There are times I think my old dog could live on for another two or three years just by way of inertia. And then there are times like this weekend. Slow at the best of times these days, his pace was positively glacial on Saturday and Sunday. We heard a yelp from the backyard Saturday night, late: he had fallen on the lawn. His back legs, atrophied after years of arthritic pain, simply could not push him back up off the ground.
Becky went out to rescue him.
We have three concrete steps between the sidewalk and our porch. Each morning he cascades down them, usually landing on his feet. Each morning he hesitates at the bottom when we return. I stand on the porch above him. He looks me in the eye, plangent. I crouch and shout boisterous encouragement into his deaf ears. You can do it! Just three steps! That’s right! Come on, Zeke! and then he hoists himself onto the porch to fervent praise.
Each morning I wonder if the previous day will prove to be his last successful unassisted ascent. I am looking at ramps.
The picture above was taken twelve years ago. Zeke was already a mature dog. He has outlived generations of friends since then. Those back legs once pushed him up four feet of smooth cliff face. His desire to be good was the only thing that kept him off our kitchen counters.
Those legs betray him now. They give out and he looks at me. He looks at me, and I wish I could take his pain on as my own, to relax those whiskered eyebrows and feel the calcinated ache in my own hips, just as I will take on for him that last pain of surviving him. But I cannot soothe him and he stumbles downhill to the park, still distracted by the squirrel smells and the blowing leaves, and when he misses the curb and falters he looks at me again, a dazzled sadness. And then he forgets and the smile comes over him again and he tries to run, and then the pain again.
I know that look. It is the look he gave me when he had failed me, strewn trash or pissed the rug, when he expected disappointed scolding. My dropping to my knees to rough his fur and kiss him has not stemmed it. He has no more to prove to me: he is a good dog irrevocably. I kiss him though it does not reassure him.
On the same roll of film as the shot above is one of Zeke halfway through a sprint, the grassy field behind him but a blur, a wild smile on his face, no feet on the ground. He never touched the ground much except to sleep, and could lose any dog that chased him, and turn and taunt and run behind the tree again, his feet but light and temporary on the earth.
Damn you Chris, crying’s not work safe. (But then I am on lunch hour.)
Just reading The Philosopher’s Dog - by Raymond Gaita -which deals with this very topic. Chase it up if you haven’t read it.
Oh zekey. :(
I miss him. :(
I’m sorry to hear about this, Chris.
I lost a beloved cat a few years ago—she was hit by a car the day after I finished the first full draft of my dissertation. There had been days while I was in the midst of writing that she was the only living creature I interacted with. I was heartbroken and didn’t know how to deal with the grief, so I went looking for books on pet bereavement—it’s not a topic a lot of people take seriously. But I know that for people who really love their pets, it’s a terrible, terrible loss.
Chris,
You are good man, standing by your “boy.”
BB
“he is a good dog irrevocably.” I love that line.
How much does Zeke weigh? We carried Tober up and down any stairs with more than one steps for I can’t even remember how long. He would get a “hey, what’s going on here, do you have to do this?” look on his face. and now the tears are coming again for me.
We built a very simple ramp for our old collie (unfortunately, she’s now passed on). I just used a couple of 2x10 planks, fastened together with cross sticks as braces beneath. I covered the whole thing with a strip of that tacky looking artificial turf stuff to make it easy for my dog’s feet to grip. We had plenty of room for a long ramp, so I made it with a pretty easy grade. The whole thing can just be lifted away from the steps if I want to put it out of sight any time. Sure made my dog’s last couple of years a lot nicer - just sort of removed a barrier that probably made her feel depressed every time she came to it. In fact, she actually looked happy the first time she tried it out and she started going out to the yard a lot more often after I put the ramp in place. At the most, it took me an hour or so to build. Just sorry i didn’t make it a year or so sooner. Anyhow, I just left it in place because I figure stairs are hard on a dog’s legs and my younger collie seems to prefer the ramp over the stairs—she zips up and down it all the time and avoids the steps—so, what the heck, why change things?
I occasionally looked after an aging arthritic senile crippled epileptic near-deaf near-blind and frequently incontinent dog while his owners worked 16 hour shifts or took holiday. I moved in. {They got loving care for the dog, I got a dog.}
The owners employed a numbers of strategies the last year or so to help Bruno get along.
Acupuncture really helped. He had less stiffness and therefore more mobility. They found a specialist in animal physio for that, and in between sessions we massaged the dog’s hind quarters (esp.) daily, and sometimes twice a day.
