R.I.P.

We took Bonnie to the vet today to be euthanized. Because we got to the clinic ten minutes before they closed for the weekend, we had to use a vet we didn’t know. She asked if we wanted to be present, and we were taken aback because we’re not the kind of people who avoid the presence of death. As the vet administered the fatal injection, Peggy lay on the floor hugging Bonnie and sobbing while I jabbered on about unrelated things, so you might say that I wasn’t any too present for death myself.

When we got home, the first thing Peggy wanted to do was to cuddle, but the first thing I wanted to do was to bury Bonnie. We waited overnight to bury Baxter when he died three years ago, and by that time, he was cold, stiff, and looked pitiful, so I wanted to get Bonnie in the ground while she was still warm and looked like she was asleep. I’ve been in so much physical pain that I worried that digging a grave would leave me worse-off, so Peggy helped.

Before the burial, I took Bonnie indoors and showed her to our cat because I wanted him to know why she went away. Maybe it didn’t help, but I’ve done that with other pets, and never saw any reason to think it was harmful. While Brewsky smelled Bonnie, I wondered if I could ever love him the way I’ve loved so many dogs. I can tell that there’s a lot going on in that little head of his, but I can’t usually tell what it is, and that leaves a gulf between us.

After the burial, I felt like I was in a movie in which happy images of Bonnie’s life ran before my eyes one after another. Things I hadn’t thought of in years came back like a vivid dream in resplendent color, and I beat them down as best I could. I wanted to be alone, so while I did yard work, Peggy called friends and relatives for support. I was surprised because Peggy usually avoids talking on the phone. After thinking about it for two hours, I took 25 mgs of oxycodone, and it cheered me considerably.

Some people don’t understand how anyone can grieve for a dog, but I’ve grieved more for dogs than for any of the people I’ve lost, probably because my dogs were with me all day everyday and were innocent and dependent.

Peggy won’t want another dog for years, if ever, but I already want one. On the other hand, the last three years of Bonnie’s life were tough on Peggy and me because Bonnie became blind, fearful, arthritic, and started to lose her hearing. People say that dogs adjust well to blindness, but Bonnie spent those years walking into walls and furniture, and it really got to me until I started taking Cymbalta and marijuana.

It’s also true that I started thinking of dogs differently after I had my shoulder surgeries. After two of those surgeries, Peggy was out of town for a week or more during the early stages of my recovery and, it being winter, I found it really, really hard to take two dogs (Baxter was still alive after the first surgery) walking in the seasonal drizzle everyday. I couldn’t dry them and clean their feet adequately with one hand; I worried constantly that they would trip me; and I had a hell of a time just keeping myself from getting wet. One day, a pit bull attacked Baxter, and I had to beat it off with one arm. Luckily, it was a young female and not too aggressive. 

After my third surgery, Peggy was out of town again, and Bonnie became ill with autoimmume hemolytic anemia. For at least a week, she was so sick that I expected her to die at any moment. She needed medicine every eight hours, but this meant having to shove the pills so far down her throat that she couldn’t spit them out, and I couldn’t do it with one arm, so my friends Ellie and Josh came over every eight hours. It was then that I started to think of dogs as a liability that I would be better off without. I also resented Bonnie because throwing tennis balls to her hundreds of times a week for years was probably what ruined my shoulders.

For the last two years of her 15 years and 7 months, not a day went by but what I wished she would die sooner rather than later because her infirmities were so upsetting, especially listening to her bump into things, which made me cringe every time she did it. Dogs need far more from us humans than most of us are able—or even willing—to give them, and I found this especially true of a blue heeler because blue heelers want to be on the move every waking moment. If she hadn’t been my dog, I wouldn’t have believed how much exercise she needed, and when she went blind, I couldn’t satisfy her need except by taking her walking, and my arthritic knees made even that difficult. I was afraid that when she did die, I wouldn’t enjoy remembering her because her last few years were so hard for me (they seemed harder for Peggy and me than they did for her), but I don’t think that’s going to be true. I think I’m going to remember her whole life.

