No One Told Me About the Pee
I couldn’t sleep last night.
Is it the pandemic? The hazardous smoky air from wildfires that kept all of us inside for a week? Is it the choices that I now have to make where there is no easy answer, such as give up my career OR send my kiddo into daycare, during the middle of a pandemic?
No.
It’s the dog. He’s 14 and has the doggy version of dementia. He has lost control of his bladder. At his last check up, the vet brought up end of life and euthanasia. It was a conversation I knew was on the horizon, but hadn’t prepared for.
“I’m not saying he’s there yet,” she said.
I was in the Prius, discussing my little guy’s end of life on the phone as she examined him inside. The “talk,” came somewhat unexpectedly because Elwood isn’t visibly suffering; he’s addled.
“It’s OK to let go if everyone in the house is miserable. Whenever I see a dog make it to 14, I know it is loved.”
Sometimes I walk around the corner and a pile of pee soaks my sock. I attempt to react calmly, because I know that it will end and that I have such little time with this guy — a month? Two months? A year? It is very frustrating, but it won’t change.
He’s “in decline.” Words more appropriate for expiring fruit, wilting flowers, or rusting appliances, not a lively little being who has slept in my bed most nights for over a decade. A dog that sat right by me as I started having contractions, like whatever pain I felt, he felt it too. A dog that climbed into my lap the first night we brought him home and licked me right on the nose, indicating that I was his person.
The vet said the pee would only get worse.
How could it? I wanted to ask. How can an animal so small produce so much goddamn pee? She offered a medicine, but then said it will get to a point where all you’re doing is giving him more and more medicine.
“Shoving it down his gullet. Is that really good for anyone?”
As our human baby grows bigger, stronger, and begins to use the potty without prompting, Elwood is shrinking in mind and in body. Losing commands. Losing control. Losing so much weight and muscle mass that the ridges of his spine are visible.
A few years back, strangers would mistake him for a puppy. Now they just comment on how old he is and give me a sympathetic look, as if recalling beloved animals they put to sleep, as if I am headed into a storm they just emerged from.
He still plays. He picks up a ball or his little elephant and runs with it, barking at us to join him. He still eats. After his checkup, I use the vet’s forms and determine he’s in the yellow zone, the “not yet” zone, the “enjoy this time” zone.
It seems like just yesterday, we were teaching him sit and paw and heel and taking him to puppy kindergarten. He hid under the chair the first day and then graduated by running toward us when called and was complimented on his “recall,” the most important command a dog can learn.
It seems like just yesterday we were putting boots on him because we lived in Quebec City and it was so cold that his paws would stick to the ground. He walked so shakily, like Bambi on ice that we carried him around instead.
It seems just yesterday, he was running with the big dogs at the dog park so fast, he would eventually crash and tumble, and I would race after him yelling, “be careful,” like I do now with my daughter.
Elwood isn’t an easy dog. He’s not what we pictured nor even what we wanted–I wanted easy and playful, low-key dog that everyone loves. I wanted a boston terrier, the American Gentleman because they’re “so good with people.”
I wanted a dog I could bring to the beach and watch swim or even a dog that would snuggle up with my friends or one I could bring into the office sometimes.
Elwood is not that dog.
It takes him a long time and a lot of pieces of chicken to go from nipping at a stranger to letting them pet him. He has severe anxiety and we’ve done our best to remove the situations that make him anxious.
He hates walks, especially when it rains. Did I mention we live in Seattle?
He has a knack for finding the most important sheet of paper in a pile and ripping it to shreds. He has chewed debit cards, receipts, the covers of beloved books — usually in moments when we were unable to pay attention to him.
We clean up the pee again and again and again in a not-funny Groundhog day. We spend $60 a month on medication for his cognitive dysfunction. We’ve fed him special salmon dog food his whole life and when our human baby was born, we spent hundreds of dollars on a dog behaviorist, so that we could keep him because YES, having a baby and a needy dog IS stressful but “getting rid” of him was never an option.
He’s our family.
His absence will hurt — he sleeps by me almost every night, in the space between my knees or near my back, sometimes burrowing under the covers. He loves his human family. He has surprised us all by eventually tolerating our toddler, even when she is not being gentle.
Elwood has taught me what real love looks like. Real love is cleaning up pee, again and again and again. Real love is accepting when your friend doesn’t like the beach, instead of forcing them to like the beach.
Elwood has taught me patience and how to communicate without words and what end of life care looks like — all the misery, bodily fluids, the wanting for the pain and hardship to end, but not their life.
Real love is meeting someone where they are, not where you want them to be. Real love is letting them go, when it is their time and yes, maybe determining when that time is for them because they cannot do it themselves.
It is not his time, but it is near. It came up too fast. It always does.
