The End: Part Two

November 18, 2011: Molly's Party

On the last night of Molly's life, Spencer Harrison, Jennifer Backler, Sylvia Davis, Jay Gemmil, John Hutchison, Jane Saracino and Debra Appleton all came by to say goodbye.

Spencer brought people food (chicken and cheese sauce) and Molly believed she had already died and gone to heaven. We watched for signs of barfing, but there were none.

Molly always liked Jay best, and settled next to him...

... when she wasn't trying to get to the food on the coffee table.

Then she grew weary of the festivities and went to bed as a bit of a hint to the guests.

November 19, 2011: Molly's Last Day

I felt conflicted at the vets the week before when he told me Molly could live another year or two. That conflict raged anew on several fronts the day we put her down.

There were two tough moments for me before we even got to the vet. Getting ready to go, I was coming down the stairs to the dining room and felt a powerful aversion to carrying through what we'd decided to do. "Don't do it!" said something inside of me. And something else said, "No, she's not going to get better, she's not going to suddenly start having fun again. Do it."

The other moment was when I tugged on her bed to bring it closer so I could get her into her harness.  Molly leaned back - she didn't want to go. That just killed me.

Brent, reliable to the very last walk, arrived at 8:15 on the dot. He carried Molly, and Bruce and I walked on either side of him, the two blocks to the vet's. Twenty feet from the door, he put Molly down on the ground. She had a light-coloured goopy poo thanks to the rich food she'd had the night before.

For the last time in my life, I cleaned up after my dog with a plastic baggie.

Molly hung back at the door to the vet's office and one of us - I can't recall who - picked her up and carried her in.

At the counter was a middle aged couple with a nice little dog. They saw Molly and smiled and said "aw..." and then they saw our faces and they didn't say anything more.

The vet ushered us into a small, comfortably appointed room. He explained what he was going to do, something about a catheter. I wasn't really paying attention because I was worried about whose lap Molly should be in when it happened. I thought Bruce's lap would be better than mine because she liked him best and I wanted her to be most comfortable and least anxious at the moment when it happened and I got tangled up in the blanket the vet had given me and I was having trouble standing up and handing Molly to Bruce and I felt a little dizzy and had to lean against the wall and oh god I just wanted this to be over but oh god I didn't want it to happen at all.

I finally settled down standing across from the small couch where Bruce and Brent were seated, with Molly on Bruce's lap. The vet uncapped the syringe and I wanted to yell "stop!" For sixteen years I had protected Molly's life. Part of me reeled in disbelief and horror that I could possibly have ordered her death.

I know the moment when Molly died because I felt it in my own body. I watched the vet's hands and saw the plunger on the syringe move and felt a little separated from what was going on because Brent had bent his head down to be close to Molly so I couldn't see her at all and then I felt a pain in my heart as though something that had been there for a long time was suddenly gone. 

And then I started to cry.

*******

I knew from the first "look at the cute doggie" commotion Molly caused that we had to share her. 

This is Molly's last gift to the world.

Thanks for reading this short tale about my small dog. I have another blog, This Week's Picture, that started in 2004 as emails about Molly. In 2012, after Molly was gone, I began posting weekly, not about Molly, but kind of in memory of her. You can find it here.

Review: Favourite Things

I need a little more time before I describe Molly's very last day. Let's review the basics of Molly's favourite things.

She enjoyed her meals (with thanks to the Internet, Gary Larson, this anonymous woman and the two JRTs in the background for this perfect rendition of her most favourite thing).

Molly loved to play.

She loved a big basket of dryer-fresh laundry. She'd dive into it to soak up the heat. She'd get so warm she'd start to pant.

She loved sitting in the sun.

She loved sleeping in our bed. 

She loved hunting squirrels in the tree tops from the comfort of Bruce's lap. 

She was always up for a nap.

Now, back to the end.

The End: Part One

By the end of September 2011, Molly's cough, her diminished senses, and the impending winter weighed heavily on me. I was genuinely worried about how she might fare through another four or five months of snow and sub-zero temperatures. Her cough was not getting better and never would. She didn't seem to be suffering, but dogs don't let on.

On the other side of the exact same coin, I was happy with how otherwise healthy Molly still seemed to be at her tremendous age (112 people years). Long ago I'd met a man who had an eighteen-year-old dachshund. It was fresh out of teeth, but otherwise seemed like a pretty OK little dog. One small part of me then formed the ambition that my dog could probably live that long and have a few more teeth left to boot.

I'm happy to say that ambition carried no weight whatsoever in the events related here.

With her cough as the ostensible reason, I took Molly to the veterinarian on Remembrance Day, 2011. As a civil servant, I get the day off and it has, over the years, become the day when I do important things, such as meet with my financial advisor or start to make the decision to put my dog down.

I was completely dissatisfied with the care Molly was getting from the vets we'd used since we'd brought her home as a puppy. I went to a new place on the ground level of the old Sears warehouse - long since converted to condos - on Mutual Street. 

The vet was a nice young man. I told him about Molly's cough. While we talked, Molly walked around and around and around the perimeter of the small office, nose down, seemingly oblivious.

I still remember feeling ridiculously pleased when the vet said that we must have taken very good care of Molly.

When I asked him about whether he thought she might be at that point, he said her heart and lungs sounded healthy and strong and that she could probably live another year or two.

I still remember feeling deeply conflicted when he said that. 

The vet seemed to notice. He said, "Write up a list of all the things she liked to do and that made her happy - and write a list of what she does now. That might help you decide."

Then we talked some more about the cough. There was no cure, but there was a treatment. It was $60 for a week's worth and had to be administered three times a day, forever. He would also have to make a special order to have it brought in.

I said, sure, order some in.

I hooked my blind, deaf, little dog - still circling the vet's office - back onto her leash.

The vet said, "You know, the literature's still not very strong on this, but there's a growing hypothesis about dementia in dogs - and Molly might be showing some signs of that."

Right. So I left the vet's office with my blind, deaf, demented little dog and went home to mull things over.

I never physically wrote down the list of things the dog liked to do, but this blog has mentioned many of them. Molly loved to play, chase squirrels up trees in parks, go for long walks, attack the vacuum cleaner, meet new people, sleep on Bruce's lap, boss around other dogs, make a giant fuss over myriad things like changing the dining room table cloth and generally just be that high energy little super hero / 'toon we welcomed into our home so long ago and that she had been until, it seemed, just minutes before.

After more than sixteen years of life, Molly didn't play, couldn't hear, wouldn't go for long walks and lived a muffled, circumspect life with a cough that bedevilled her. And winter was coming.

These were the things I slept on. When I woke up the morning of the 12th, I said to Bruce, "I think we should put the dog down."

Bruce said OK.

I called the vet, cancelled the order for the treatment for the cough, and booked an appointment for first thing in the morning on Saturday, November 19, 2011.

I sent an e-mail out to all of Molly's friends and admirers, inviting them to one last visit before Molly went on to her next reward.

Finally, I called Brent, Molly's walker, and asked him if he would like to come with us that day. He said yes.

Before Molly's very last day, I like to remember some of the things she really enjoyed.