Ignoring odds, the dog abides

— Last April, I wrote about my old dog Sherpa and how, it seemed to me, she had stopped trying to live. I wrote about how one morning she couldn’t or wouldn’t move, how she spurned her food. I wrote about how I carried her outside into the sunlight and sat beside her for awhile, waiting for her to die.

I meant for it to be the last piece I would write about Sherpa in this space, for though she didn’t die that day or the next, I knew the end was soon and over the years I have read too many maudlin words about dogs dead and dying. All of us have our sadnesses and there are other sorts of things I mean to write about. I thought I would save the Sherpa updates for the blog.

But it is late February, and the dog I was sure would not make it to summer, much less Christmas, is still alive. She has serious mobility issues, she is incontinent and I suspect demented, but she is unmistakably alive. She eats, sometimes fiercely, and once or twice a week, Karen trundles her around the neighborhood in a Radio Flyer wagon, to see what she can, and maybe more importantly to be seen. We trot out Sherpa to be witnessed by the populace like the dressed-up husk of Castro or, as I sometimes think of her, the “poor, infirm, weak and despised” Lear.

Dogs do not read Shakespeare, but Sherpa often seems to me like that blighted king, with dark suspicions and unresolvable grievances. She came to us damaged, and while I think we made each other happy, I don’t believe I ever won her trust. There was something in her, some primal wound or congenitally crossed circuit, that wouldn’t allow that. She loved her adoptive family, but always ran from me.

She can no longer run, or even often stand, and so I have touched Sherpa more in the past month than I did all of her first dozen years with us. She hasn’t the strength to object, though sometimes she will remember herself and pop her teeth at me. It can’t be called “snapping,” for it seems a parody of the act, like poor Fred Sanford jabbing at his dummy son Lamont. (But don’t laugh too hard; when she does catch you it can hurt-she didn’t break the skin but my thumb throbbed like it had been caught in a Vise-Grip.)

The question is obvious, and we have talked about it. I know I have a responsibility to my dog, that having been heartless enough to exercise dominion over her, I now have to be heartless enough to decide that she has suffered enough. The price we pay for the comfort and joy our animals provide us is the swift, sure and permanent ending of their pain. In breach of this agreement, we cannot pretend to love them.

But it is never simple, is it?

I remember coming home from high school one afternoon to find my father crying in his den. Our family dachshund-his dog-had gone off her feed; he’d taken her to the vet where they’d discovered cancer in her gut. There was no answer, and they did it then and there. All told he was in the clinic about 15 minutes. There was nothing else to be done. (Dad never really got over it. He never wanted another dog.)

But there is nothing so clearly wrong with Sherpa. She can’t walk more than a few steps, she is dotty and we have to clean up after her sometimes. But she eats, and seems to appreciate attention-if we leave her by herself too long, she will yelp to bring one of us to fetch her in from the deck to be with her family.

Sometimes she is restless, but often she sleeps so peacefully through the night that in the morning I imagine she has moved on. But then one whale eye opens. She’s back. And what she must think of that I cannot imagine.

I worry that I have kept her alive too long because I lack the courage to fulfill our implicit contract. I worry that she hurts, because I have read that dogs are very good at concealing their pain. I worry that she may be confused and frightened, though she seems less anxious these days than she did when she was silly and frisky. I worry that she frets, that she, on some level, understands that she is disappearing, and that she dreads in the same vague way most of us do. I worry that I worry too much about this old dog who never found my presence comforting or tried too hard to please me.

I also worry that I might kill her because she has become inconvenient. That I believe I know more than I actually do. Sherpa has defied all my guesses, she abides despite the increasingly confident predictions of her demise I have made over the past several months. I know certain lines have been crossed, that she will never find her way all the way out of this dark forest, but even so. . . .

I wonder if she doesn’t still love the way the world smells. If she doesn’t take pleasure in the antics of her little sisters. If there isn’t yet some comfort in the pressure of a human hand on the back of her neck. Karen has just discovered she likes a special kind of biscuit-we still have things to learn about each other.

Sherpa has not always been a peaceful or particularly loving animal; she’s not the sort of dog that people write sentimental bestsellers about. She has been indifferent to humans most of her life, content to fill out the pack, accepting whatever comes to the third dog in line. She’s not special.

Except to the extent that she is-to the extent that there is mystery and feeling in her. There is something warm and fragile, a wee fire banked within her, that was ignited by some force or alchemy that we can’t yet and probably will never fathom.

But it is my duty to decide when that fire is doused.

That is not the most difficult decision most of us will ever face. If we are lucky, we will not only eventually deal with the aging of our loved ones but our own diminishment. Most of us will witness our own decline, watch ourselves shrink as gravity pulls us inexorably down.

The death of an old dog is neither remarkable nor a tragedy. But I was wrong when I wrote that Sherpa had given up. She abides, as inscrutable and impenetrable and holy as she’s always been. I only hope not to fail her.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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blooddirtandangels.com

Perspective, Pages 72 on 02/26/2012

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