We had to put one of our two dogs “to sleep” yesterday. What a dishonest phrase. We euthanized her, and it broke our hearts. It was unexpected, and I still don’t know whether that made it worse or saved us some pain. Without burdening anyone reading this with all the details, she got sick suddenly, we took her to the vet, and they found she had swallowed part of a cloth toy, which had never happened in her eleven years. When they attempted surgery they found a large mass on her pancreas. The vet said she would very soon experience significant pain, that it was incurable, and that her swallowing the cloth and necessitating the day’s events probably couldn’t have happened at a better time. But sadly, we were told the only real options were to wake her up to say goodbye, or to allow them to euthanize here without waking up. Waking her up would have been only for us given the state she would be in, so we opted for her to never wake up. We’ll never really know if we did the right thing, for her or for us. We had already gone home, intending to come back and be there as she came out of surgery. We didn’t realize that the last time we saw her would be as the tech took her back to be examined. I still wish I had stayed with her right up until the surgery began, but that’s never going to happen. We didn’t want to be in the way. So many things cannot be undone, and we don’t even think about them in that moment.
Karma (happy little sister to her brother, Dogma, who is still with us) was our “little girl”. She was smaller than her brother, probably the smallest of the litter (we never saw the other six dogs). Compared to her brother, she was the adventurous, sometimes mischievous one. We have a picture of her as a puppy when she was caught red-handed climbing out of her wire-fenced kennel, right over the 4-foot top, while her brother watched. He has always played by the rules, while she sometimes made her own. but she was also the dog that would beg you to play catch with a frisbee or toy, and who would dive into the water, paddling like mad, when you threw a stick or a toy. She was the one who would jump up in our Polaris side-by-side vehicle the moment it started, sprinting down the stairs or across the yard at the sound of the engine. She was the always the one to lead the charge when someone pulled into the dooryard, barking like mad until she inevitably made a new friend, or got close enough to recognize and old one. Karma loved her little adventures, and her human parents, and she wasn’t afraid to show it.
We have two crate beds where they slept each night, and she’s the one who would wake first, whining to be let out and run to the bedroom. Those crates exist because the alternative was that she’d never leave our bedroom, instead sprawling out to take up an amazing amount of space for a 40-ish pound dog. She’s the one who would climb up on me, putting her head on my chest, licking my face, every morning. She’s the one who would roll over on her belly to be petted when you just walked into the room. I regret every time I was in a hurry and didn’t pet her. Thankfully I almost always gave her at least a little scratch, especially over the past few years, since we moved to Maine and slowed down to a more sustainable pace. When I would come in to the house at night, after being out at a meeting or just working a little later than usual in my office, she would always come down the stairs to have me let her outside. It didn’t matter that Kate had let her out two minutes earlier. This was a Karma-Daddy thing, and she seemed to love it. She always made feel a little bit like a hero, because to her, that’s what I was. Daddy’ little girl, that one.
Losing my “little girl” has me thinking about a meditation lecture that I have saved on my phone, by Sam Harris. It’s entitled, “The Last Time” and it speaks to the fact that for everything we do, there will be a last time that we do that thing. And often, we’ll have no idea that we’re doing whatever it is, for the last time. So now I’m thinking about the last time I threw her little dog frisbees for her (she was a world class “catcher”). The last time she jumped into the side-by-side (the buggy, as we called it for her) and went for a ride. The last time she jumped into my truck to go for a ride out to our blueberry field, where she would romp with her brother in the field we planned for her to play in, when we build the next house and move there in a year or two. I’m glad she got to play in that field with her brother. She seemed to love going there despite her having ample room here on the island, and the thought of them exploring together makes me smile even as it has me ready to shed a tear. I’ve been thinking about the last time I gave her a bath, and the fact that the last time she got into a vehicle I had to pick her up and put her in it instead of just watching her jump in. The last time she jumped out, at the vet’s office. The last time I gave her a little pat and a scratch and told her what a good girl she was. That was the last time I’d ever do that, and I’m tearing up just thinking about it. We never know when a thing will be done for the last time, which tells us that we should always treat a thing as if it is. Dogs can teach us much about the rest of life. Karma sure did that for me. Daddy’s little girl taught her Daddy more than she’ll ever know, and more than Daddy ever realized, until now.
