I know a dear, lovely old lady whose health and physical condition aren’t their best. I love her very, very much and can’t bear the thought of my life without her in it. Because of her, the "death panel" and euthanasia debate has made me cringe. We are facing those end-of-life decisions at her side; we are weighing the options and watching carefully as her condition changes. The only problem for us is that she can’t fully tell us when she’s ready to take the final step.
This dear old lady is a dog. She’s our baby, our darling pug, and she’ll be 17 years old next month.
That’s beyond matronly, positively ancient for any pup. Many has been the time I’ve come home to find her deep asleep, and without the comfort of her snore (which also helps me sleep at night), I might have mistaken her for already having left us. She’s a cancer survivor, a Cushing’s disease survivor. She’s a canine tank who seems to have barreled through it all, but she’s declining, and we’re scared.
We love our baby dearly, and we know that, at nearly 17, she is mostly blind and deaf as a post. She’s also arthritic in joints and her back. She experiences a great deal of pain. We are fortunate to be able to afford good medical care for her, and medications to help manage the aches that make her whimper sometimes when she’s just trying to lie down for a nap. Her arthritis and seemingly growing frailty are making it more difficult for her to get around easily. Sometimes she just falls over making a turn or tripping over a random object, and she’s not able to get up on her own. She gets very scared, and her limited sight and long-gone hearing leave her sometimes feeling very alone in this world, even when we’re in the same room. She can’t sense us as well as she used to, and so she often stands right by us, leaning against a leg or close enough at heel that she can see us easily – though this sometimes leads to me tripping over her, which breaks my heart. It always results in lots of kisses from me and a turned face from her, meaning, "You get no kisses before food." They say time heals all wounds; not with this one. Nothing soothes her hurt (or loneliness, or boredom, or, well, anything) like food.
After a feeding, of course, the kisses are bountiful. When a pug is as hung in the tongue as ours is, they’re sloppy kisses, but there’s nothing better. Pup kisses make life worth living.
But how do we know how long her life is worth living? Quality of life is as important as length of life, both to people and pugs. When we’re talking with people about advance directives, palliative care, hospice, and end-of-life decisions, we have the advantage of at least being the same species. If we do that in time, we can communicate the hurts and the fears, and make sure all the right wishes are set down in ink and fulfilled to the letter.
For our beloved pug, the planning is not so clear. We know the day will come. We both believe she will tell us when she is ready to go – in fact, she may just make the decision and go on her own. For me that would be ideal in the sense that we did not have to take any action to help her make the final leap. I have experienced the other choice, and it still brings tears to my eyes. When I was a teenager, my devoted kitty, who was actually older than I was, slowly declined across several months. She ate less and less, and took to spending the day on a rug in the kitchen. Our other cat, up until that time her sworn enemy, bathed her and brought her food from their bowl, kibble by kibble, across the kitchen. One cold night, my kitty came up the stairs for the first time in months and slept that night on my bed, in the crook of my knee, as she had done for years (but hadn’t in the past few months). I know now that she was saying good-bye. The next morning, she lay on the rug again, skinny and in obvious pain, with her paw over her face. She was telling us it was time.
My husband and I are watching for those signs. We have even finally begun to talk about it. When the pup has a tough day and falls over a lot, emotion-wrought looks shuttle between us. But she seems to bounce back time and again, still bopping around the house, still seemingly spunky and sprightly for her advanced age. She still raises a ruckus when we try to pet her but she’s decided it’s feeding time. She refuses to grant kisses until the proper edible offering has been made. She still stands guard in the kitchen at breakfast and supper time, and the cats still mostly respect her domain over The Edible Empire, running when she spots them and gives chase.
But she’s more scared than she was. We are, too. I saw an accounting of her weight over time from the vet – and it’s dropping, which is to be expected. She sleeps a lot more, and the sometimes frequent falls must take it out of her, especially when she doesn’t know where we are and yelps because she can’t get up. "Puppy down!" is a frequent call of late. Our cats (who are not dog people) now make a habit of sniffing her over to check on her when she’s sleeping, and when she falls, they are often at her side, concerned and seemingly wishing for opposable thumbs to help pick her up.
Merciful euthanasia when quality of life has declined to nil is a common practice with pets, one that I believe in but which still wrenches my heart. I believe people should have that right to make that decision for themselves, too. The right-wing "death panel" hysteria enrages me because it polarizes an already-controversial issue which I believe is a most merciful option to make available when people no longer wish to fight terminal illness. The clueless corps willfully, completely misrepresents this issue to misinform millions – and probably taints assisted suicide discussions for decades to come, not to mention practices like advance directives, which should be commonplace. Watching this distorted debate play out has been a horrible backdrop against which to consider my own mortality and that of our beloved pup.
Technically, she’s my husband's. He adopted her 17 years ago; I joined the pack only two years ago. I want my 15 years’ catch up time, damn it.
And I know it’s too much to ask, but I want those to be 15 years of pure love, free of lying bastards who inhumanely manipulate an emotional, delicate, private decision just to hold tight to the reins of money and power. Greed is ugly. I would like to say good-bye to those criminals long before I must say good-bye to my first and only puppy.