this is a story about a giant geriatric dog reaching the end of her life. it’s told in a rather facetious manner, so it might make you mad. i feel better after writing it though, so i guess that’s a thing.
so, let me tell you about how my dog died, because that was by far the most real estate in the twilight zone zipcode i’ve ever purchased.
we’ll skip a lot of backstory and start sometime in early 2010, in which i came into possession of an old dog the size of a small donkey. the vet i took her to guessed her to be around nine or ten by her teeth and whatever dog voodoo veterinarians perform to determine age. she was mostly white and absolutely fluffy, and if the humidity was over 40%, the fur on her ears would crimp and curl like Shirley Temple.
her dumps were the size of russet potatoes. her name was princess.
i advise everyone in the universe to think twice about what you name your pet, because screeching PRINCESS, DON’T YOU FUCKING EAT THAT at the top of your lungs down the street (where there’s also this really fantastic echo) makes it exceedingly difficult to keep up a classy image such that you know you never really had but like to occasionally think you might pull off and fool the masses as long as you never open your mouth and say things like ‘princess don’t you fucking eat that.’
princess came home with me because i have land, and she was a big ol dog, and i’d like to think this is a pretty decent place to die, what with all the trees and wildflowers and what have you. better than an apartment, anyhow. i had delusions of grandeur – a majestic white cloud that would snuffle around my yard and keep the burglars away by virtue of being a large thing with teeth.
as it turns out, this giant-ass dog was afraid of pretty much everything. thunder was a problem. airplanes. school buses. garbage trucks. car doors slamming too hard. i saw her get spooked by a chicken one time. and by far, she was so gun-shy she’d nearly rip my shoulder out of its socket to go home and hide in the closet.
so princess, the 100 pound great pyrenees mix, remained an inside dog. now, land i have; living space is …not quite as plentiful. indoor life was chaotic in its own way: my computer chair wheels ate a lot of her tail fur. when she stood up under the dining table, she’d hit her head and the dishes would jingle. she was balls to the wall TERRIFIED of the tiny ding of my toaster oven – like she would wake from a dead sleep and pee a fucking river across the den.
she also had an intense distrust for ceiling fans???? idk
anyway, in summary of the last five years of princess’s life, i learned: her favorite treat was her own poop, but she’d settle for the shit in the litter box if no one else was home. trimming her claws required wire cutters. we lost a rug to some really hellacious stains after making the mistake of buying these really poisonous jerky treats from Costco (tl;dr, don’t buy any treats from china like, ever). hip problems did not stop her from nabbing chicken guts from the trash can. lower spine deterioration did not stop her from whomp-whomping outside for a walk with Boy. and even when the rest of her body gave up, nothing stopped her from eating the shitty canned Pedigree instead of the expensive shit we always bought her, that asshole.
so, let me tell you about how my dog died, because that was by far the most real estate in the twilight zone zipcode i’ve ever purchased.
the deciding of where/how to put your pet to sleep is a gut-churning event in itself, which is something we knew was coming but just didn’t know…. when??? and then that was suddenly decided for us when princess couldn’t make it home after her walk, and thereafter just sprawled in the mud under the porch and looked at us like ‘seriously? i’m done. i ain’t going out there, aaaaand you’re crazy,’ followed by a big donkey-sized sigh of irritation.
this is almost precisely what one of my relatives did the night before he died, so i was like, ‘oh. well then. we’ll see what we can do and get back to you on that.’
and like, we did what we could for her that night and i dunno about Boy, but i was hoping she would just peacefully go in her sleep and that would be that. unfortunately, things very rarely go that way.
like all that expensive blue buffalo food and joint medication and whatever must have done something for her, because she was a massive fifteen year old dog and was painfully coherent. she just couldn’t (and wouldn’t) get up, and was very annoyed by flies and baby grasshoppers having a party in her fur.
anyway, we’re now faced with the ‘planning your dog’s death’ meeting (and during this, we had company visiting, who had the misfortune to experience our real southern hospitality).
our options were as follows:
- wait for her to magically die
- take her to the vet and put her down
- or do the Old Yeller thing
the first option wasn’t really working out. she was miserable, making a mess of herself, and in pain. waiting for her brain to catch up with the rest of her deteriorated body was just, you know, kinda fucked up a little
the second option was tricky. thing is, trying to transport a giant incontinent dog with hip and back pain from the middle of cow-country-nowhere in a volkswagen jetta to the one veterinarian in town didn’t sound like a very solid plan. i mean sure, anything is doable with enough manpower, but for the sake of the dog we just didn’t want to haul her down the backroads to die in a place she hated, if she even survived the stress of rolling around the folded back seat/trunk like she did that one time we miscalculated a trip to the dog wash.
option three was to take her out back and take care of her ourselves, which admittedly might be a horrific concept to a lot of people, but it’s a thing, and in dire situations is a way to put a creature out of its painful misery in a loud hurry.
