It s so hard to part with a boy s best friend
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It's so hard to part with a boy's best friend
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Somewhere, in my youngest son's heart and dreams, a fat, hairy, yellow dog is bounding through the kitchen with someone's sandwich in her mouth. Druzilla, the dog that ate Milwaukee, is walking her last mile this afternoon.
Parents have some hard, hard things on their lists of duties, but I think none are as hard and cruel as "making the call."
However, when balancing the universe on their shoulders, as they do every day, duty sometimes makes them stern and unyielding. No one can really understand why their pet has to die. It's unfair. It's heart-rending and impossible to explain with any satisfaction to a 12-year-old who is losing his best friend. If parenting was easy, it wouldn't be a life-mission.
Drawing the line and making the call is what parents do. Their job is an unyielding onslaught of decisions that affect all the lives in their charge and everyone around them. Sometimes those decisions on where the line belongs cut right through a little boy's heart.
No one can count all the mistaken decisions I've made as a parent; at least I hope no one can. But the decisions still need to be made, and it's up to us, the parents, the "most-responsible," to make them.
It began Saturday morning.
Dru just waddled right by her food and went outside to loll on the front porch. That had never happened before. First to eat, first to snap the dinner right off your plate, first to be caught red-handed at midnight raiding the refrigerator; Dru was totally committed to the acquisition and consumption of food.
It was more than just miscreant acts of a "naughty dog," it was the crusade of a pious and wild zealot to bite, chew and gobble her way to food nirvana. She was born with a munching mission that required the kind of every minute of every day devotion that normally belongs to a Himalayan grand master monk.
Something was clearly wrong here, terribly wrong.
In actual fact, we don't know what made her so sick, but when we got home that night from the first family Easter gathering, it was more than obvious she was. We never made the second Easter dinner at noon the next day; we were at the animal hospital instead.
As soon as I dropped into the line of gray plastic waiting chairs, I knew the possibilities. I'm 52 and have been here before. First come the huge bills, then the waiting and the diagnoses, then more bills and finally a long crumbling failure of man's best friend.
That's what I'm doing right now, waiting. Putting off the inevitable and re-counting the consequences. I can't say that I've put a price on my son's dog, but I'm wondering how we are going to pay that bill, either way.
I wonder what kind of life Dru would have if she survived. I wonder how her life is right now, caged and suffering far from her boy and family. While I don't count any of our much-loved and honored animals as people, I won't see them suffer needlessly either.
I'm considering my son's breaking heart and all the wonderful times they had together. I see them on the North Slope in Alaska, Dru waddling across the tundra giving the distinct impression that the nearby caribou are looking pretty yummy. Dru is slow because of her weight, but mightily determined.
I see them in the woods beneath and behind our house fighting pirates, or exploring distant lands, two souls bonded in lifelong friendship. Best friends for now and as it will never be again. We are only 11 once.
Vets are always hopeful. More tests, more time at the hospital under observation may present the key to continued life. At best, it means probably a week or more of vomiting yellow bile, trapped in hard metal cages for Dru, followed by a life of daily injections to preserve her as a memorial to her former self.
No thanks, I don't love her enough to hurt her so badly. It's not death I fear, it's the lack of quality of life. It's sudden, it's terrible, but it's time to let her go.
So, I made "the call" on the ride back from the vet's. Today is Dru's last. Now all I have to do is pick up the phone. It seems far away and very heavy.
Prentiss Gray is a writer and stay-at-home dad with three sons, ages 11, 17 and 20. He can be reached via his Web site,
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