Losing Lucy

No philosophy or politics this week, sorry.

I had to say goodbye to my dog Lucy last Sunday. I spent Monday morning writing a Facebook post that expanded as I worked on it until it started to feel like an essay. It has almost nothing to do with any subject I’d normally write about here, but it’s also the only thing I had it in me to write for several days before or after. If this is nothing you feel like reading about, that’s fine. We’ll be back to normally scheduled programming next Sunday. If you do read it, though, note that I haven’t changed a word from the version I posted on Facebook. So, references to “yesterday,” for example, are about things that happened a week ago.

My ex-wife (and current good friend) Jennifer and I adopted Lucy when we were living in South Korea in 2014, when she was a tiny puppy who fit in my hands. She slept on the doggie bed we set up on the floor for, I think, the first couple of nights, until she could figure out how to maneuver her way onto the bed, and then that was that. We adopted a cat (Shabazz, who stayed with Jenn three years ago when we split up) around the same time. We always called them “the Koreans”--like, “who’s going to look after the Koreans this weekend while we’re away?”

Jenn was the one who insisted on adopting Lucy when I wasn’t sure it was such a good idea to get a puppy we’d have to potty-train while we lived in a fifth-floor apartment. But Lucy, in whatever way animals do this, very quickly decided that I was her primary person. I used to leave for like 45 seconds every night to take the bag of scooped cat litter down to the trash chute at the end of the hall, and Lucy would start whining unhappily about me being gone. So, eventually, I just started taking her with me. She’d happily bound down the hall toward the trash chute--then nervously look behind her to make sure I was still coming. With exactly one exception I can think of, her whole life, that’s how she was when she was off her leash. And “taking out the cat feces with Lucy” became a nightly tradition, continued (when we had to actually go outside to a dumpster) through all the moves to Michigan, New Jersey, and Georgia and (eventually, post-divorce and post-adopting my cat Ash) to California and Mexico.

The one exception to her impeccable off-leash behavior was one night in New Jersey when there were several deer standing around near the dumbster, and Lucy forgot that she was a miniature schnauzer and not a wolf, and through sheer force of personality she made them forget it too. Those deer, who were many times her size and could have easily crushed her, fled in terror while she joyfully chased them all around the parking lot, round and round while Jenn and I tried to call her back. But, well, deer. What are you going to do.

At Rutgers, Lucy used to come to both of our classes all the time. She was so shockingly well-behaved about it we always joked that she “knew how to behave in an academic environment.” She’d happily run into the classroom, run around saying hi to everyone for a minute, and then settle into a corner or under the desk of some particularly favored student and sit quietly until class was over.

Her whole life, she was always just so happy to just...come along. She was totally happy to sit at my feet for hours while I wrote in some coffee shop, or just plop herself on the couch and chill for hours while I watched TV, or do the same on someone else’s couch if I came over for a party and asked if it was cool if I brought my dog. Which I did a LOT.

Her favorite thing in the world was going on walks, and chasing a ball or chasing one of her many squeaky toys was pretty high on the list. (Several of those toys, she picked out for herself--every year she’d got to Petco or Petsmart on her birthday and we or I would try her on a few, and get the one she seemed most excited about. The weird orange crab in the picture, she got several years back, and for whatever reason that was her favorite for the rest of her life.) Every night, when she got her nightly dental treat, she’d get up on her hind legs and literally dance for it. Of course, sometimes she’d also just dance because she was excited. She was like that.

The last few months were awful. But it wasn’t a slow decline. It was a cliff. For a lot of last year, she was getting an hour and a half of walking every day since I was trying to do my daily 10,000 steps, and there was never the slightest question of whether she was up for all that walking. When we were in Mexico, I’d try to do part of the walks on the beach, so I could let her off the leash and throw her tennis ball a few times. One of the images I’ll always most associate with our time here is Lucy happily covered in sand.

In I think mid-October, I was at the place where I go to buy water in downtown Rosarito, and I had Lucy with me, because that’s just how life worked--what was I going to do, leave her in the car for five minutes like some kind of monster?--and a local who was leaving the water place as I was coming started to talk to me in a stream of rapid-fire Spanish way beyond my plodding laborious Duolingo Spanish comprehension, but I caught the word “schnauzer” in the stream, and when we’d managed to communicate a little, he showed me a picture of his own schnauzer. He asked me cuánto años Lucy was, and when I said she was 11, he was shocked, because she seemed so energetic and puppy-ish. People were always shocked about that. And this conversation was maybe a couple weeks before she started to decline.

Around then or a little earlier one of her back legs started shaking a bit, almost so you wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for it, and one day in late October her whole body started to shake and I took her into the emergency vet in Tijuana and they told me about her spinal issue, and that there was no surgical solution. She went on a heavy once-every-eight-hours dose of Gabapentin for the pain, and with a spinal disc eventually totally cutting off a nerve she needed for her brain to send signals to her back legs, by early November she couldn’t walk at all.

