On grieving the death of a beloved dog

Two days ago, I made the hardest decision any dog person ever faces – ending the life of Lucy, the 12-year-old black lab who has been with me for nearly 9 years.

I’ve known this was coming for a couple of months. Back in June she was diagnosed with a cancer of an anal gland that had spread already to her lymph nodes. While we initially considered the idea of pursuing aggressive treatment in the form of surgery and/or chemotherapy, my very compassionate veterinarian helped me wrestle with options and come to the decision that the likelihood of adding a few more months of life was greatly outweighed by the prospect of putting Lucy through such difficult and painful treatments.  Instead we developed a plan for palliative care to see her through the final stage of her life.

But despite knowing that it was coming, it was still a horrible and painful decision and day when it finally happened.

Chapter 1: Lucy comes into my life

I hadn’t been planning to get another dog when Lucy came into my life. 

In November of 2007, I had just lost Rosa, my very dear 13-year-old black lab, who unexpectedly became suddenly ill with acute kidney disease and passed on within a few days.  Rosa had been with me through many adventures. I adopted her as a puppy who’d been rejected from guide dog school when I was living in Colorado. She went from having encounters with cougars in the Rockies, to many years living in the heart of Washington DC (where she delighted in chasing rats at the local park), to a final couple of years in the Vermont countryside. She was a wonderful, sweet-natured, highly adaptable, patient, and loving/lovable companion through many years of chaos and change in my life.  I was heartbroken from losing her, and certainly didn’t think I would be ready to have another dog in my life so quickly.  

But sometimes the world conspires against your plans and gives you something good in spite of your initial resistance.

A few days after Rosa’s death, my sister called me to ask if I would be willing to adopt Lucy.  She (Lucy) was living happily in South Carolina at the time, with my nephew’s girlfriend’s sister and her husband.  But they had recently had a baby, were living in a condo, and were finding it increasingly difficult to provide the attention and outdoor time that a dog like Lucy really needed.  They had made the difficult decision that they needed to give her up, but were having problems finding a good home for her. 

I was initially reluctant, not sure that I was ready to open my heart again to another dog, not sure that – after years of living with a relatively sedate older dog – I was really up to having a much livelier and more demanding young dog in my life.

But my sister was persistent – convinced that it would be good for me and good for Lucy – and I eventually relented.  Plans were made to connect over the Christmas/New Year’s holiday period when I would be visiting family and friends in DC/NOVA.

Actually picking her up was a strange experience.  Her family was vacationing at a ski resort in West Virginia, and we made the transfer at a parking lot of a restaurant near the resort.  The drive out from NOVA was harrowing – snow, ice and fog over winding mountains roads made it last twice as long as it should have. (And, remember, I’m a Vermonter and not very intimidated by winter driving conditions… but this was something very different).  

I know it was hard for her South Carolina family to give her up – while they knew it was the best thing for her, they still loved her dearly and were sad to see her go.  As her supplies were transferred into my car, and their goodbyes were said, both were crying (as I’m sure I would have been).  And, then, barely five minutes later, they were gone and Lucy and I were alone in my car.

I can’t imagine how Lucy felt at the time – suddenly alone with a stranger in a car for a 4 hour late night drive back to my sister’s house. It must have been confusing and frightening for her, and she was clearly nervous and shaking at times during the ride. I tried to comfort her, soft words and petting (although on those mountain roads under those circumstances, it was more two hands on the wheel, straight ahead driving than petting….)

After a day at my sister’s house in Virginia, we packed up and embarked on the 14 hour drive back to my place in northern Vermont.  While she had definitely relaxed a bit during the intervening day and we were busy bonding, I can’t imagine that another long car drive could have been anything other than extremely stressful for her. She spent most of it in her crate in the back of my SUV.  It was on that trip that we began the tradition of treating her to dollar menu hamburgers on long road trips – a tradition she clearly loved  and was insistent on - throughout her life.

By the time we got to the Hudson Valley of New York, there was snow on the ground at rest areas.  It was then that I realized that she had never really seen snow before – she was afraid of it, didn’t want to walk on it (instead only walking on the shoveled side walks and insisting that I use my foot to clear off some grass for her to do her business on).  How she was going to cope with life in the Vermont mountains ? (I live in a snow “hotspot” in a town next to the Jay Peak ski resort).  When we got home (very late at night), there was nearly 3 feet of snow on the ground, and I had to shovel a path into the house – one that she reluctantly followed in, walking daintily on the snow-covered walkway that I’d cleared.   The house was cold inside, as I started a fire in the woodstove to heat things up. 

