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One year ago today, at around nine in the morning, I found myself holding the phone. My hand shook as I tried to punch in the number for Home-to-Heaven Pet Euthanasia services. When the veterinarian answered I managed to tell her who was calling, and but then no more sound would come out of my mouth. I had had a number of conversations with her over the past several weeks, so she must have known what was happening. She gently told me, "Take your time. I'm here." It took me ages to get the words out, "I think he's ready."
I had long imaged a "natural" death for Ody: he would lie quietly on his oatmeal dog bed under the piano, surrounded by his family, and just drift off into a forever sleep. Unfortunately, my fantasy didn't pan out. During conversations over the past several months, the vet had warned me that letting nature take its course would likely be pretty ugly for Ody. Because Ody's heart was strong, he would be slowly overtaken by his physical disabilities; he would lose control of his limbs, his bowels. He would be stressed; he would get bedsores; he would probably begin having seizures. He would be trapped inside a physical body that made no sense to him.
Still, even having decided that euthanasia was probably where we were headed with Ody, things didn't go according to my plan. I had always imagined that if I did wind up choosing to euthanize, it would be obvious that Ody was dying and we would simply be speeding up the process a little. Ody would be lying on a dog bed, unable to get up. We'd have to spoon feed him, lifting his head to help him lick a bit of water. He would be in pain.
I had obviously taken "death bed" too literally. Up to the last day, Ody was very much alive—eating with gusto, going for short walks, watching from his place under the piano the daily chaos of kids, dogs, and people swirling through the house. But he was also suffering. His back and hind legs were weak, and frequently failed to do what he expected. It was only after a monumental struggle that he could pull himself up from a prone position, and once up, he would slip and sway and often fall over. Every few steps, he would "knuckle," landing on the top of his foot rather than on the paw pad. Ody took "sagging butt" to a whole new level. Whenever he tried to stand still, his rear end would gradually sag toward the ground. This made it very hard for Ody to eat a peaceful meal.
He had begun to fall much more frequently, and toward the end I was afraid to leave Ody alone because when he fell over, he could do nothing but flail around on the floor like an up-turned beetle. He had begun losing control of his bowels, so that I would often find him splayed out in some corner of the house, covered in his own feces, a look of the most gut-wrenching helplessness and terror on his face.
Other things were wrong with Ody, too. He was very nearly deaf and mostly blind. Blood tests showed extremely elevated liver enzymes, evidence of bone cancer, Cushing's disease, a massive tumor somewhere in his chest, or some other dreaded disease. If you knew Ody, you would know that anxiety was his life-long bugaboo. And as he grew increasingly disabled, his anxiety seemed to become more and more entrenched and constant. I found myself saying "poor Ody" hundreds of times a day, either to Ody himself or to no one in particular.
It is rarely possible to pinpoint a single right time to euthanize an animal, unless the animal is in a medical crisis from which there can be no recovery. Instead, we have a span of time when we could say "any time now would be okay." On the day I called the euthanasia service, I worried that it was too soon. But given a year to grieve and reflect, I think that I probably waited too long. I was unable or unwilling to fully grasp the magnitude of Ody's suffering because I didn't want to let him go.
Can it ever be an act of compassion to deliberately end an animal's life? I believe it can. I like to believe that euthanizing Ody when we did spared him additional suffering. And I do think Ody's death was peaceful and painless. He was asleep on his favorite couch in the office when the vet gave him the initial sedative. As far as I could tell, he was unaware as the vet shaved a bit of hair from his rear leg, inserted a catheter, and then injected the blue liquid that stopped his heart. He was surrounded by his human family. His canine companion Maya was curled up on the couch next to him, her head resting gently on his back as he drew his final breaths.
To mark the anniversary of Ody's death, I wander around the house looking at all the memorials to his life. A small wooden urn, tied with a pale yellow ribbon, sits on a shelf. Ody's black collar with rainbow dog bones hangs off my lamp, his oatmeal bed is still under the piano. A picture of Ody hangs over my desk. The photo was taken about an hour before the vet arrived for the euthanasia procedure. Ody's red nose is dry and cracked, his muzzle flecked with grey. He gazes into the camera with his characteristically anxious brown eyes, two milky pools of trouble. He looks at me, I imagine, as if he knows what's about to happen.
