A dog’s life
On Monday, we lost the older of our two dogs. More accurately, after consultation with the vet, we decided to have him put to sleep. He was suffering from congestive heart failure, and had had a number of progressively worse days over the last week, culminating in Sunday, when he had four episodes of not being able to breathe adequately lasting for several hours of the day and night, and being plainly in considerable distress, and the prognosis was that this was only going to get worse (it had been getting worse very quickly).
Bumble was a Springer Spaniel, and was originally my mother’s dog, then progressively shared until she died in 2014, and then ours – but most of all my daughter’s. He had a long life for a Spaniel, at around 14 years, and was an irrepressibly happy little dog (which made the contrast with some of his last week all the more difficult), always wagging and bumbling about (hence the name, given him by my mum).
His last day was, however, quite a good one. He only had one extended episode of stuggling to breathe, and got fed a lot of sausages – he loved sausages. Actually, he loved almost any food, particularly if it was human food – he would even mug me for a piece of banana… He had a bit of a run round in the garden, and woofed at people from next door, so it was all good. I think we managed to give him a really good time that day, and happily my daughter had a day off work and was able to be with him much of the day, so he had his human with him, so life was just excellent. He died eating another sausage…
We’ve kept dogs for over 35 years, and so Bumble joins Havoc, Loki, Saxon, Boss, Bridie, Purdy and Raven (all German Shepherd Dogs), five of whom we similarly put to sleep to save them further pain when their quality of life had deteriorated enough. Our outlook has always been that if you keep dogs, you have to be prepared to kill them eventually, as an expression of love and kindness, in order to save them from pain.
There is a Bumble-shaped hole in our lives at the moment. I’m typing this without a spaniel under my desk, which has been a pretty constant feature of my life for years; I went upstairs for a nap yesterday, and was not faced with a small white and brown person demanding cuddles, whichever side of the bed I tried to get into, before settling down with me. As Peter Rollins says, it is a nothing which is something.
There is also a Neil-shaped hole which appears from time to time. I attended Neil’s funeral at the begnning of September after his death in mid-August – the first Kabbalist funeral service I’ve attended (and probably the only one). Neil was my longest-term friend; we met before either of us was at primary school. He was best man at my wedding, and one of the little group of enthusiastic searchers through things arcane who were around me at university and for some time thereafter. In recent years, he moved back to our home village, and ran a website called “Mirach – the home of the Practical Kabbalist”. And in December last year, he complained of severe headaches and was rapidly diagnosed with a brain tumour, which was operated on quickly. The surgeons didn’t get the whole tumour – it was a choice between leaving some of the cancerous tissue and reducing his function to a vegetative state.
For some months, he was really very functional – two weeks out of four, he’d be his old bright and cheerful self, just evidencing a little word aphasia and some frustration at losing his mobility (his Driving Licence was withdrawn immediately). The other two weeks were the chemo week and the week after, during which he felt wiped out. The thing was, he wasn’t feeling any pain (no nerves in the brain), and I made a point to spend some time with him during the “good” weeks, and we talked of many things, including (of course) religion and spirituality. He was still maintaining a daily meditative practice then, and, like me, was not concerned about death as such, merely about the means of getting there, so he was very laid back about having a prediction of months of life rather than years.
However, in April he had a seizure, went into hospital and promptly caught one of those hospital-borne respiratory diseases. He did rally after that, sufficiently to be back able to hold something of a conversation on two of the occasions I visited him, but was fed by tube from that point and after a few weeks transferred to a nursing home inconveniently situated over an hours drive from home (his poor wife, who visited him six days a week, was worn to a frazzle). There, in July, I had my last sensible conversation with him. His quality of life was clearly dire – he couldn’t really move much apart from his head, his cognitive ability and language ability had taken a huge nosedive, and he was slipping in and out of consciousness during my rather short visits, but he did seem glad I was there. The one thing which he was definitely able to communicate was that he had had enough of this, and wanted it to be over…
Eventually, in August, after he had been unresponsive for four weeks, his wife agreed with the doctors that they would stop feeding him. He lasted eight days after that, as against the two to three the doctors predicted, mercifully unconscious the whole time.
I can’t help contrasting the two, and thinking that certainly May to August were not a period which I would wish on anyone, and I was able to save Bumble from something similar. But no-one was able to save Neil until things had been dragging on far too long.
There are times when I rather wish I were a dog…