Imagine Lucy arriving at 1 a.m. to a cold unfamiliar house after a 14 hour drive, accompanied by a guy she’d only met 2 days before, with the outside world even colder and covered by snow so deep that she could barely walk through it. I’m certain she could smell Rosa in the house (it had been only 1 ½ months).  It could only have been a frightening and strange experience for her.

Chapter 2: A dog’s life in the country

But she adapted quickly.  Within a couple of days, she was joyfully playing in the deep snow, rolling around in it and blazing paths through it (practically swimming through it, with her head barely above the surface in a maneuver I came to call “snorkeling”) as she went about exploring the yard and woods around the house.

Life was different for her from South Carolina in a number of other ways. 

There she had been crate trained.  At my place, she had free run of the entire house at all times, I was home with her all day, she would go with me in the car when I went shopping or ran errands (a r-i-d-e in the c-a-r being on the best things on the planet for her, getting her terribly excited at the mere mention of it up to her final days).

And instead of sleeping in the crate, she could relax on her doggie bed  on the living room floor (or on the sofa) for her afternoon naps and sleep in my bed at night.  She was a horrible bed hog, somehow finding a way for her short body to diagonally occupy an entire queen sized bed and making me shove her to the foot of it so my 6’3” frame could also sleep there.

We still kept her crate. I found a space for it under the stairs to the second floor where it remained.  The door was always open, and she would still sometimes go there when she was frightened by thunder or fireworks or gunshots during hunting season, feeling safe in her “cave.”  If she went to her crate, I always knew that she was frightened or upset about something.

In many ways, Lucy lived an ideal life for a dog. 

My house — a 100+ year old country schoolhouse converted to residential a while back — is on 11 acres in the Vermont mountains - with woods, streams and lots of room to explore.  

And a pond. It is hard to overstate the love that Lucy had for that pond. It was her personal swimming hole, a place she – quite literally – would do laps in, swimming back and forth endlessly from one end to another.  (After a couple of sightings of a large snapping turtle in the pond, I would nervously watch from shore and was relieved there was never a turtle/dog encounter…)

While there, she almost never had a leash on her – we’d take long walks all throughout the area.  About a mile from my house, down a small dirt road with almost no traffic, is a extraordinary spot – a century old covered bridge over a waterfall, situated on the ruins of what was once a water-powered “creamery” for processing the milk from the small dairy farms that used to be located in the area.

At the river…. 

While it sometimes is used as a swimming hole for locals on the summer weekends, most of the time we would have the place entirely to ourselves.  Lucy would spend hours swimming in the river, tromping through woods and endlessly making me throw her sticks into the water to retrieve. We would visit the bridge area at any time of year, she liked it as much in the dead of winter as on the hottest summer days.  She’d then finally tromp home – wet and exhausted.

But while she enjoyed the leash-free life in Vermont, she had no problem adapting to “civilization” when we’d go visit people who lived in places where dogs can’t run free.  Once or twice a year we’d pack up for that long 14 hour drive to NOVA, where my sister lives in the heart of planned suburbia.  (Usually it involved a trip to the dog groomer’s first, for a professional bath to wash off the accumulated good country smells….).  There she contented herself with long walks two or three times a day, with favorite recreation paths that she knew well and remembered over the years.  She understood that the rules were different when visiting…. leashes were mandatory, sofas were off-limits, and sleeping at night meant her doggie bed instead of on the human bed with me. (Although she became pretty good at sneaking onto my bed in the guest room after I’d gone to sleep…don’t ask, don’t tell…)

She had doggie friends – in the country almost everyone has a dog, and she became buddies and playmates with several neighbour dogs, seeking them out on walks to sniff and play.  But she also had some frightening encounters – once almost killed by a team of sled dogs that was out on a training run on the road in front of my house, twice attacked viciously at dog parks.  It made her a little timid around other dogs, although she usually got over that after a little bit of sniffing and assurances that it was okay.

