All Dogs Go To Heaven

The four of us squeezed together on my grandmother’s four-poster bed: me, my 7 ½ year old twins, and the dog. It looked like a scene from “The Napping House” where all the human and animal inhabitants of a house one by one fall asleep on Grandma’s bed, snoring and twitching until the whole bed collapses. My children occasionally come to my bed in the wee hours of the morning after a nightmare or if the darkness is too dark. But when they both asked to sleep in my bed, I was a little surprised. I think it has to do with Casey, our black labrador retriever, whose rhythmic breathing now alternates beats with my children’s.

Casey was my first child back in the days when I was married. She is approaching her eleventh birthday, hampered only in her eternal quest to fetch and swim by some arthritis. In spite of a gray-haired chin, many people still ask if our senior citizen is a pup.

When my husband moved out last spring, I gave away our old bed and set up my grandmother’s cherry bedroom set, circa 1920, with gracefully carved pineapples and flourished headboard. As it is only a double bed, and Casey is a first-class bedhog, she was initially demoted to sleeping on the floor – until last Friday. A suspicious-looking lump on her hip prompted a trip to the vet.  The news was bad – a bone tumor. It would probably spread rapidly, eventually to her lungs. And then came the words no one likes to hear: there is nothing we can do. Grief overwhelmed me, more than I thought possible over a dog. But she is more than a dog to me. She is one of few constants left in my life after losing my marriage, my life’s dream of the perfect family, and full access to my children. To lose her would be the finishing blow.

But more painful than my personal sense of loss is watching her lose mobility and energy a little more every day. I admire her courage and the way she compensates for her bad hip without a whimper. Her brown eyes, no longer clear, are weary from fighting the cancer she doesn’t understand. When do I say enough? I don’t want to let her go, yet I refuse to let her suffer. Soon I will make the decision to end her life. Does she know how much of a comfort she is to me the nights I am in my house alone without my kids?

Casey is snoring now against the backdrop of the rain that has been pounding the ground all day. The kids, somehow, must intuitively know that she will not be with us much longer, and in times of crisis families band together. My daughter insisted that Casey sleep on the bed with us tonight in spite of the crowding. Maybe our combined strength can comfort her before she goes to dog heaven where the meadows are always green, the bones are plentiful, the cats are slow, and no one tires of throwing tennis balls for her to fetch.

January 2001