Is there a lesson from a dying dog?

He looked like a gargoyle when we met him. His back legs splayed outward, ribs emerging from a gaunt frame, the hint of a tail. Scars on his nose and a notch in his right ear, as if someone had pinned a tag to it and then ripped it away.

He grinned like a gargoyle, too, pacing our house on the night we brought him home, flopping down and then standing to pace again. He had no instinct to fetch and little interest in other dogs. The numeric tattoos in his ears suggested he might have started life in a laboratory, and thus had scant experience with canine things. 

We found him through a dog rescue. They said they’d found him wearing a rope collar in a kill shelter in Roswell, New Mexico. Nico Wolfson, our little alien. Hips so tight that he could not sit. We suspected he’d spent most of his first year in a cage. He might have been part Labrador and part beagle, but that was just a guess. 

It didn’t matter. Nico was badly in need of love, and we had so much to give. The kids were little then and would spread brightly colored sleeping bags across the floor or the couch. They would settle in together, two children and a dog. Playing and sleeping and playing again. A pack of three.

***

Nico eventually learned he could sit. His gaunt form grew plump — the result of too many treats. He’d had a hard life to start, so what’s a little cheese in his bowl with breakfast? 

He never took an interest in returning a thrown ball. He just wanted connection. If the kids were having a dance party, he hovered beside them, tongue out and panting. If they played Legos or Lincoln logs, he’d lie close by. In the car, he’d stand between their car seats, ignoring all appeals that he sit for his own safety.

Most nights, he’d settle in next to me in the front room, and we’d listen to the wind break like a wave against the house. The rest of the family asleep down the hall. The scattered thoughts of a father. So many worries. About work, about family. Soothed by the constancy of a dog, tucked nearby and breathing softly amid the din.  

***

Is there a lesson from a dying dog? Some accumulated truth, collected unseen since the time of our joining, that floats atop the spring of grief? What other arrangement do we undertake that is so short, so inevitable? 

We don’t say it, but we understand from the beginning: This bond will break my heart.

***

Nico’s health issues from his youth only temporarily subsided. Before too long, his eyes, a deep amber, clouded over. He suffered random leg injuries that vets attributed to his start in a laboratory cage. After a few years, he began avoiding the basement because the stairs caused him pain.

It was an autoimmune disease, discovered six years ago, that really did him in. It sapped his energy. He had trouble going to the bathroom. And a few times, he got sick — so sick that my wife and I worried what we’d tell the kids if he died. 

But we found meds that worked, and he bounced back enough to resume our strolls through the neighborhood and long winter nights curled up in the living room as the snow fell and the turntable spun. There were still many years ahead, I told myself.

***

We aged together. As his eyes clouded, mine weakened to the point of embarrassing my kids by asking for help reading receipts in darkened restaurants. His coat grayed, and so did my beard. And while he struggled with the basement stairs, I would grimace as I put on my coat for our walks, the result of a bad shoulder that would crack loud enough that my wife could hear.

People say death is life’s one constant, but loss is our companion long before then. Loss of friends, of family. But also the loss of chunks of ourselves, disintegrating with a slow but determined momentum. My family lived near the beach when I was a kid, and one of my favorite pastimes was building a dam to block the rising tide. As the waters rose, I would frantically fill the gaps with sand, working with greater urgency until finally giving in to the inevitable.

At night, while the wind howls and the family sleeps, I wonder if I’m now playing a different version of that game. But I reconcile loss with the wisdom that clings to it. My body is not what it was, but I’m hopefully a kinder, more well-adjusted version of myself. My children are no longer the kids who built couch forts with me and the dog, but I’ve learned to love their teenage musings about art and love and competition.

Nico’s decline felt different. I wanted meaning from his suffering. But as I watched him tire on walks or struggle to get out of bed, there was no insight to be found.

***

The meds eventually stopped working. Or maybe it was his swollen spleen. Whatever the cause, around the start of this year, Nico went from an aging dog to one that’s dying. He had more trouble relieving himself, ate less and dropped weight until the ridges of his spine reemerged. He slept later each morning, eventually rising for breakfast around the same time the kids arrived home from school.