But she really seemed to like people more than other dogs – especially children. And those children almost always were equally attracted to her.  She was unlimitedly cheerful and patient with kids, playing with them for hours on end.  She’d let them poke and prod and pull on her without objection, instead simply romping and excitedly joining in their games. And she seemed to be able to sense children who were afraid of dogs, and became calm and restrained in their presence as their parents would encourage them to gently pet her – she became the favourite of several dog shy children over the years whose first comfortable dog experience was with her.

Chapter 3: A dog saved me

But while I can talk about the kind of good life she had – the country dog able to live a life many dogs can only dream about with room to run and play, a 24/7 human companion, and more than a little spoiling – it is a bit harder to do justice to exactly what a huge difference she made in my life.

When I moved back to Vermont after nearly a decade in Washington DC (where I did intense AIDS policy work and undertook the exhausting challenges of running a national advocacy group) I was completely and totally burnt out and seeking a quiet retreat away from the craziness of that life.  The peace and quiet of the Vermont countryside was just the antidote I needed.

But what I didn’t realize at the time was that I was also soon become unable to work (or do much else) with the onset of a series of complex neurological (and related neuro-psych challenges) that would limit me both physically and mentally.  I had lined up many consulting contracts, but found myself unable to complete them (or take on other ones) for reasons I simply didn’t understand at the time.

So while the doctors searched for explanations, I struggled – exhausting my savings and finding myself increasingly unable to connect with the outside world. 

I honestly don’t know if I would have made it without Lucy through that period.  Not only did having a dog force me to go outside the house on a regular basis – she actually made me want to, no matter how difficult it seemed (physically and emotionally) at the time. She prevented me from wallowing inside and hiding from the world.  She didn’t care if it was a 20 below night in February or a perfect Vermont autumn day, she would drag me out.

Her long walks through the woods and down the road not only helped remind me of the beautiful world of nature that I loved, not only helped me get a much needed daily dose of vitamin D, not only helped make sure I got exercise and got off the couch --- it also forced me into social contact with the people who lived around me. Even if the quick conversations with neighbours and fellow dog owners never went into great depth, they were an absolute lifeline of human contact for me at a time when I was shying away from it.

And, when the thoughts of the demon “suicide” would briefly enter my mind, surprisingly it wasn’t thoughts of friends or family that pulled me back – it was thinking about Lucy and how unfair it would have been to her.

It was a very rough period. For almost six months, with my savings exhausted – I was broke. I sold an old car I’d inherited from my father to pay the utilities, did on-line surveys in order to get a $50 Walmart gift card to buy a few essentials, got small gifts (in the form of checks or gift cards) from my sister– but I basically had no income other than food stamps. 

Hanging on by that thread, I couldn’t afford dog food for Lucy.  But somehow we managed through – I would use my food stamps to shop for bargain meats for her, the marked down liver and cuts of chicken, pork, beef and lamb I would find at the local market that were at their expiration date and sold for a fraction of the normal price. I’d buy whatever was available, freeze it and then cook and mix it with rice, vegetables (whether frozen from my garden or on sale at the store) to keep her fed. I’d bake homemade treats for her with similar low-cost grocery ingredients – peanut butter, powdered milk, beef broth.  (That’s a habit that continued for the rest of her time with me…)  Somehow I managed to keep not only myself, but her, nourished and full on just a food stamp budget during that period. (When I hear of politicians and others taking the “food stamp challenge” for a week, I often ask myself if they could manage to live on a single person’s SNAP allotment for months and months, let alone also manage to feed a dog on it…) 

Remembering that period became particularly poignant to me when – during her last couple of days when she would no longer eat her dog food or treats – I cooked her steak and chicken and handfed her small pieces.  I broke down sobbing in the kitchen on Wednesday as I cooked chicken for her – her last meal it turned out -  remembering those food stamps days just a few years prior when I similarly cooked for her.

Eventually I was approved for Social Security disability and, while certainly not flush, our financial situation became more stable. She happily adapted back to dry dog food (although she certainly continued to enjoy some more than occasional – but healthy – pieces of human food).

As a single person, disabled, living alone in an isolated rural area, struggling with a tendency to shut myself off from people and the outside world, I simply cannot adequately convey what her companionship and unrequited love has meant during some of those difficult periods, and how she played such a central role in allowing me to eventually make it through to a brighter place.

