It was with a heavy heart that I listened to one of my dearest friends speak of her senior dog’s relapse.
I heard her anger at the professionals she had entrusted with her dog’s care. I heard her guilt as she racked her brain thinking of the what-ifs and should-haves, could-haves and would-haves.
I listened to her voice break and the eventual tears that came as she pushed away that little niggling pin-prick thought that everyone is faced with when their dog is near the end of its life. As best I could, I just listened with empathy to my friend’s heart breaking in two.
I’ve been in her shoes, a few times now, and as I stare into the eyes of the three loves of my life that are staring back at me as I write this, I will be in those shoes three more times.
But I’m better prepared for it thanks to the lessons I learned from my dog Harley. Just over 10 years ago, I came face to face with the canine grim reaper as I tried to breathe immortality into my dog Harley after he was diagnosed with a highly aggressive cancer. It changed my perspective on death.
When Harley passed away, to say I was devastated would be an understatement. Questions ran through my mind: “How did I miss that lump?” “If I rubbed his tummy for a few moments longer each morning before rushing out of bed would I have caught it sooner?” “Was he giving me signs that I missed due to my selfishness at the time?”
It was a futile conversation because he was dead and I was wishing with all my might that he wasn’t. I was trying to find a way to bring him back to life by finding answers to unanswerable questions.
Then, about a month after Harley’s passing, I had a dream so incredibly vivid that when I woke I believed it was really happening. In my dream, I made a deal with the Grim Reaper to bring Harley back to life. I woke up to find him waiting to go for a walk. We played Frisbee, he ran the trails with me, he ate shortbread cookies while curling up on the couch with me. In my dream he had come back to life — but he hadn’t really. His body had materialized, but when I looked into his eyes they were black as coal and empty of life, without a spirit.
It took a number of years for me to come to an understanding about that dream, and that happened when I was faced with the decision to euthanize my other dog, Alex. His old age had caught up to him.
I remember telling myself I could keep his body alive with medications that would give him energy and alertness, but eventually destroy his already compromised liver and kidneys. I could inject him every day with fluid that would help flush out the fluid from his heart. I could put him through a surgery to remove the oozing tumour on his bum. I could feed him pills to help him defecate and more pills to prevent his bladder from leaking. I could do whatever I could to keep him alive for myself, or I could just accept that he was not immortal and it was time to let him go.
When we bring new dogs or pups into our lives, we subconsciously sign a contract with our dogs to end their lives. We give them a life and we also have to have the courage to let them die with dignity.
As humans, we want to hang on to life forever, but I think that dogs know there is something else after death. That is why they accept it so peacefully, unlike humans. We are constantly trying to find ways to prolong our lives because we are so afraid of the unknown and death is a really big unknown.
This is another lesson we can take from our dogs, as we all will eventually face our own mortality. If our dogs can accept death with grace, dignity and in some cases filled with joy, maybe we too can find a way to be unafraid of death and, just like our dogs, taste life right up to the end. Maybe they know something we don’t.
Joan Klucha has been working with dogs for more than 15 years in obedience, tracking and behavioural rehabilitation. Contact her through her website k9kinship.com.
