Never Never Land

On pets, death, and the inevitability of growing up

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

If you’re fortunate, the first loss you experience will be an animal. For many children, it’s a parent, a grandparent, a sibling. My own first memory of death was when my black lab, Marley, got out of the house and ended up drinking antifreeze in a neighbor’s yard. They kept it outside, open to any animal that would wander by and smell the sickly sweet. It wasn’t an accident. They didn’t like wildlife or neighborhood pets on their property.

Marley was wild and young. He lapped it up and returned while we were out looking for him. In my four year old memory, he died that very day, but in reality antifreeze poisoning doesn’t happen that fast. It must have been a few days later when he started vomiting and couldn’t stand anymore. By the time my dad took him in, it was too late. That big dog left and never came back.

He was the grandson of a dog my stepmom had. Her name was Sophie. She was a beautiful golden retriever, though none of her traits had been passed down to her daughter Moonie. Moonie was jet black like Marley, nothing but lab from the looks of her. My memories of them together are brief, running into golden grass in the mountains while I sat on a picnic table and my dad yelled for them to come back. They never turned at the sound of his voice, just ran full sprint into the wild.

My aunt took them when my dad followed my stepmom to Texas. I write “stepmom” so you understand the relationship, but I never referred to her as that. She was always Debbie to me. It was years later, after a story too complicated to tell now, when I had moved to Texas, then back to Colorado with a new stepdad in tow, that I dealt with the death of Sophie.

She was old then. I was eight or nine, and she couldn’t get up anymore. Her back legs just wouldn’t hold her. My aunt took her to the vet, and my cousin and I went with. We said goodbye to her in the car. She couldn’t get up and was too heavy to carry in. I still remember the way my heart ached then, swallowed up and gulping grief. Like drowning. We made her a book, kept a little hair and taped it so we would never forget that golden red fur. We wrote poems and put our grief to paper, just like I’m doing now, nearly thirty years later.

I said goodbye to my cat today. My kids were there too. I told them they didn’t have to stay, could step aside any time they wanted, but in the end both of them waited with her while she passed. The vet who came to the house was kind. He had eyes like a pastor, and I wondered if this was his calling.

“I was an only child, but I grew up with a pack of dogs around,” he said earnestly while he unpacked his things.

He could see how sick she was, and told us that as hard as today is, the alternative would be worse. I nodded my head, and had to avert my eyes for most of his talk. My daughter, eight years old, took it all in. Her heart is wide and vulnerable like that. My son’s is too, but he’s eleven, and a boy. He tries to keep his closed most of the time, and the man’s words were getting in, pushing that door wider.

“I wish he wouldn’t have talked so much,” he said after, and I knew what he meant. I feel myself close my heart up to those electric moments, when the skin gets prickly in the static of it, the realness of now. But I needed the words to buy time between his arrival and her passing. And my little girl needed them to help her understand what was happening.

He gave her a sedative, and her body relaxed and opened like it hasn’t for months, and I realized how right this is to do for her. She was hurting. We waited with her like that, her body laid on its side and breathing peacefully, the labor gone out of her. And then I told him we were ready.

It went quickly. She never knew. Was asleep and dreaming while her heart stopped. There was nothing traumatic about what happened. Only a deep sadness knowing she couldn’t stay even though I wanted her to.

I think I live my life solving problems. I get clever, imagine I can figure my way out of everything. Control is the illusion. Then my cat gets cancer, and I can’t think my way out of it, and I’m snapped back into a girl body at four and then eight and then twelve. I’m swallowed whole in the ocean of reality. Death and life and the ground taking back what its’ owed.

I’m on my mother’s shoulders, and she’s telling me we don’t live forever. The night is blue around us, broken only by orange cones of street light shining on the asphalt. My sadness rises like a tide in me, but I still don’t know what it is.

Tonight I laid my daughter down, and she cried at the loss of an old cat who meant so much to us. I think of that little creature’s smallness in the world, in the big scheme of things. But not for my little girl. One day she’ll be twenty, then middle aged, then old, and tragedy will hit. She’ll lose someone, and her body will remember this day, when she said goodbye to her cat and saw what death was for the first time, and realized with her own eyes how precious all of it is.