After a vet appointment, my wife returned with both him and a worksheet scoring his quality of life. I scanned the first questions and quickly pushed it away. 

Nico still had his good moments, I told her. I recalled how he’d wake excitedly in the evenings when my daughter returned from her restaurant job smelling of burgers and grease. I ignored all the times he’d hardly move when I walked into the room.

It was the kids who convinced me that it was time. Or rather, it was the thought of them, alone while my wife and I were away, finding their childhood playmate seizing on the living room floor, or worse yet, dead on the couch. My wife and I reviewed the vet’s questionnaire again and tallied up the score. “Quality of life is concerning,” it told us.

For whatever reason, our society has settled on “put them down” as the moniker for euthanizing a pet. I assume its origins reside in some rural euphemism for killing an animal.

But another definition emerged from that questionnaire. Putting a pet down, in a literal sense, means to relinquish our grasp of them. Or put more simply: to let them go. 

***

I took a walk on the last night of Nico’s life. The sun had slipped near the horizon, the sky pink and blue. When I had imagined this moment as his health deteriorated, I envisioned us cruising the neighborhood one last time. A break from the suffering. Some deeper meaning finally revealed.

On similar nights when we were younger, Nico and I would walk up one street and down the next, pausing at the park or the high school so he could sniff the grass. But he was too weak to join me now, too exhausted to do much of anything but look up from his bed.

I drifted through the neighborhood until I reached the park. I watched the clouds wander and people strolling the path that Nico and I traveled countless times. Then a man emerged with two eager dogs and a cord of rope. He whipped the toy high into the air, the dogs charging up a hill, tongues out and panting hard. 

When I got home, I saw a cake on the kitchen counter, a last gift for Nico from my son. We walked outside, planted the cake on the patio and waited. Nico took a step toward the cake, then hesitated. Craned his neck and then licked. Backed off again.

I walked inside, opened the fridge and grabbed a bag of bacon that my daughter had been collecting for him from her job, and returned to the porch. I stuck the bacon strips on the cake. 

Nico stared ahead. He tried nibbling at the meat, but it was no use. He stepped away from us, turned and sniffed the grass. It was getting dark. We drifted inside. The cake sat mostly uneaten on the patio.

***

The rest of the family retreated to their rooms the next morning as we waited for the vet to arrive. It was me and Nico together again in the front room.

There was no wind this time. Birds chirped through the open window. I heard a neighbor’s chimes, the gentle whirl of a car passing on the street. Nico tucked nearby, his breathing more pronounced, more labored. The doorbell rang.

When it was finished, my daughter sobbed over his body. Sobbed in an unguarded way like she did sometimes when she was a little girl and he was a puppy. Back when they’d lie together in those brightly colored blankets, and the world felt infinite. 

Finally, she stopped crying and looked at the vet. Both were on their knees, leaning over Nico’s body. “Thank you,” she said. She paused, and I’ll always wonder whether I could summon that much grace. “I don’t know how you do this.”

The vet looked at her, then looked down. My eyes were wet, my throat choking shut. “It gets harder every time,” he said.

***

Is there a lesson from a dying dog? Some wisdom that sleeps in a long-forgotten vault until times of sorrow, when it wakes and reveals itself as a salve for our damaged hearts? Some vast amount of sand conjured from the ether to hold back the incoming tide?

It’s been three weeks now, and I’m still waiting. I wait in the front room, in the fading light. I wait in the morning, when I turn the corner and see his vacant spot on the couch.

As an editor, I remind writers that the ending matters above all else, that without it, the reader doubts the journey’s worth. The reader wants — I want — some greater truth to be revealed, for some wisdom that balances this side of the scale against the weight of loss, the weight of inevitability. 

I try to convince myself that I’m thinking about this all wrong. That the truth of a dying dog is more simple. Maybe there is no lesson. Maybe we don’t need one. We loved Nico as best we could, for as long as we could, and he did the same for us. 

Is that enough? God, I hope so. But I’m not sure. I know I’ll keep pondering him on nights in the front room when the family is asleep down the hall, when the only thing I hear now is my breathing and the wind breaking against our home like waves against the shore.