Saying Goodbye to Our Dog

Well, today was absolutely terrible. We had to euthanize our dog, Molly. Her decline was precipitous: she started retaining fluid, stopped eating, and had trouble breathing. The vet figured it was cancer or heart failure. Expensive tests and treatments were not going to reverse the outcome. It’s been hard to see her suffer these past few days.

It seemed that she was fine one minute, and then all of a sudden she was not. She couldn’t do much more than lay down all day. We had to help her get outside to use the bathroom, and even to get up off her hind legs (her back legs and feet were extremely swollen.)

Seeing Molly so listless was troubling. This is the dog that very much wanted to murder the mailman, every day. In fact, she wanted to murder most living things, excepting her family (and their friends.) Her most recent kill was a skunk in the back yard. Any animal that walked by got barked at, even if it was on the other side of the street.

We knew things were dire when a raccoon climbed down our chimney and gave birth. Molly didn’t even lift her head when animals were making a racket in her own house. A far cry from the time she tangled with a raccoon in our back yard (that was a fight she lost, which cost us a ton of money because we had to take her to the overnight emergency vet to get her patched up.)

So we sat the girls down and talked about Molly yesterday. We told them that Molly was very sick, and that she wasn’t going to get any better. We told them that she was suffering; that we would take her to the vet, and they would help her fall asleep so that she could die peacefully.

“I don’t want Molly to go away,” cried our nearly-seven-year-old despairingly.

I spent a lot of the night holding my sobbing daughter. The four-year-old seemed to take it in stride, having just one sobbing episode. We’re not sure that she understands the concept of forever, so there may be tears in the future. Thankfully I was already at work when the girls woke up this morning and told Molly goodbye for the final time.

The vet was nice, and seemed sympathetic. He told us we were doing the right thing. I know that we were, but I feel like “doing the right thing” should offer more comfort than it does.

I spent the better part of Molly’s life complaining about her. She was kind of a terrible dog. She bit a few people early on. We had to buy more expensive homeowner’s insurance.

Then we got her on doggy-Prozac, and that seemed to help. But she would somehow manage to eat all the food around the pills, and we’d often have to force feed them to her.

She ate the mail. Bromleigh got an advance check for her book, and it had a bite mark in it. Fortunately, the ATM still accepted it.

She scratched up the door frames.  She got up on the couch and licked her paws, leaving giant circles of smelly dog slobber. We had to vacuum all the freaking time.

She got skunked three times, because she was apparently incapable of learning. We couldn’t take her on walks, because she would try to attack other dogs.

We had to go through elaborate routines whenever people came over – in the early part of her life guests would have to come through the side door. She calmed down a bit later on, but would annoy our guests by begging for attention. She always managed to find the one person that hated dogs and rub against her.

Still, she was our dog. And the thing that saved her life was her unfailing patience and gentleness with our children. We had her evaluated by an animal behaviorist before Fiona was born. She ingratiated herself to the woman, rolling over and showing her belly, taking in all of the attention.

Molly was submissive to the girls – if they grabbed on her, she might cry, but she would never snap at them.  She hung around their high chairs and reaped the benefits of our children discovering cause and effect.  Molly paced around whenever the girls were in different rooms, trying to find a way to protect them both.

We got Molly from a no-kill shelter. After she bit someone, we called them. The employee we spoke to told us that they would have to euthanize her, because of the bite history. Some no-kill shelter. So we kept her. We dealt with her. We bought a gentle-leader leash, got her on drugs, and worked at ways to decrease her anxiety. She was a pain in the ass. Incredibly inconvenient.

I had always joked about how great it would be when Molly met her end. How much our lives would improve (this was usually after vacuuming couches that she knows she wasn’t supposed to be on, or cleaning up dog shit, or dealing with a house that smelled like skunk.) But it’s not fun. It’s terrible.  Molly was our family dog.  And we got her because we were newly married, and super dumb. Bromleigh got appointed to a church, and we moved into a parsonage in the suburbs. We had a fenced-in yard, which we figured was as good a reason as any to get a dog.

At the shelter she was the pretty one. But she was just laying down in her cage. She didn’t jump up to greet us, like the other dogs did. We found out later that it was because she was overcome by anxiety. We picked the dog that was touched in the head.

And yet, this was our dog. She became part of our family. She might not have lived as long if we didn’t come along. Someone else might not have gone to the lengths that we did to keep her alive. We were probably pretty irresponsible, come to think of it. You’re not supposed to keep a dog that bites.

We got past it. The drugs helped. The routines helped. And she didn’t bite anyone else for the rest of her days (well, if you don’t count the skunks and chipmunks.)

I’m truly surprised about how upsetting this is to me. I’m not a dog person. Probably still not a dog person. But it was heartbreaking to leave the vet’s office with a plastic bag containing her leash and collar, and a receipt for services rendered.

She was a living creature, and I watched the life pass out of her today.

I’m not sure that I can ever have another dog.