15, today

Bonnie spends two or three hours everyday walking into walls, one after another after another. Bump, bump, crash. Bump, bump, crash. When she dies, the first thing I’m going to do is to wash smudges off walls. Until then, why bother? It would be like raking leaves if leaves never stopped falling. I’ve heard people talk about how well dogs adjust to being blind. Bonnie became blind at 13, turned 15 today, and the adjustment has all been downhill. I doubt that this dog (who once figured out for herself that could carry a ball and Frisbee at once by putting the ball in the bottom of the Frisbee) has the mental capacity to adjust, although it’s hard to tell given that she’s not only totally blind, she’s 90% deaf. There isn’t a day goes by but what Peggy and I don’t wish that she would die already.

Nothing ever brought us more joy or more sorrow than Bonnie. I blame throwing tennis balls to her with a throwing stick, hard, hundreds of times a week for more than a decade for ruining my shoulders. I threw those balls because she needed the exercise. Now, I’m mad at the universe for making me suffer for the rest of my life because I tried to do right by my dog. Yet, I must admit that I mostly enjoyed our ballgames—as well as hiking together and her running alongside my bike and, oh yeah, camping (except for when she rolled in something). 

People were forever stopping to visit as I threw her ball across a drainage canal and she ran to a pedestrian bridge to cross the canal for it. They would say something about how fast she was, and then she would shift into yet another gear and go even faster. Sometimes, ten or fifteen dogs would gather in this same field, and every last one of them would be trying to catch Bonnie, and she would be running in and out among them like a fighter plane among bombers.

In her second year, she turned into a hellion and started attacking other dogs, including her lifelong friends, so that was the end of doggie friendships. After that, the only dog she ever played with was this great big old part husky named Freeman. Freeman liked to kill things, and he would have killed Bonnie if he could have caught her, but she was so fast that she could run in, nip his hindquarters, and make her getaway before he could get turned around. Freeman’s person and I used to have a lot of fun watching our dogs’ little game, but we were also glad that Freeman stayed pretty close to us because we never knew but what we might have to make him cough up Bonnie (I know, you’re not supposed to break up a dog fight; you’re supposed to stand there and watch your dog gurgle through a crushed trachea after you let her do something dangerous).

Sure enough, one day Bonnie was running backwards with the usual derision in her eyes and a big smile on her face, no more than ten feet in front of Freeman’s gaping jaws, when she tripped and landed on her back. At that moment, Freeman became an optimist and doubled his speed. Bonnie didn’t just get up, she exploded up, spun around in the air, and hit the ground running. In that moment, I was glad my dog was okay, but in the next, I wondered if she would ever play with Freeman again. As it turned out, she never stopped playing, neither did she stop running in reverse right in front of him and occasionally tripping. I just loved the spirit in her that said, “The world is my oyster, and I can do any damn thing I please.” I spent half of my time trying to protect Bonnie from the results or her own cockiness (the pink collar that Peggy bought for the little puppy that she wanted to name Clair just never did seem right on the dog that became Bonnie).

To see Bonnie as she is now, so beaten by life that she’s afraid of a cat that doesn’t mean her any harm, is very hard. I’m tempted to say that it’s harder than the death of my mother, but I guess it’s just hard in a different way. So, why don’t we put her down? I could even do it myself as far as that goes (I really have it in me), but she still enjoys her 45-minute walk each day, and she still wags her tail when I roll her tennis ball to her. When the tail stops wagging, it will be time.

Peggy: sixty years worth, ten years at a time

1952. That's Peggy's sister on the right. Dianne was (and is) timid, whereas Peggy was (and is) tomboyish. You might have guessed this from their body language.
















1962. As I was looking at this photo trying to think of what to say about it, I had the thought: "I could just eat this little girl," but I realized it might be interpreted sexually when what I meant was that that I want to use my body to build a fort that would protect her from all the sad things that have since happened in her life, many of them caused by me. Even that doesn't capture what I feel when I look at this picture, but it's the best I can do. The sweetness, alertness, kindness, shyness, playfulness, innocence, tomboyishness, and femininity in her face is, well, when we talk about the sacred, I feel like saying, "But I feel the sacred all the time. Looking at this picture is one of those times."





