A Dog Year

by Jon Katz

  Quite the opposite: he is eternally fascinated with me. I am his shepherd, his brother, his pal. He stares at me for long stretches and prefers, when possible, to keep me in sight. When I write in my study, he often sits in the backyard at the window that looks into my office.

  We communicate with hand signals and the beginnings of words—I rarely need to finish sentences. He knows when we’re walking, riding, when I’m taking him along or leaving him at home, when he has my permission to run, when he doesn’t.

  Inside, he sits at the doorway to whichever room I’m in, observing traffic and checking on my well-being. If I yell, cry, trip, grunt, shout, or make any unusual sound, he’s at my feet in a nanosecond, looking me over, ready to serve, protect, defend.

  He knows about my bad leg, and when I fall or stumble, which happens with some regularity, he’s instantly at my side, worried, licking my hand, wanting to help. He’s become Lassie-like. If I were down and in trouble, I’d have no hesitation about yelling, “Devon, boy, go on! Get help!” He’d zoom away and show up at somebody’s door, barking frantically, leading them to where I lay. Maybe this is a fantasy. I suspect I’ll find out one day.

  I know him better now. Underneath all the hell-raising, he’s a sweetheart, needy but also generous and giving, full of affection.

  He is capable of great calm, a new addition to his repertoire. It was now clear that he’d known all along what I wanted from him, he just wasn’t convinced he ought to do it. He stopped jumping on tables, knocking over phones, pacing in the house. He ate from his own bowl, left Stanley’s alone, began to appreciate Julius and watch over him. Yet he retained his spirit and pride. He was still a working dog.

  Old Hemp, smiling down from some moor in the sky, couldn’t have been prouder. Or was it Old Kep?

  Seven

  Lots and Lots and Lots of Heart

  * * *

  Stanley was lagging, it turned out, because he was dying. It was hard to believe. His eyes still had their permanent playful gleam. He was the eternal sprite. Paula said Stanley was the cutest puppy that had ever lived, and he’d kept his sweet puppy face into his eighth year.

  Dr. Brenda King is a great vet—direct, thorough, confident. She sometimes doesn’t seem all that wild about people, but she’s crazy about dogs and usually, after nodding briefly to their humans, speaks directly to them. Her diagnoses and instructions are brief and to the point, but they carry a lot of weight.

  Stanley nuzzled her hello, then accompanied her willingly to the X-ray machine, throwing back an anxious look when he saw I wasn’t coming along.

  A little while later, Dr. King came in and closed the door behind her. Not a good sign. She knew my dogs very well, and was certainly aware of how close we were.

  She had a particular soft spot for Labs in general, and for Jules, as she called him, in particular. She joked about his lack of enthusiasm for traditional Lab-like activities, and the resultant special diets we had to conjure up to keep him from ballooning like a manatee. And Stanley had always melted her heart.

  “Bad news,” she said in her usual, forget-the-b.s. style, but her eyes belied her professional mien. “Stanley’s heart rate is way down, well below the last time we checked and far below what it ought to be.”

  She’d first noted a decline on our visit a few months ago, but at the time it was small and didn’t appear to merit further attention. Now her examination revealed a different story. Besides which, she said, the X rays confirmed another suspicion—severe hip dysplasia, epidemic in Labs and golden retrievers. It was becoming painful for Stanley to run or walk too far; he was well on the way to becoming crippled. “I’m surprised he can even chase the ball,” she said.

  I thought silently that Stanley would happily chase a ball to his last breath.

  But the steep decline in his heart rate was more alarming. I’d have to bring Stanley in a couple more times, once right after he got up in the morning, once after exercising. We’d run tests to make sure.

  Devon wasn’t in any way a factor, she was quick to assure me, anticipating the waves of guilt I was already feeling.

  The news grew worse at each visit. Stanley’s heart was failing. Apart from open-heart surgery, or powerful medications whose side effects could be dreadful, there were no good treatment options. And for me, those weren’t options at all. I have a clear sense of how far I’m willing to go when a dog becomes seriously ill, what I’m willing to put a dog through, even one I care for as deeply as Stanley.