{Did I get the feeling he was faking it to get the massage? <lol>
Near the end, I held him up as he staggered to his bowls a few steps away which were on a stand so he didn’t have to bend over. Then came the day I had to put the bowls between his front legs. Then one day, he couldn’t do more than lift his head and lick my hand, so that night they took him to the vet.
He didn’t really have any horrible untreated disease. He was just old. Sixteen is very old for a lab.
Keep on Chris. Keep on.
Simply beautiful. {{{{{{{{{{ Zeke }}}}}}}}}
My old yellow-shepherd dog Ford still insisted on coming along with me on horseback rides at nearly 15. I had a long, leggy thoroughbred mare at the time who walked almost as fast as some horses trot. I’d slow her down as much as I could to accomodate my dear old dog, who’d clocked some serious trail miles with me over a lifetime. Eventually, I had to get off of the horse, and dog, thoroughbred, and I would all walk the trails together. Ford still thought he was coming with me for a ride, which made him happy, and that’s really all that mattered at the time.
Lovely post.
Our dogs live in the garage, and so we had a doggie door for them to enter. And outside the doggie door, a doggie deck made of oak from an old pallet, nailed to 2X4’s stretched between some 4X4’s. Celie, our lab couldn’t make the 15 inch leap to the deck, so we built her a ramp. It worked for as long as she lasted (about 2 more years till she was almost 16). She was a great trail dog as well, and loved to be with us on hikes or when we saddled up the horses. I think she inspired the two dogs we now have. They go crazy when they see us hook up to the trailer—-time for a trail ride.
Indeed, crying is most inconvenient right before I head off for a lecture…
I love your Zeke pieces. He’s such a character and so lucky to have you. You’re a grand old pair.
Is Zeke on any pain meds - there are several that are very effective for dogs, with not bad side effects?
Just don’t want a loyal old dog to suffer needlessly.
There’s nothing like a beloved dog. I nursed my old dog through congestive heart failure for the last five months of her life. Some days I thought she was a goner, then the next day she’d be running around wagging her tail. It got harder to watch her having trouble breathing, not being able to do all the things she loved to do. But she still seemed to have an awful lot of joy left until the end, and a will to go on. She died peacefully at home. She had a good life. I’m not much sad any more, just grateful for the good years and all the joy she brought me. Sounds like you’ll have much joy to remember with Zeke whenever his time comes. The final months, weeks, years, are the most precious.
I looked through the Flickr site to see if you have posted the one of him with his feet off the ground. I can imagine it pretty well, I think.
Sat here for twenty minutes trying to think of something good to say, Chris.
...
Zeke’s a good lad. I’m glad you two found each other. You were both SO lucky.
We tend to think a Great Love can only happen between a man and a woman. But we think that only because those are the stories that get told and retold in our homocentric society. We learn only that one mental model.
But sometimes, for people of rare mind and receptive heart, a Great Love can happen between a boy and his dog. *
The pain you feel is the price tag for this magnitude of love. It would hurt less only if you loved less. The pain says something good about you both ... and I’m convinced that kind of good radiates out from you, in a totally non-mystical sense, and enhances the world around you.
I think, from my own experiences with Ranger and Tito, that the love lasts longer than the pain. The pain ends; the love goes on.
Still, I’m sorry you, and Zeke, have to go through this.
I wish ...
...
(* Yes, of course: or a girl // or a cat, horse, etc.)
xoxoxo zeke
Thanks so much, everyone.
To answer a few of the questions that have piled up:
Zeke is on some pain medication, though we’ve been through a few different courses. Some of the usual methods wound up giving him ulcers, and others didn’t work. Right now he’s on a regimen of maalox-coated aspirin with Tagamet, and an injection of Adequan every week.
Zeke weighs just under 50 pounds, in part because he’s always been a slightly fussy eater. For a dog, I mean: not too many fussy eaters will chow down on the compost pile. But he gets bored with the same food, and stops eating it. We also suspect he might have some greyhound in him, from the shape of his head and chest and the way in which he runs. Used to run. So lifting him up a couple flights of stairs would be no problem.
And I’m thinking about where the ramp goes, because the sooner I get it built, I think, the longer Zeke will be able to go up stairs when he wants to. Minimizing the wear and tear can only help. I think the last stair-climb is only a month or two away otherwise.
hi Chris -
take care, you’re doing great and I’m sure Zeke appreciates it. it’s so hard when those we love start getting old and/or ill. my experience was that the hard part is the doublethink caused by trying as hard as you can to think up and do all you can to make things better while trying to live with and accept the knowledge that you can’t ultimately solve the problem.
best wishes
Andi
I love Zeke
Hey, is that dog part wolf?