Chapter 4:  Facing the bad news

During her life, Lucy had very few health problems. A few years ago she started gaining weight rapidly (ballooning from 80 pounds to 110). After convincing the vet that she wasn’t just another middle-aged Labrador beset by obesity due to too many treats and not enough activity, she was diagnosed with a thyroid condition and began treatment.  Within a few months, her weight (and activity) returned to normal and she became her old lively self.

But as all of us do, she eventually began showing signs of age.  Difficulty in climbing steps suggested that she was developing arthritis (not unusual for a lab of her age). This spring my vet decided that it would make sense to start her on some pain medications to deal with that pain, but first wanted to do some tests to determine what drugs she would be able to tolerate.

That started us down the line that ended on Thursday.  The first tests showed some liver function abnormalities (which ruled out one of the pain meds she was thinking of). The second tests confirmed that there were some abnormal readings.  In early June the vet suggested that it made sense to do some imaging to see what was going on to produce these results. Off we went to the specialty clinic 1 ½ hours away, where they handled her very professionally. Her stomach shaved for the procedure, in she went as I anxiously awaited outside.

We were soon re-united and the kind doctor came into a small room to explain the results.  The first thing they found was that she probably had Cushing’s disease – an adrenal condition that was probably the cause of the liver function results. While not good news, that would be treatable.  The second thing they found was much more serious – she had a mass in one of her anal glands and it had spread to surrounding lymph nodes. He explained the various treatment options, but was evasive when questioned about the prognosis with any of them.

Shell-shocked, Lucy and I loaded back in the car to go home – stopping on the way at one of her favourite dog parks where she could take a dip in a river on such a hot day. I nearly broke down crying when one of the other dog owners in the park asked me about her shaved stomach and, when I explained it was part of an imaging procedure, she said she hoped they didn’t find anything bad.   I could barely speak when I had to say that, unfortunately, they had.

Getting home, the research I immediately did on the internet was not promising about Lucy’s prognosis. Speaking with my local vet soon after, we made the painful decision to not pursue treatment but rather to develop a plan for palliative and hospice care for Lucy for whatever time she had left – giving her the comfort and love she deserved.

For most of the last 2 ½ months, Lucy was doing relatively well, even as she slowly declined. 

One of the most disconcerting symptoms had started to develop before her diagnosis, but progressed relatively rapidly as time went on.  She became increasing agitated and anxious at night – in what the vet explained was the canine equivalent of “sundown syndrome” sometimes seen in elderly patients with forms of dementia.

She would be calm and steady during the day, but once darkness fell she would become restless. She would need to go outside multiple times at night – often every hour or two. While she would need to go to the bathroom during these trips, she also seemed to want to simply be outside.  Fairly often she would decide that 3 a.m. was the perfect time for a swim in the pond – I’d watch from the shore as the small LED pendant around her neck allowed me to observe her swimming from one end of the pond to the other, back and forth for 15, 20, 25 minutes.  Other times she would go out and simply sit down on the grass and look up at the sky – I would take these opportunities to sit down next to her, talk softly and stroke her, until she was ready to go back inside.

We tried a number of approaches to deal with this, and none of them really worked. Upping her pain medications at night seemed to wind her up even more instead of being sedative (as did giving her Benadryl, which some vets had suggested as a tool). Carrying her upstairs to sleep on my bed didn’t work – she’d sleep for an hour or two, and then the night cycle would begin. Melatonin and a couple of herbal remedies may have lessened the night anxiety a bit, but I suspect they were more placebo for me than having much real impact on Lucy.

Needless to say, this was very disruptive to my sleep cycle. Eventually I adopted a different pattern – I would spend the night, dressed in pants and shirt, napping on the sofa or recliner in the living room. This made it easier to get up and go out with her, and being alongside her in the living room at night also seemed to lessen her anxiety a bit. Then we’d go out one last time around 5 when the sun was coming up, she’d come back in and sleep peacefully on her bed, and I would go upstairs and grab a few hours of actual sleep in my bed.   But the pattern was exhausting, and I basically didn’t get a complete night’s sleep for more than two months.

