What It Is to Love an Old Dog

Fair warning: the dog dies at the end.

For 15 years I loved a hard-luck mongrel, a shepherd-husky mix I brought home from the pound where he’d lived most of his first year in the world. He kept at my heels through my twenties and thirties. As my own youth ended I watched him grow old, rickety and lethargic, deaf and half-blind.

If we’re lucky, our emotional attachments mostly involve the beginning and middle of someone’s life, or the middle and end. To live with an animal is often another matter. We precede them; they predecease us. And to love an old dog is a long elegy, one that begins early and hasn’t ended yet.

First we found a tumor, a fatty, bloody mass that came back from pathology thankfully benign. A few years later, what seemed to be a seizure or stroke proved to be a disorienting and frightening but otherwise harmless disorder of the inner ear.

Then our vet said that the weakness we’d noticed in his hind legs might not be arthritis, but degenerative myelopathy, the canine equivalent of ALS. If she was right, we could expect him gradually to lose motor control, starting in his rear half and spreading, like a metastasis, to other parts.

We tried to be ready. There were good days and bad days, until the bad became the new good days, with worse ones ahead. His accidents in the house grew more frequent. His walks became tentative. He could no longer wag his tail.

I admired the nobility in how he would bow in his weak rear legs to stand, how they would shake then, and shake even in his sleep. That the vet had said this was normal in old dogs made it no easier to watch. And what we call nobility is nothing in an animal, only survival, if survival is ever “only.”

They make do. They do what they can, or, when they can’t, they look at us, look to us in that manner perfected over tens of thousands of codependent years. We congratulate ourselves for winning their acceptance, though this depends less on our character than our proximity to food.

You cannot say what you want to say—or you can, but it only matters if you say it in the same gibberish you use to offer treats and to ask “Who’s a good boy?” The dog is not sentimental. In other words, the most earnest expressions of love must be spoken in such a tone of voice as to render them ridiculous. This is a lesson, I think—about suffering, and love, and our tendency to cling—but what the lesson is I do not know.

Let me not be maudlin. This dog did not save my life. I find those WHO SAVED WHO bumper stickers both too cute by half. But there were times in these years when my sorrow was such that the only solace for it was to bury my face in the fur of an animal to whom it meant nothing, except maybe the chance to lick the salt of a tear or two.

“I think I could turn and live with animals,” Walt Whitman writes in “Song of Myself” #32,

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

But we cannot turn. Animals that we are, we nevertheless are not them. We are only ourselves.

What is there to say of the end? It was as I had imagined, but worse, because it was real. That morning, fat, unhurried flakes of snow fell in the yard. The sort of weather he used to love. I gathered him into my arms in a blanket and carried him to the car.

When the time came I leaned down close to him, put my face on his long face, and since I did not know what to say I said It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re a good dog, you’re my boy. The words weren’t right but they didn’t matter; words had never particularly mattered between us, and now after all they are for me.

The last gift you give to your old friend is to stay with them until they sleep. Their last gift to you is that sometimes in your own sleep you see them again. In mine, he comes to me with his tail sweeping a slow arc, back and forth, and rests his chin on my knee. I bend my face toward his again. I speak some secret nonsense, I scratch around his ears.