lbr though, because shit, *i* wasn’t gonna shoot her –i’m not gonna shoot ANYTHING that isn’t about to eat my face– and you could see that wince of the soul when Boy considered the option. and also, what a shitty way to go: you’re a dog who is absolutely terrified of guns, and that’s how you go out? that’s fucked. none of us wanted that.
luckily, the internet exists. Boy found a ‘local’ team that will drive out to your house, sedate, and euthanize your pet all in the convenience of your own home, like some kind of handy fucking assassination service, i guess. so… that’s what we went with. it was pricey, and even more so because we are way out of their service area (it was another 50 bucks to drive to our county), but, you know. seemed less stressful for all parties. Boy had been the one to set up the appointment over the phone, so i didn’t know much about the folks– just that they’d help with princess and no one had to shoot anybody. win-win.
i was not, however, expecting the circus that showed up. not saying it wasn’t worth it, but wow, i’m still not even sure what took place was actually real.
so saturday afternoon a van pulls into the gravel driveway and two people in scrubs hesitantly peer at the dilapidated wreck that is the old add-on room that is slowly falling off my trailer like the zombie apocalypse has already come and gone. you could tell they were out of their element. they probably expected one of those fancy ‘country living’ mansions with like hired gardeners and trimmed topiaries. instead, they got us.
they find Boy and princess, and i get the checkbook. i come back outside and learn that they are waiting on a third party, who was the actual veterinarian, so ..idefk who these other two people were supposed to be. once they were out of earshot, Boy pats princess’s head and looks to me and says ‘no wonder it’s so expensive, we have to pay three of them >___>’)
anyway, this is when i find out i must make the check out to a company whose name i will not say aloud, but suffice to say was so painfully cheesy that for a good long moment, i thought this lady in scrubs was pullin my leg. like i thought this was some weird homestuck-irony-level joke, in which something absolutely ridiculous has become so bad that it turned inside out and a thing unto itself to be used legitimately and without pretext, and this name is now imprinted in the carbon copy of my checkbook for the rest of my foreseeable life.
that being said, i was trying to not be emotional paying for my dog’s death, so thankfully i did not have the spare mental resources to say anything stupid such as, “seriously? ….are you serious?”. because she was. absolutely, too-much-mascara-but-refusing-to-acknowledge-it, ‘i’d like to say a doggy prayer for your baby’ serious.
and now we reach another one of those recurring moments in life where you just can’t script something this weird. there are greater forces at work, here. there is no way on earth i could have ever constructed a scenario in which three complete strangers (number 3 found her way here finally) would circle around me, Boy, and princess and pray for her to reach some great heavenly field in which to romp and play, and that when we, as her owners, died, we would be reunited in death, ALL in what i’m pretty sure was mostly iambic pentameter with rhyming couplets.
and like, i’m trying to be the strong southern girl and not let snot drip out of my nose and weep like an infant, and then this prayer circle happens in our tool shed because that’s like the only non-muddy surface on our property right now, and half of me is attempting to not roll my eyes in a confused, baffled outrage because i’m sure these smooth operators say this at all the dog funerals, and the other half is like unwillingly listening to the words and it’s just making me cry like i’m twelve despite the Sanrio cotton candy acid trip afterlife they’re describing. and the lady with the mascara is patting my backfat and i want to screech DON’T TOUCH ME but i don’t say anything because i just want the freaky shakespearean dog eulogy to be over so they can take my money and leave.
and sometime, during this batshit collision of emotions, my dog dies very quietly in her sedation-induced sleep. which, all things considered, was the most i could have asked for, really.
they leave (and mascara lady asks me to email her some pictures of princess so she can make a memorial on their company website???). we cart her out to the pasture and lower her into a hole that was a little too short for her, so she ended slightly curled up inside with her paw over her nose, which is how she always slept around my computer chair in the first place. we buried her. i planted a pretty salvia at the grave.
now i’m faced with trying to figure out what i should email this lady. she said to send some pictures and write about happy memories, but i don’t think she meant ‘all the times you caught your dog eating her own poo’.
i guess this service was originally meant for people who are admittedly a lot more attached to their animals than i am. like i got the feeling that not only was their prayer circle designed for grieving owners, but also for the employees themselves? like the one dude sounded kinda choked up while he was bustin out the rhymes.
i mean, don’t get me wrong. i loved my dog. but i’m also aware that creatures, human or otherwise, die, and that’s a thing i’m okay with. i don’t particularly need a rhyming eulogy to be able to let go, but hey, it’s totally okay if other people do, and maybe those folks were as baffled with us as we were with them.
either way, princess did the thing she was brought here to do, which was to live the end of her days with cat litter caked on the end of her nose like a crackhead and smelling wildflowers and licking snow. RIP, you brat. i’ll do my best to keep your salvia alive. i never really liked your name, but really it’s only because mine means ‘princess’ too.
part-time recluse 