The other symptom that progressed was losing strength in her hind legs.  She could walk without difficulty or evident pain, but she lost the ability to walk up stairs (including the few steps that led from the ground outside to the deck where the door to the house was).  We soon became quite good at me standing behind her supporting her rear legs up each step. (In the final week or so, even that became difficult and I had to pick her up and carry her up the steps...)

It was during this period that I realized that I would have to cancel my plans to attend the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia (despite having just been elected as Democratic National Committeeman from Vermont). It clearly wasn’t possible for Lucy to spend a week at her normal boarding facility, and there was no way I could ask anyone else to provide her the degree of day-to-day care she was requiring.  So Lucy and I watched the convention together from home – and I absolutely knew that I was in the right place.  

But throughout and despite these challenges, she seemed to be doing remarkably well – she retained a vigourous appetite (and became quite insistent on eating large quantities of her favourite treats – which I happily indulged).  She still wanted to ride in the car for my daily trips to the post office, she still swam almost daily in the pond, still took short walks in the woods surrounding the house, still wanted to be outside regularly. Even if her energy level was lower (not unexpected with a 12 year old dog with invasive cancer), she did not appear to be suffering or experiencing notable pain until the final few days.

Chapter 5:  A quick ending

It was amazing to me how quickly the decline came at the end.  On Tuesday morning, she was out walking in the woods and swimming in the pond.  By Tuesday night, her walking became difficult…. she would go 10-15 feet, and then her rear legs would seemingly collapse under her, leaving her sitting on the ground unable to get up.  She wouldn’t eat anything Tuesday morning, but Tuesday evening I cooked her a bit of steak and was able to get her to eat it mixed with her regular dog food .  She began panting very heavily at times – especially after exertion.

Wednesday morning I called the vet and set up an appointment for Thursday to get her examined and see what was going on.  But as Wednesday went on it became clear she was in rapid decline. She refused to eat any food or treats, she could barely walk at all, and her panting was escalating into frequent attacks of very heavy breathing.  Wednesday night was miserable, as she developed bloody diarrhea and began hyperventilating. I managed to get her to eat a few pieces of chicken, but she wasn’t very interested and soon refused any more food. I didn’t expect her to make it through the night, and upped her pain medications to keep her comfortable.

Thursday morning I called the vet to let them know that the situation was getting dire, and that the visit would almost certainly be for euthanasia instead of just an assessment. She appeared to rally for a couple of hours early in the day  - sitting up, looking bright and perky (perhaps aided by even more painkillers).  I spent the morning hugging her, stroking her, telling her that I loved her and that it would soon be better.  I cried constantly.  I steeled myself for the horrible trip that lay ahead.  She soon fell back from the rally, her breathing turning into a desperate gasps for air that convulsed her entire body.  More pain killers, and she eventually settled into a quieter sleep.

The last morning of her life, she rallied briefly… time for a good-bye

I carried her to the car for the 25-minute drive to the vet. She briefly perked up again being in the front seat next to me, but by the time we got there, she was once more engaged in desperate gasps for air.  I carried her into the office, and the staff immediately saw the distress she was in and how desperate the situation was.  We loaded her on a stretcher and rushed her back to an operating table where we put an oxygen mask over her snout to ease the breathing. The vet came in, quickly shared my assessment that the end was near, got my consent and, with me holding Lucy and reassuring her, delivered the injection that ended things in just a few seconds. 

It was so hard to believe that just two days before she had been happily swimming in her pond, and now she lay dead on the table.  They allowed me time alone with her to say final goodbyes, to sob once more, and to hope that she had not suffered too much in those final hours.

I stopped at the store on my way home – picking up a bottle of wine to lift a glass to her that night, and a Virgin of Guadalupe candle to burn in Lucy’s memory (being neither Catholic nor religious, it was not something with particular meaning to me – but somehow felt like a gesture that was appropriate).

I walked back into the house, and broke down sobbing again with overwhelming grief.  Coming back into the living room that had, in effect, been a canine hospital room for the previous 2 months was brutal – her bed that was covered with the bodily fluids she had been unable to contain in her final hours, the pillows that were placed around it to ease her discomfort, the bowl of uneaten food from two days prior, her toys and treats scattered about. It was the end of a long and difficult journey, and I was spent – physically and emotionally.