There were weeks after that where she couldn’t eat or drink without me propping her up and holding the bowl right up to her mouth, and she had so little bowel and bladder control she was wearing a diaper all the time, and all I did every day was sit with her curled up against me (in a diaper, on a towel) on the couch while I watched Star Trek on Netflix or wrote Jacobin articles or argued with people on the internet. Eventually, she got to some kind of equilibrium with the pain meds and everything else, and she got a lot perkier again, and I could leave the bowls on the ground in front of her, and if I carried her out to hold her over the grass once every few hours, she didn’t need a diaper except at night. (All I’ll say about the experience of helping her go to the bathroom is that I washed my hands more times and with greater fervor in the last few months than in the previous 45 years of my life put together.) I got her a stroller so she could go on walks and at least enjoy the smells, and she could do stuff like go to the coffee shop with me while I wrote again. Starting in late December, she even had enough energy to want to play with her crab.

On weeks that I got it together to make into LA to teach the in-person Capital class, I left her with a woman we’ll call K. who’d dog-sat for her in happier days, and who does care work for geriatric humans, so she was perfect. Other than those sporadic Wednesdays with K., though, I probably haven’t been apart from Lucy even for an hour or two more than half a dozen times in the last few months. But I spent most of November thinking we were heading into awful-decisions time already, and I was so insanely grateful to have been wrong about that, I very happily could have spent years more taking care of her like this.

We didn’t get those years. Her unrelated heart problem (also not curable), which the doctors had been tracking and worrying about for a while but which had never been the main priority, kicked in for real last week. She was having trouble breathing and she flat-out refused to eat and she had to be hospitalized. When I came to visit her in the hospital, they had me offer her food, in the hopes that she might take it from me even if she wouldn’t take it from anyone else, and she gave me what I can only describe as an offended look, like, “What the fuck? You too? I thought you were on my side!”

In the old days, when I’d come back to the apartment in New Jersey after a couple days out of town for some speaking gig, she’d jump on me a bunch of times on my way into the apartment and then I’d just sit down on the couch for a few minutes to give her a chance to get it out of her system--she’d jump on me, crawl all over me, lick my face, jump back onto the floor, run around, jump back on me and do it all again, over and over again. My glasses were always knocked off somewhere in the process. Even in the last few months, those half a dozen or less times I’d leave for an hour or two for some errand I didn’t see a practical way to take her along for and I left her on her doggie bed on the floor, she’d whine like crazy when I got back and I’d lie down next to the doggie bed and she’d lick my face while I pet her until she seemed to think everything was OK.

So, more than anything, I couldn’t stand the idea of her spending any more time in the hospital. As late as Friday, I was talking to the vets about maybe bringing her home, maybe seeing if I could give her an oral version of the medication they had in the IV drip, seeing if she would maybe be happier and start eating again at home (even though she hadn’t before, that was why I’d taken her in in the first place), but by yesterday morning she’d gotten so much weaker she couldn’t be safely discharged. And with the choice narrowed down to letting her starve to death or keeping her alive in miserable circumstances with a feeding tube or the godawful decision I finally made, I drove down that pothole-strewn highway from Rosarito to Tijuana to say goodbye.

They took her down from the hospital level on the third floor and brought her down to one of the regular vet examination rooms and left me alone with her for a few minutes while I cradled her in her blanket in my lap, her IV drip still attached, and I petted her and kissed her and babbled to her about how immensely unbelievably goddamned grateful I am for all the years we got and then I laid her down on the examination table with the blanket arranged to cushion her head and the vet came in and administered the shots while I pet her behind the ears until she was gone. And then I went home. And God but I feel like I’ve lost a limb.

Every non-travel day for the last eleven and a half years, the last thing I’ve done before I’ve gone to sleep at night is given her a dental treat and the first thing I’ve done when I’ve gotten up in the morning is taken her outside to pee. The whole pattern of my life is structured around taking care of her and hanging out with her--the one great constant in all the ways my life has changed since 2014. Up until a few months ago, every time I moved around the apartment, she’d follow me from room to room, just a constant presence of happiness and physical warmth. When at some point over the course of the day I’d realized I didn’t know where she was and I’d look around, 99% of the time she was within a few feet of me. Even in the last few months, if I was in a different room for too long, she certainly let me know. So even yesterday, when I got back from Tijuana and I was sitting in my dining room making some awful FaceTime calls before I lay down, the old instinct kicked in a couple times and I looked over to where her dog bed was positioned by the dining room table, to autopilot “check on Lucy.”

At the vet, near the end, they gave me a card with some awful saccharine shit about “the rainbow bridge” on it and only my deep cultural training as a midwesterner stopped me from throwing it away on the spot. But I will say this much. If all my grumpy atheistic materialism turns out to be totally off-base, if I’m just completely wrong about all of these subjects and there really is some kind of afterlife, I can’t even imagine how evil God or the universe or whatever would have to be not to let us spend it with them.