  Dr. King didn’t have to say what she was thinking. I’d been to see her dozens of times over the previous years. There was no encouragement or hope in her face or in her words.

  Even more than getting a dog, the biggest, most complex and wrenching decision in any dog owner’s life is when to put a dog down. There are people who choose to keep their dogs alive by any means possible, just as there are people who choose that fate for themselves.

  But I have to be honest: I am not one of them. The relationship between a dog and a human is always complicated. The two know each other in a way nobody else quite understands, a connection shrouded in personal history, temperament, experience, instinct, and love.

  One’s own life story is always inextricably bound up with this decision, as mine was. Brenda King told me once that the great challenge in being a vet—or a dog owner—is a sense of advocacy. Unlike people, dogs can’t speak for themselves. The lucky ones hook up with people who know them and fight for them, who act humanely and lovingly on their behalf.

  People who grew up without advocates often get entangled with dogs, for the most obvious of reasons. Sometimes—any vet will tell you this—dog owners lose sight of the boundaries between their own lives and their dogs’ lives, between the human and the canine experience. During any extended visit to a vet’s office, ancient dogs in dreadful shape are carried or wheeled in for medications, operations, and devices.

  “What you’ve got to do,” Dr. King told me in her usual matter-of-fact way, “is to figure out not only what the dog wants, but what the best thing is for him. Nobody else can do that.”

  So I understood that my decision about Stanley wouldn’t be born of the moment. It would be shaped by decades of personal experience, by the myriad factors that constructed my own worldview. And it would be a huge decision. I adored that dog, who unlocked the happy, playful parts of me. But I understood from the minute I left Dr. King’s office what I was likely to do.

  What would I want? What would Stanley want? What would be best for him? For him to end his life as happily as he’d lived it. For him not to be crippled by hip dysplasia, or felled by a stroke, heart attack, or seizure. For him not to end his days struggling to take a walk, chase a ball, keep up with the new pack that had abruptly formed in my house and life.

  Several friends and neighbors pleaded with me to collect more opinions, consider surgery, try holistic healing, get on the Web, or explore radical new diets. One even suggested adoption: I could seek a quieter home, where Stanley could live peacefully and perhaps longer. I could visit him from time to time.

  But sitting on the steps outside Dr. King’s office, sniffling and hugging him, I felt as if I really would rather have died myself than give him away, break our extraordinary bond. I had to do the right thing by my lights, be true to my sense of his interests. I had to be his advocate and, of course, the advocate I always wanted to have and which I had come to understand finally I never would have.

  I will never know, of course, if what I decided was the right thing. Nobody can say that with certainty. But I had a powerful sense of clarity, of knowing what I had to do for him. He needed that from me.

  Sweet Stanley. Every day began with his climbing into bed between Paula and me, curling up for an extended cuddle. I smiled every time I looked at his face. I couldn’t help it. He continuously brightened my life with that happy spirit, that big heart.

  He wasn’t as mournful and contemplative as Julius, or as smart or as weird as Devon. But he had
more fun than any dog I knew. I’d had enormous joy watching his passionate, fervent ball-chasing and retrieving, on land and in water, to which he brought serious commitment and inexpressible pleasure.

  He was my almost-oceangoing Lab—and his big heart, perhaps his most marked characteristic, was suddenly failing him. It seemed unjust.

  But I wasn’t surprised on that summer afternoon when Dr. King brought me the bad news for the third time, and Stanley came over and put his head between my knees, tail wagging. As always, he was concerned about me, sensing my unhappiness. I scratched his favorite spot, behind his ears.

  Stanley was always toting something around the house. He loved retrieving the newspaper each morning, strutting proudly down the walk and into the house as if he’d bagged a pheasant, eagerly awaiting his biscuit and exclamations of praise.

  In fact, there in Dr. King’s examining room, he plucked a paper cup out of the waste can and began proudly walking back and forth with it, head up, tail wagging.

  “I feel we should put him down,” I said haltingly. “Does that make sense to you?”

