Erik E Esckilsen

On the Dog-Grief Narrative

Exactly two weeks have passed since my dog, a golden retriever mix named Bella, died. She was euthanized in a veterinary hospital within a few hours of being diagnosed with extensive, aggressive liver cancer. According to the veterinarians who attended to her in her final days, she probably suffered neither much nor long; the cancer had worn her down gradually, sapping her strength over several months, until her compromised liver began to bleed into her stomach over a day or so, quashing her appetite. It’s possible that death felt, to Bella, like the culmination of an extended, graduated fatigue. I don’t recall her whimpering or displaying any other signs of acute pain. In her age — which the vets called “geriatric” and estimated as being older than ten — Bella moved slowly, especially in the formidable July humidity. A touch of arthritis sometimes caused her to limp, but medicine had been ameliorating that condition effectively for a few years. She vomited a little bit one evening roughly a day and a half before the moment of her death, which was the only obvious signal that Bella gave of her illness. While her life, especially the hard first part of it preceding her adoption by my wife, Laura, may have conditioned Bella toward a kind of stoicism, I take solace in her being able to walk, if slowly and a bit tentatively, and inclined to wag her tail at the sight of human company right up to the end.

I have tried, in the above reflection, to avoid sentimentality. I admit freely to having been moved to great sadness while trying to comfort my pet in her final hours. For that matter, I acknowledge that I am still occasionally overcome with emotion when passing through our house and certain parts of the neighborhood that, for one reason or another, trigger memories of Bella. She was, as many pet owners will understand — and many of the condolence messages offered in Bella’s passing expressed — as much a part of our family as the human souls gathered under our roof. Not to rank us, but Bella came into my care three and a half years before my twin daughters were born. (Incidentally, Bella also preceded me as my wife’s companion by roughly the same length of time.)

I have also tried, in grieving over Bella’s passing and relishing fond memories of her, to avoid mining this event for philosophical ruminations on the nature of life and death or even on why human begins become so attached to their pets as I was to Bella. It is true that I miss that animal terribly at times, but it is also true that my own parents are in the late stages of their lives, that young men and women of great promise — the sons, daughters, and siblings of my own friends and neighbors — die every day in wars overseas, and that fatal accidents and illnesses befall human beings with such entropic frequency that the simple act of getting out of bed in the morning sometimes seems a doomed venture. I choose to view Bella’s death not as tragic but as an inevitable part of caring for a pet. Don’t get me wrong: She was a gem. But she also enjoyed a high quality of life for at least six of what I’m guessing were her twelve sentient years. To invoke a cliché, it was just her time to go.

What interests me today, two weeks later, is the effect that sharing the news of Bella’s going had, and continues to have, on my coping with this loss. Although Bella went sooner and more quickly than I had expected or hoped, even as she was dying beside me I was aware of the multiple narratives being constructed — most of them by me — to give reason and order to two seemingly unreasonable and disordering phenomena: (1) the (imminent and then actualized) strongly felt absence of an energetic presence that brought only joy to a life defined, as all human lives are, by joys, disappointments, and hardships; and (2) death from an illness of largely unknown cause. What interests me, in other words, is how the narratives one constructs in grief function to soothe a pervasive and profound sense of loss by approaching that loss from multiple angles and assaying comprehension in smaller parcels of that whole — rather in the manner of a cancer invading and colonizing a body organ by organ.

Here, then, are some of the narratives inspired by the death of Bella Anne Rabinovitz (November 29, 19?? – July 20, 2010).

THE NARRATIVE OF BELLA’S BIOGRAPHY
Laura and I were unable to determine the exact age at which Bella died, as we were never certain of her age in life. We did decide, however, on one November 29 when Bella had enjoyed a day especially full of her favorite activities, that surely this day must have been her birthday. Such activities included sleeping late, not one but two long walks — one to a local park, the other along a scenic rural path — treats awarded for good behavior as well as discovered on the abovementioned walks, and an excessive amount of human affection. Really, this schedule described many days in Bella’s life; reduce the number of daily walks from two to one, and you are looking at 99 percent of Bella’s days with Laura and me. One might justifiably claim that Bella was a little spoiled. I don’t deny this. What is more, I defend my methods in caring for her on the grounds that they were a kind of reparation for the hardships she must have endured before Laura rescued her.

