, or if it meant anything at all, but I’ve been thinking about it constantly for the last three weeks.

It was sort of a forlorn double-take. As he turned to head back inside, he stopped at the stairs, turned his head back to me, looked me dead in the eyes, and communicated something, and then walked away.

Maybe it is too human of me to look for meaning in that look.

And then came the drive…

The drive to the vet took place in an alternate pocket dimension where time didn’t exist. All four of us crammed into the car with Cowboy and drove him to the gallows. My brother, who moved out almost exactly a year before, was sitting behind me, and in that moment, I felt so close to my family.

We had all become unstuck in time and launched suddenly into 2017. Cowboy’s eyebrows were still brown. I was in middle school, my brother was in high school, and we were on the way to somewhere unimportant; it was only the drive that mattered.

The drive was thirteen minutes, I think. We were cracking jokes, as humans do in the face of great tragedy, critiquing my dad’s driving, talking about freeways, avoiding that damn elephant in the room like pros.

For thirteen minutes, we were invincible. Immune to pain, illness, death, distance, and even time.

And in the middle was Cowboy, surrounded by his loved ones, just being a family, a pack. His favorite. I think he knew what was going on, but he didn’t seem too bothered by it all. I mean, what dog doesn’t enjoy a good drive?

So, no. That moment couldn’t last forever; the best it could do was stretch out a little bit in order to be savored.

And maybe Cowboy wasn’t trying to communicate anything with me, but regardless, a message was still received on my end. And if you remove all our big-brained thinking out of it, this is really a story about an inevitable event you cannot possibly prepare for. A sadness we choose to bear because the joy is worth it. So we sign on the dotted line.

As all Cowboys must do, ours had to pass on through to the next town. Because even though he was canine by blood, his soul longed for fresh air and a nice dry brush to pee on. Maybe we’ll see him again, or maybe we won’t, but I’ll always be glad he chose to stay with us.

xoxo.