  She nodded. “When someone who loves his dogs as much as you do tells me that, it’s time.”

  The alternatives were unacceptable to me. He’d tire and struggle, especially in the coming warm weather. He was at risk of seizures and heart attacks. I couldn’t bear the prospect of his collapsing on a walk or during a swim. I feared he’d fade before my eyes.

  I could see he had already lost much of his energy, and I felt especially bad about that. Once I thought about it, he’d been slowing down for months. Preoccupied with Devon, I hadn’t been as quick to spot it as I otherwise would have. Dr. King was telling me it wouldn’t have made any difference, but it made me miserable anyway.

  Long walks were getting tough on Stanley, and though he still tore off after the ball, he might not be able to continue much longer. Too much swimming could be fatal, she said.

  “Stanley has been happy every day of his life,” I told Dr. King. “I’d like him to go out that way.” I told her I’d need to talk to Paula, but I felt clear.

  She agreed. She wished more of her clients’ owners took that view, she said. One of the toughest parts of her work was keeping old and suffering dogs alive beyond their time, beyond reason. She mentioned a German shepherd who had no hind legs and was pulled around in a small wagon. She well understood the love of dogs, she said, but there came a point when there was little purpose or joy in a dog’s life.

  I didn’t ever want Stanley to suffer that way. But I wanted to take him upstate to say goodbye. Up to me, Dr. King said.

  I wanted to be careful, to make this decision on its own merits, without letting our three-dog drama subconsciously affect my judgment. The people who’d warned me about owning three dogs had been right—it was rough, the walks, the feeding, the attention each needed and deserved, the trips to the vet.

  Our easy rhythms had been thrown off. Julius and Stanley were generous and forbearing, as always, but we’d had fewer of our special moments on walks or while I worked. Part of me missed having two easygoing dogs, and I didn’t want that feeling to come near this decision. I asked Dr. King to backstop me, to tell me if there was any good reason to think that Stanley could get better, or enjoy more time. She said she would consider it carefully.

  The tough part was, Stanley still took pleasure in life. He still loved Paula and me and Julius—though I don’t think he loved Devon—and he would still happily chase balls, retrieve newspapers, and lick kids.

  I wanted him to go out that way, before he got sick or knew pain or got scared.

  We made a tentative appointment to euthanize him the following week. She asked if I wanted his body cremated, and I said yes. I pictured scattering his ashes upstate, in the woods and meadow and in the Battenkill, the place he most loved to swim and where both of us nearly drowned.

  I drove upstate a few days later, with all three dogs. Devon was a different animal, but he was still a handful, and I wasn’t sure Paula could handle him alone yet.

  Upstate, the difference between this visit and the previous one was striking. Devon had become a Jon Katz scholar. He watched me all the time, closely enough to know that I was upset about something, and seemed to suspend part of his taunting rebellion and manic energy. He didn’t stray once from the cabin.

  My plan was to give Stanley a perfect day, a proper farewell, and a hell of a good time. It was difficult, because several times, looking at him, I burst into tears and he tried to comfort me, which was completely backwards. I wanted to celebrate his life, not dwell with morbid anticipation on his death.

  On his perfect day, I let the other two dogs outside and cooked Stanley a sirloin steak for lunch, feeding it to him in big, fragrant chunks. He couldn’t believe his luck. I gave him three giant beef-basted biscuits for dessert. Then we went out onto the mountaintop.

  Julius and Devon were lying beside each other staring out at the valley, a rare moment of calm for Devon, a premonition perhaps.

  I threw Stanley’s favorite mangled, blue, trapezoid-shaped ball, the one that bounced and jerked at crazy angles, and which he pursued with enormous enthusiasm, barks, pounces, and growls.

  This ball had a history. It had been around nearly as long as Stanley had, and he’d treasured it from the first. It had probably been retrieved a million times, in all sorts of weather and on every conceivable terrain.