1972. By now, we had been married six months, but hadn't known one another a year. This photo was taken on a canoe trip on the Pearl River near Jackson, Mississippi. I'm sure I put Peggy up to the pose because she was too shy to do such things naturally, and our relationship was still new, after all, despite the fact that we were married.











1982. We were building a shed at our home in Mississippi, and Peggy appears to be having an amiable interlude with a nail--either that or she's asking it not to bend when she drives it into the oak lathing. She insisted on the un-carpenter-like apparel and wouldn't wear anything on her feet but sandals. One day, we were splitting wood, and she dropped a large piece of post oak on her foot and broke it--the foot, of course. Silly me, I thought this meant a speedy trip to the hospital, but Peggy said, "I'm not going with my hair dirty," so I held her erect while she showered.


1992. Peggy was on figure skating teams in Oregon and in Minnesota. She then got into downhill skiing, and it and mountain climbing became her passions. I tried skating. skiing, and mountain climbing, but didn't care for them.












2002. Even I have summited the mountain in the photo, but it's a little one that you can scramble up. You've got to be willing to work hard and risk death to get up the ones that are technically challenging and prone to bad weather. Peggy couldn't get enough of them, so I became her support person, going on training hikes with her and keeping camp at trailheads. Mostly, though, she and a half dozen men (few women climb) would go off and leave me home, and that was fine with me. The red thing in her hands is an ice axe. It's good for probing for crevasses, climbing steep snow or ice, and self-arresting when you fall (you will fall).

2002. Those are cross country skis. Peggy and I did this together a fair amount, and we also snowshoed a little, but she found them boring compared to the excitement of downhill skiing, so she was forever going off with another carload of men to Hoodoo Ski Area or Willamette Pass. I don't like snow, so I don't miss cross country skiing much, but I would still like to go occasionally. Mostly, when we were going, we would simply drive to where the road was closed by snow and take a day trip from there. We have snow camped, and we have also skied to fire towers and spent the night in them. This photo was taken on a day trip, You can tell because the pad is too short for lying down (it's for sitting on), and the pack is too small for carrying everything we would need to camp. Bonnie was five in the photo. She's now 14 1/2 and blind. She still likes to play fetch.

2002. If the slope below her was as steep as she's making out, I doubt that Peggy would be holding her cap in her hand, yet she did go on rope climbs that people have been dying on for decades. Like many of Oregon's Cascades, this particular mountain has a bad reputation for "rotten rock," meaning rock that either comes off when you pull or push on it, or else falls on your head for no reason other than that your luck was bad. People have climbed Everest only to die in Oregon because mountain climbers aren't interested in safe mountains. I didn't like for Peggy to climb dangerous mountains, but it was in her blood, and I've never imagined that I had the right to tell her what she could or couldn't do (I subscribed to Ms Magazine for her when it appeared in the early '70s, but I was the only one who read it). I would be at a loss how to handle a subservient woman. On the one hand, it sounds sexy, but I don't know if I could respect her. I want influence, not control.

2012. Sad to say, but Peggy no longer engages in any strenuous activity, probably because of arthritis more than anything. She just took up drinking coffee, so in the photo she is having her daily brew of 3 parts vanilla soy milk to one part strong coffee. We try to find campsites with a good view and that (except for the road we drove in on) are so closed in by terrain or vegetation that we can let Bonnie roam freely. The thought of losing a 14 year old blind dog in the wilderness is simply too horrible to contemplate. You can see that we camped directly on the road, confident in the improbability of anyone coming.

Despite the fact that Peggy is the breadwinner in our family and has enjoyed a lot of traditionally male activities; she is all woman. And despite the fact that my bedroom is pink, I cry more easily than she, and my father was a transexual; I am all man. We have always given one another the freedom, and even the encouragement, to transcend traditional gender roles. Perhaps, this was made easier by the fact that we have always known who we are.