Dog Years

On a raw morning two days after Christmas, snow drifting out of a milky sky, I steered my Honda Fit onto U.S. 33 toward downtown Buffalo and an appointment I didn’t want to keep.

My wife and I were taking our 14-year-old dog, Daisy, to the vet's office. We would return home without her.

“I hate this,” I said.

“I know,” Laurie said.

Neither of us risked saying anything else.How merciful ignorance. Rarely have I known I was doing a thing for the last time as I was doing it, and thank you God. Life would be unbearable if we recognized every ending for what it was.

Take our sons, for example. Now both in college, Sawyer and Jacob loved to go sledding when they were little, and had ample opportunity to do so, for not only did we live in snowy Buffalo but our house was a scant block from a sledding hill. Jacob’s sledding expeditions are seared into my memory for the way he invariably ran home sobbing and violently shaking his near-frostbitten hands because he hadn't been able to tear himself away from the hill until he was all but frozen. And yet I couldn't tell you when he did that for the final time, have no memory stamped as such, could not point to a specific day on the calendar and say that’s when our son outgrew sledding on his way to outgrowing home. That vagueness smudges away like an eraser the unforgiving lines of reality.

This, though -- this final ride to the vet's office with Daisy: I remember it with crystalline pain and a time stamp. That morning we had known and loved Daisy for nine years, which made her -- what? 12? 13? Her age we didn't know with any precision because the rescue league couldn't tell us and neither could the vet; Daisy was from a kill shelter in Bowling Green, Kentucky, so her origins were fuzzy.

Memories may keep alive for a time the things we love, but they kill us bit by bit, whittling down our hearts even as they feed our souls because each time we recall something is one more brick in our unremembering of it

Not being sure of Daisy’s age was a source of vague discomfiture from the beginning. A dog year is worth six or seven human years, they say, and as the years passed and Daisy's eyes became cloudy and her chin gray and her movements labored, not being sure of her age started to haunt us. How much longer we had with her, the question that weighs on most every dog owner, was more freighted by that lost year.

Daisy’s age wasn’t the only puzzle we confronted upon adopting her. There was also the mystery of her name. A pug-chihuahua mix, Daisy came with papers that said her name was Dolly and a collar tag that said Peanut. Our older son, Sawyer, who then was 10, took no time coming up with a solution.Sawyer was our animal-namer, the one who would bestow on a gray cat we were to adopt a couple years later the name Vince, for Vince Lombardi.

Sawyer is a Packers fan. No Packer has ever been a girl, though, so it was into some other reserve of naming ideas that Sawyer reached to come up with a moniker for our new dog that spring, the spring of 2013. Let’s call her Daisy, he said. So Daisy she was.The name suited her well. She wasn’t the loveliest or showiest flower in the garden, but she was plenty beautiful to us.

One sunny day a few years back, as I was taking her for her afternoon walk, I pulled my phone out and shot a photo of our shadows together on the sidewalk beside a patch of daisies. To look at that photo now is not to see us, because we are not there; it is to imagine us.

Among my most heartbreaking "last time" memories of Daisy is the final time I took her for a walk, on the evening before we took her to the vet. It was a typically pale and washed-out Buffalo winter day, very still, the light fading, and Daisy didn't want to walk; she just wanted to stand staring into the distance at things I couldn't see.

As Laurie and I waited for the veterinarian to come into the room that morning, I needed something to take my mind off the blue-blanketed exam table and what would happen on it. A range of possibilities occurred to me. One was to try remembering in detail our wedding day, 21 years before, in Chicago. Another was to study a wall diagram of a dog’s inner ear. I needed something, anything, to transport or distract me, to make me feel better or at least to occupy my mind enough to keep me together. Already I couldn’t see the words of the Byron poem I’d brought as prayer for the tired, old dog I held in my arms, and I wouldn’t have been able to say them if I had.

“Read this?” I asked Laurie.

Taking the crumpled paper from my hand, she gently gave voice to the words there.

"Farewell to our Daisy,"who possessed beauty without vanity,"strength without insolence,"courage without ferocity,"and all the virtues of man without his vices."

“Did you write this?” Laurie asked.

I lied and said I had because that required only one word: yes. Saying "No, it’s from a Byron poem" was too much.

The first time we saw Daisy, courtesy of the rescue league that blessed us with her, she came trotting out of a back room off the rescue league's office, beelined straight toward the four of us, and sat right by our feet as if to say, “Here I am. So when are we going home?” Now, Daisy seemed to be telling us it was time for her to go to a different home, a greater home, a kinder home, kinder even than the one we gave her. She told us, in the way that dogs do, that it was time for her to leave us.

And so we waited for the vet, who was running late.Ten-thirty came and went. Then 10:35 and 10:40. On some level hoping selfishly that the waiting would never end, Laurie and I passed the time looking at a big, illustrated poster of dog breeds. We found pugs. We found Pekinese. We found pit bulls, which Laurie was surprised to see grouped with terriers.

And then the vet was knocking at the door and I was laying Daisy on the blue blanket.

Memories of our time with her came flooding back. Memories of her fiercely shaking her toy duck, its legs flip-flopping back and forth around her head. Of her standing in the kitchen doorway each morning, patiently waiting for me to feed the cats before I fed her. Of how she loved lying with me in the big red recliner in the living room on Friday nights as Laurie and I watched TV.

Let’s be honest. Memories may keep alive for a time the things we love, but they kill us bit by bit, whittling down our hearts even as they feed our souls because each time we recall something is one more brick in our unremembering of it, the gradual fuzzing of the mental images until one day we realize we've lost the precise contours of a face or the color of someone's eyes.

Now here was the final memory. The vet had finished his work and Daisy was gone. Some of her nerve endings got the news late, and one of her hind feet twitched for maybe five or 10 seconds – back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I asked the vet about it, worried that maybe he hadn’t given her enough of the death serum and she was lingering and in pain. He reassured me. That’s not uncommon, he said. She has passed.

But, for a fleeting moment, the lower part of that leg kept kicking, just like it used to when, sleeping in the big red recliner, that little dog of mine dreamed of running free through some vast, open field only she could see. Dreamed of running, and running, and running.