Laura adopted Bella from a family in Essex, Vermont, over Labor Day Weekend in 2003. These caretakers were the latest of several who had cared for (or not) Bella, whose name at this time was Buffett. Why Buffett was unwanted by her earlier caretakers Laura was unable to determine, but the Essex family’s complaint was this: The dog was in the habit of carrying tack from their horse barn to the crawl space underneath a porch to which she had been relegated. In other words, these people who cared so little for their golden retriever that they made her live underneath a porch also disapproved of her innate propensity to retrieve. This very habit was among the dog’s many quirks of which Laura and I would become fond. When anyone entered our house, Bella would pick up a nearby shoe or something of similar size and weight and carry it around for a minute or so, tail wagging, as if showing off this ability. (If this writing were a New York Times obituary, Bella’s relentless conveying of objects would be noted as one of her chief contributions to civilization.) She rarely chewed on such objects, content just to carry them around for a while and then set them down. While she didn’t hide them, she discarded them at random, which sometimes made them difficult to find when needed.

Lucky for us, the Essex family found this propensity not at all charming. They were eager enough to be rid of Buffett that they advertised her availability for adoption in the ABSOLUTELY FREE section of the newspaper. Laura was among twenty or so people to call about the dog within minutes of the ad’s publication. She implored the owners to let her drive over immediately and have a look at the dog, having lost her golden retriever of 11 years, the legendary Maggie, just a couple of years earlier.

Buffett, renamed Bella, was in fairly rough shape when Laura brought her home. The dog was emaciated and had apparently delivered a litter of puppies recently, which must have been taken from her abruptly, since her raw teats still swung from her belly. Her nervous reaction to being leashed for her first walkabout suggested that she had never been on a leash before. Trauma in Bella’s past occasionally manifested in such behaviors as a grave wariness of harmless, inanimate objects — a sawhorse in front of a pothole, a large tree stump — and outright fear of intermittent beeping sounds, such as made by mobile phones and smoke alarms with dying batteries.

Laura, an experienced dog owner, nourished Bella back to health, and the dog’s sweet nature soon shone through. Indiscriminately friendly toward human beings in that way of many golden retrievers, and largely oblivious to other dogs she encountered face-to-face, she barked only when another dog passed by her territory, and she never picked a fight with any living thing for as long as we knew her. I would like to say that she was loyal, but I suspect that she greeted each prospect of affection and a snack with equal enthusiasm. That she chose to range no further, when unleashed, than the sidewalks and yards one house on either side of our house I attribute, in part, to her fear of being abandoned.

Perhaps that is not giving Bella enough credit. We were good to her, and she knew it. In response, she integrated her habits, quirks, needs, and wants with ours. She required less direct care than some varieties of houseplant, though she required as much attention, not a moment less, as anyone near her could possibly spare. I wonder how many years will pass before I no longer expect, upon letting myself into the house, to see her madly rooting around among the shoes by the front door for a prize. I may forever wonder just who was being rewarded in this ritual — I for coming home or Bella for awaiting me so steadfastly.

THE "SHE HAD A GOOD LIFE" NARRATIVE
Or, LA BELLA VITA
One of the more comforting expressions we heard and uttered, and continue to hear and utter, in mourning Bella’s death is this one: “She had a good life.” While this may be the most commonly uttered expression in times of grief generally, its somewhat pat effect did not, in our particular case, undermine its goal of putting into broad perspective — and in positive terms — an otherwise sad, isolated event. What made, and continues to make, this expression comforting is the fact that, in Laura’s and my estimation, it is true. Bella did have a good life. Our recognition of this pleasant truth liberates us from such unpleasant thoughts, regrets mainly: that her cancer wasn’t detected in time to be treated; that Bella couldn’t be with us for just a little bit longer; that, when our infant children drop food on the floor, which they do systematically, Bella isn’t there to take advantage of the windfall. “She had a good life.” We test the veracity of the claim by enumerating, in narrative, the ways in which her life was good:

-- Her friendly disposition compelled people to pet her often and at length, and she lived in two neighborhoods densely populated with people inclined toward showing affection to an obviously friendly dog.

-- Bella was taken for a walk nearly every day, often to local parks where she was able to roam without a leash.