  Once, he had chased it so intensely he plunged into a bush and got a sliver of wood stuck in his eye. I had to rush him to a nearby animal emergency center to have the splinter safely removed. As soon as he recovered, he went back to the bush and got his ball. Another time the ball got lost in a snowdrift in a park. A painstaking search by both dogs, our entire family, and several neighborhood volunteers failed to locate it. But as spring approached and the snow cover diminished, Stanley went back and dug it out.

  One of his quirks was a fondness for leaning over storm sewers holding a ball and dropping it in with glee. I’d shout, but couldn’t quite seem to convince him that this meant losing his beloved ball.

  Whether he was being perverse or somehow driven by instinct, we lost many balls down many sewers. I tried to protect this favored blue ball—now pockmarked, misshapen, and disgusting—by not throwing it near sewer openings.

  But one winter morning I forgot, and Stanley proudly walked to the edge of the sidewalk, leaned over the sewer entrance (one of my theories was that he was looking for raccoons and other creatures that lived therein), and dropped this ancient blue ball. It bounced on the grate and I tried to grab it as it ricocheted into the street, off the sewer entrance, back onto the sidewalk, and then—plop—down into the sewer. Stanley looked shocked, crestfallen.

  Every day, every time we walked past that sewer, he would lean over, then turn and look at me beseechingly. But there was nothing I could do. To make the loss more painful, I couldn’t buy him a replacement; the ball was no longer being manufactured. Stanley mourned.

  But months later, during a fierce early-morning spring rainstorm, I was walking the boys and saw Stanley up ahead at the sewer entrance, barking and wagging ecstatically. I hurried over to the sewer and, to my amazement, saw the blue ball bobbing up and down in the murky water.

  It had evidently been sitting down in the sewer well all these months. Days of heavy downpours had raised it close to street level, though it was still several feet down.

  Stanley was overjoyed, looking at the ball, then at me. “It’s in the sewer, Stanley,” I said, pleading. “It’s got to be disgusting. And it’s freezing.” But I knew. We all knew.

  Egged on by his joyous yelps, I reached down with the pooper-scooper to try and snare the ball. The tool wasn’t long enough, though, and the ball was bouncing crazily up and down, just out of reach.

  Sighing and cursing, I lay down on the asphalt, protected only by my raincoat, and fished through the sewer grate with the scooper, water pouring over me. I didn’t even want to think about what might
be in the water.

  Opening and closing the scooper to trap the ball, I came close several times, but whenever I thought I’d caught the damned thing, it would slip out. Stanley was intensely, expectantly focused on this rescue. Julius sat down in the rain and looked at me pityingly. I might be nuts, but he would sit it out with me.

  I don’t know how long I lay on that grate in the rain, but I suddenly became conscious of a car speeding in our direction, pulling up alongside me. I was also suddenly aware of flashing red lights. I lifted my head and saw a police cruiser and, coming up the street from the opposite direction, a unit of the town’s volunteer ambulance corps. A door opened quickly and I was looking at a patrolman’s boots.

  “Hey there,” said the officer.

  “Morning,” I said, my arms still extended into the sewer with the scooper. Was this illegal? I wondered.

  At that moment, I got the ball! Julius came over to greet the officer—they were both friendly, I told him—but Stanley’s eyes remained riveted on the ball.

  “Mister, you okay?” asked the officer after a moment.

  I couldn’t let go of the ball now, after all this. I was trying the difficult maneuver of lifting it up and onto the street—it wasn’t easy from this angle.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?” The ambulance had stopped a few yards away. “The dogs are friendly,” I yelled as two paramedics hopped out and ran to me.

  “Well, sir,” the cop went on conversationally, “it’s pouring, and it’s six-thirty in the morning and you’re lying on a sewer grate in the street.”

  I climbed to my knees triumphantly, with the scooper and—tada!—the ball. I kept the ball in the pooper-scooper, though. No way anybody was going to touch it until it had been boiled for half an hour.

  “My dog lost his favorite ball,” I explained meekly. The cop was speechless. I could only imagine how much he’d enjoy replaying this to the guys back at the station. For that matter, Paula would have a few choice words when she saw my clothes and coat.