Chapter 6:  The context of grief

I’m not a stranger to death and grieving.  As a gay man of a certain age, and with decades as an HIV activist, I spend far too many years dealing with the death of friends, colleagues, co-workers, neighbours, and lovers.  I stopped counting the deaths in my life from AIDS when it hit the 500 mark – and that many many years ago.  And I struggled over those years with finding the depth of emotion required for constant mourning and grief.  At times, it was beyond me to confront the dying – unable to muster real emotional responses to massive loss, simply overwhelmed by the sheer volume and unrelenting pace of death.  A psychiatrist later diagnosed me with a form of PTSD caused by that degree of unrelenting loss (a condition that I suspect is shared, if undiagnosed, among many others of my generation).

And it goes beyond deaths from AIDS-related causes.  Both my parents died after long difficult illnesses. I lost several friends on 9/11.  I’ve lost friends to suicide, to addiction and drug overdoses, to crime, to traffic accidents, in war. I’ve known people who died in plane crashes, in political assassination, in terror attacks. I’ve done hospice work, and been with many people at the moment of their death. And there have been, of course, the usual collection of premature deaths from cancers, heart attacks, strokes and the like.

I’ve struggled with my grief responses in many of those cases – sometimes unable to muster much of a reaction, sometimes surprisingly overwhelmed and touched by the death of someone who didn’t know well.   I don’t pretend to understand the complexity of my grief and why some deaths elicit such profound reactions, while I struggle to muster any emotional response to others.  (And we won’t even begin to explore the complexity of my reactions as they relate to my own mortality.)

I’m not someone who believes in an afterlife… no “Rainbow Bridge” for me. I see death as a finality – for animals and people – and think that the only “immortality” is found in the legacy of love and memory that is held by those left behind.

I do understand that the intensity of reaction I have to Lucy’s death is due partly to the incredible intimacy and the years spent with her. Part of it is that reaction to losing someone who love was unconditional and accepting, and who was dependent on me for her well-being.  But I’m equally sure that part of it is a vehicle for processing all those other losses – all the friends I never could muster tears for, all the empty holes in my life from some many people who aren’t there any longer.  Lucy allowed me to connect and feel at times in my life where that was difficult, and I’m convinced that her death is doing something very similar now.

Chapter 7: Rituals and remembrance 

Now I’ll begin the sad and comforting rituals that follow any death (animal companion or human).

I’ll slowly begin putting her things away – it really was too much to see her bed in the living room, to see her dog dishes on a daily, an hourly basis. 

Today I made the normal Saturday morning drive to the trash/recycling centre in town – a ride that Lucy made with me every Saturday for years, where she would get a treat and a pat from the attendants on duty.  I had to sadly answer when they asked “Where’s Lucy?” that Lucy was gone.  I somehow managed to talk about it without completely losing it, only a hint of a tremor in my voice and slight tear escaping my eye.  I moved quickly and left – even such a mundane place as the town dump being a trigger that I didn’t want to deal with.

There is a great local charity outside Burlington VT (ironically named “Lucy’s House”  lucyshousesite.weebly.com/…  ) that collects pet food and supplies to enable families in economic difficulty to keep their pets with them. 

Just last weekend I had to restock Lucy’s  food. As I had a during the previous couple of months when buying dog food, I struggled with the question of whether to purchase the “big bag” or not.  In a sign of hope/faith, I opted for the large bag.  And I’d also stocked up on many bags of her favourite treats, which were on sale at the time.  So at least those things will go to good use with families who need them.   Just like when a human dies, I’ll go through her things – I’ll gladly donate the things that can be useful to others, toss (with many tears) the things that have no future use, and hang on to a few items that are rich with memories.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll get her ashes back in a small wooden box that matches the one I have of Rosa.  I’ll spread some of them out by the pond, then take a sad walk down to the covered bridge and spread some there.  And the rest of the box will find an honoured place to remain next to Rosa, with some pictures and one or two mementos to remind me of the incredible love I was able to share with a wonderful dog.  (And near the urn holding the remains of my dear friend John, who died 28 years ago this summer.)

Over time, I know I’ll become less weepy and the sadness will ease in intensity, and I will be able to look back with joy and happiness at the time I’ve had with Lucy, and feel very fortunate for it. I’ll be fine.   But, at least for now, I’ll allow myself to feel the grief that my heart and my soul need to let out.