-- That her caretakers are moderately avid to avid hikers afforded her opportunities to roam a fair amount of regional wilderness. Vermont peaks bagged: Mt. Abraham, Camel’s Hump, Snake Mountain, Mt. Philo. Adirondack peaks bagged: Blueberry Mountain.

-- Laura and I count among our friends several dog owners, so whenever we were away and couldn’t take Bella with us, she stayed with familiar people, sometimes in her own home. Except for during her brief stay at the veterinary hospital, Bella never spent a moment in a crate or cage in all that time that Laura and I cared for her.

-- Prior to getting cancer, Bella had been in good health for an animal of her breed and age. Her hearing and eyesight were no longer sharp, and she had a touch of arthritis, but she suffered from few ailments over the years.

-- Because I’m able to conduct some of my work from home, Bella often had human company during the day, which appears to have been her strongest desire. When our daughters were born eight months or so ago, the number of people home with Bella during the day, along with the frequency and duration of their presence, increased exponentially.

THE NARRATIVE OF GOOD MEDICAL DECISIONS
We comfort ourselves with the notion that we did all we could for Bella, medically speaking. She had received an X-ray and a full blood workup roughly a year ago, and this examination turned up nothing of concern. Just a few months ago, she went under general anesthesia to have a troublesome wart removed from beside her eye, and the blood work associated with this procedure also revealed no clear sign of cancer. Fatty tumors on her back and side and a cist over her right eye — typical developments for Bella’s age and breed — had been tested and determined to be benign. If we were in the practice of having our pet receive ultrasounds on a regular basis, we might have detected her cancer early enough to treat it. We were not in the practice of doing that; no one is, for obvious reasons. Only when Bella vomited on the evening of Sunday, July 18, did we suspect that she might be ill. Even then, though, our first guess was that she was experiencing a bout of something gastrointestinal.

On a rainy Monday, July 19, Bella was quite lethargic. I was able to get her to go out in the yard in the morning, but, after completing her ablutions, she parked herself on the lawn. Bella was never one to spend much time alone in the yard and certainly not in the rain. Although she hadn’t eaten her previous night’s dinner or her breakfast that day — which, again, was not entirely unlike Bella when the weather was hot and humid — she vomited a little more mid-morning. Laura made an appointment for her to see a veterinarian at Fitzgerald Veterinary Hospital that afternoon.

The attending veterinarian, noticing that Bella’s abdomen was distended, recommended an X-ray and a drawing of fluid from her stomach. The X-ray revealed little; the vet was not sure which organs were which. The fluid she drew from Bella’s abdomen was impossible to misinterpret: blood. The vet hypothesized that the blood was leaking from some organ, probably the spleen, through a fissure created by a mass — that is, a cancer. She further speculated that, if her diagnosis were correct, there was an equal chance of the splenic mass being benign as being malignant. If the mass were benign, the spleen could be removed entirely, and Bella could live a normal life for as many more years as her general condition would allow. If the mass were malignant, the spleen could be removed, and Bella could live a normal life for probably months before the cancer showed up in other parts of her body.

Another possibility, the vet noted, was that a mass had attached itself to Bella’s liver, not to her spleen. She — the veterinarian — was not board-certified and so could not operate on the liver. She could, however, operate on the spleen. In fact, she could operate on the spleen more or less immediately. She produced a page of information on the cost of the surgery.

While I was reviewing the cost sheet, I was troubled by more than the final figure: roughly $1,400 for an exploratory surgery to remove Bella’s spleen. I should say that I was troubled more by something other than the figure: the prospect of Bella undergoing an unnecessary surgery. This particular veterinary hospital did not have the capacity to conduct ultrasound examinations. The veterinary hospital in the next town over, however, did.

Laura and I conferred on this matter and agreed that the best option in the interest of Bella’s welfare was to take her to the other facility, Burlington Emergency & Veterinary Specialists (BEVS), where she could spend the night and receive an ultrasound in the morning. This plan had the added advantage of allowing the BEVS vets to administer fluids and nutrients to Bella through the night, increasing her blood volume and stabilizing her condition in the event that she would require surgery. Laura and I weighed all of this against the probability that Bella would be scared in a strange place without us. As noted elsewhere in this blog entry, we had never put her in a cage or crate.

