One Year

It was one year ago – yesterday, Saturday by day of the week, Monday by date – that I had a traveling vet come out to the house and euthanize my Dalmatian, Angel.

Just writing that paragraph above caused a tightening in my throat. How raw the pain is still after a full year. I have this photo of her on my iMac desktop,

so I see her every day I'm home. And I have a shot of her I snapped with my camera phone one day at the vet's office, and it's now my phone's "wallpaper," so I see her every day, regardless of whether I'm home or not.

It's been a year… a full year of occasionally driving past the vet's office I took her to – more frequently in the last few years than in her youth – thinking that I have no reason to stop there any more; a full year of walking past the pet foods aisle at the grocery store, or the pet supplies stores, knowing that there's nothing there for me to get; a full year of seeing other people's dogs and getting on the floor with them and making a silly fool of myself trying to give and get as much lovin' the brief minutes will allow me.

At moments it is difficult to comprehend that so much time has passed, that so much life has happened to me, since I sent Angel out of existence. Too often and too easily the images return of sitting in the grass in the shade of the garage in the back yard that pleasant Saturday afternoon and holding her while the life slipped out of her eyes and her breathing slowed to nothing, and time has disappeared, and it feels like now.

Some may read this and think me silly to wax poetic about a "lesser" animal a year dead while my marriage lies in a coma awaiting the plug to be officially pulled. Don't get me wrong; I have mourned the death of my marriage. I very often still do. But we're not putting an end to a life, just a life together. It was love that died…or, if not love, then devotion. With Angel, the devotion was in her eyes right until the moment they lost focus and she slipped away. That and the reality that it was my decision hit me more powerfully. It was the most difficult decision I've ever had to make, and the worst thing I've ever had to do. Leaving the house in which I had shared nearly nine years with Mrs. Farrago comes a close second.

I guess, as far as my life is concerned, I would have to call 2007 The Year of Pain and Loss. Except the pain lingers, and the loss echoes.

So I think it's time to put something else on my desktop, something innocuous, like a photo of my car or a naked woman, anything to stop bringing my mind back to the most difficult day of my life, yet one of the greatest joys I ever knew. But what to replace her with…the Macintosh Swirly Screen?

An Angel Passes

It is a macabre, cruel power we humans have given ourselves over the lesser beasts in our midst. I mean, specifically, our pets.

I wrote last year of the impending demise of my beloved dog, Angel. I made the decision last weekend to finally put an end to her struggles and indignity…this weekend.

I won’t lay out any more details of her troubles; she was an old dog and had old dog problems. What struck me through the week was the pervasive acknowledgement that these were her last days. It was like a person in the room, an invisible, unpleasant, unmentionable character who waited patiently for the appointed time to take Angel away from me.

Frequent bouts of tears and doubt, and an evil prescience about her future battered me while she blindly went about the business of being a dog, blissfully unaware that she was doing these things for the last time.

But don’t we all? We never know how many beats our hearts have left, or when the car rolls off the assembly line that will be shipped, delivered, purchased and driven into ours. But it was the knowing how much time Angel had left, the scheduling of her final heartbeat, the complicity I felt doing it “behind her back” that wrecked my thoughts and interfered with my work.

And the tears it caused, tears she didn’t understand were for her, let alone understand at all. The mourning process started a week before the vet came to the house. It was mostly at night, bed time, when she always would look at me with those doleful eyes, pleading silently with me not to go upstairs, to stay with her downstairs or to take her up with me. But maybe the week of agony was best.

Not long ago Mrs. Farrago and I had two Dalmatians. Cosmo was hers since he was a puppy. Angel was mine since she was a puppy, and moved with me into Mrs. Farrago’s house back in 1998. Cosmo, two years older than Angel, developed his own set of age-related problems and, in late August of 2004, Mrs. Farrago decided the time had come for him to be done with it. We had consulted weeks earlier with a traveling vet, and on a Saturday we called her. She was available to come the following day, in the early evening to put Cosmo down.

This gave us little more than a day to make our peace with it, to say, hug and kiss our good-byes to him. And he was gone. He wasn’t really my dog, having lived more than half his life before I ever met him. But on that, his last day, I bawled my eyes out as if I had known him since the day he was born. And the next few days were especially difficult.

Angel had been mine since her eighth week of life. She had no concept of life without me; despite my frequent travels, I always returned home. Her appointment set, I was able to ease into the grief a little more, each day becoming a little easier to come to terms with my decision, each day making me, if only slightly, able to grasp the reality that I would soon see her take her last breath.

It didn’t make the very moment any easier to take, as the life left her eyes and her body went slack, but I had, to a degree, prepared myself for the moment. Cosmo helped me get through it, too.

That she go peacefully and calmly were all I could ask for her last minutes, and that’s how she went.

I will remember her and miss her forever.



Angel For Now
October 31, 1993 - April 21, 2007