The decision to move Bella to BEVS was perhaps the best decision either Laura or I ever made on Bella’s behalf, for, as the following will explain, it spared her the indignity of an unnecessary surgery at a time when she must have been feeling frightened and vulnerable. The BEVS vets let me inspect Bella’s lodgings and gave me a rundown on how they would attend to her overnight. I left feeling anxious about her imminent ultrasound but confident that leaving her at BEVS would be safer than bringing her home.

In the morning, I returned to BEVS for the bad news: The ultrasound had revealed that Bella indeed had cancer. It was not on her spleen, however, but on her liver, and it was extensive, diffuse, and inoperable. Her prognosis was days, not months or years. Our options at this stage were limited: Bring Bella home, only to have to bring her back soon to be euthanized; bring Bella home, only to have her die at home; or euthanize Bella there, on that day. Of the three, naturally I preferred the two that entailed bringing Bella home. As Laura pointed out, however, this would prolong the inevitable and would also be an emotionally difficult experience for us. Plus, with eight-month-old twins, we could not offer Bella the kind of quiet environment best suited to her condition. The veterinarian added that there was no guarantee that Bella would not suffer more acutely at home. As she put it, dogs in her condition “tend not to go quietly.”

So we made the hard choice and decided to have Bella euthanized that day. Being in the position to make such a call is a bit surreal, but it was, we are sure, the humane action to take. The BEVS staff was sensitive to our grief and certainly to Bella’s suffering, and in those last few hours we spent together, Laura, Bella, and I were able to share some quiet, private moments.

THE NARRATIVE OF OUR FINAL HOURS TOGETHER
I arrived at the veterinary hospital early on the morning of July 20 to hear the grim prognosis. Laura was at work, so, after sending her a text message asking her to contact me, I sat with Bella in her cage, where she seemed uncharacteristically calm for a dog that had not seen the inside of a cage in more than six years, if ever. Of course, her energy was low because of blood loss, but she seemed more relaxed than fatigued. While I waited to hear back from Laura, I petted Bella and, for the first time, began to feel intense sadness over her fate. To be sitting with her, stroking her soft fur, receiving her baleful gaze every time my hand stopped moving, yet knowing that, within a few hours, she could....

Laura called, and we made the decision to euthanize Bella later that day. Laura would reschedule her appointments for the afternoon and come to the hospital. I communicated our decision to the attending veterinarian and then left the hospital for a bit of breakfast.

Returning a short while later, I rejoined Bella in her cage and, while petting her, reread “The Sorrows of Gin” from my paperback copy of The Stories of John Cheever, which I keep in my truck so as never to be stuck somewhere without something good to read. If I were to recast this reflection as a work of fiction, I might select a different Cheever story to insert into this moment, such as “The Worm in the Apple,” since “The Sorrows of Gin” offers no metaphorical commentary on the situation at hand. It’s simply the story of a young girl who sees her family life disrupted by gin.

Bella’s IV drip had apparently done a good job of stabilizing her condition, so, after finishing “The Sorrows of Gin,” I took her outside for some fresh air. Again, I was gripped with sadness, this time for the realization that this would probably be Bella’s last trip out of doors.

The humidity had slackened a bit, and the sun was out. I let Bella off her leash, and she followed me to a picnic table in the hospital yard, away from the parking lot so as not to be distracted by with the sight of other pets coming and going. While Bella lay on the ground, I petted her. By this point, I had been petting her for probably a combined three of the four hours that I had been with her that day. I am sure that this was just fine with her. She was a creature of few needs, but the need to be petted, if she were in the company of a human being, was nearly insatiable. One of the shared rituals that I miss the most is her coming to my bedside in the morning, nudging at whatever part of my body was closest to the edge of the bed, and positioning herself to be petted for as long as I could stand it. I suspect that she had conditioned me, over the years, to pet her in my sleep.

Laura arrived with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s vanilla ice cream and spoons. We fed Bella and ourselves a few bites and then set the carton on the ground between her paws for her to enjoy.

We led Bella on a short walk around the yard, and she did seem a little shakier to me. Inside the hospital, she lay down on a bed in an examination room, and we sat on the floor with her. The veterinarian who administered her anesthetic noted that he and his family members had been through this experience several times and that he understood it is never easy. I took some comfort in these remarks.

With Laura’s and my hands on her, Bella died.

The saddest moment was still to come: the sight of Bella, alone on her deathbed, facing away from us as we exited the room. This is one of few images from my life with her that I hope to forget.