putting down the dog
Hey! I hope all of you are managing to enjoy some of the hottest days we have ever experienced in our lives. Wear sunscreen! It is always an honor and a pleasure to write to you.
We are talking about death in this installment. If you don’t feel up for that, please click off and, if you want, come back at a time when you feel ready.
When I was maybe ten years old, my dear friend died from brain cancer. My mom said she held his hand as light flooded the room and then he was dead. When my dad told me he was dead I screamed and collapsed to the floor. I knew he was sick, that was clear from the start, but it felt like it got really bad so suddenly. He had been in remission. He had been better. We used to play with Legos and he would tell me his dream was to open a theme park where everything was made of Legos and I said I would help him.
I think I knew he was going to die when he stopped going to the hospital. He spent a lot of time in bed. He always had tubes in him, some giving and some taking. His arms were green and blue from years of puncturing. Chemo, radiation, chemo, radiation, something new, something fancy, something expensive, something desperate.
Yesterday, we put my dog, Sugar, down. The second of our dogs to die this year. We adopted her around the time my friend died. We picked her up from the breeder and a week later picked up her sister, Spice. They spent their entire lives side by side, on top of one another, both big spoon and little spoon. We live near a hospital, so when the ambulances would drive by, Sugar and Spice would howl with the sirens.
My dad embraced Sugar’s whole body as she died. He buried his face in her torso fur and sobbed and told her over and over again what a good dog she was. I put my head on my Dad’s back and held my hand on Sugar’s torso. I felt her heart stop beating.
Beat beat beat beat beat beat beat beat .
We were both crying as we walked out of the vet. Walking in was much stranger. The receptionist smiled and asked who we were there to see. My Dad said, “our yellow lab is in the back- Sugar.” and the receptionist, still smiling, led us back to Sugar’s room. Room 3. My mom was already there, laying on the floor with the dog, covered in white hairs. I just kept thinking Well, here we go. We kill the dog now.
My dad and I hugged outside the vet, still crying. He said he wished I didn’t have to feel the pain I was feeling and I said that this is life, but what I really meant was that this was the opposite of life and neither of us are any closer to understanding anything at all. We climbed back in my dad’s car and an ad for BetterHelp online therapy was playing on the radio. The narrator asked us if we were feeling depressed, anxious, or lost in the world. I laughed.
When she died, the first thing Dad said was, “I’ve never pet her without her tail wagging.” I kissed her side. She didn’t move. Of course not. When does a friend become a body?
On the car ride home I could only think I need to call my brother. He is in Venice and I didn’t know what time it was in Atlanta, so I definitely didn’t know what time it was in Venice.Eventually my brother was on the other end of the phone. Dad asked me to put it on speaker. He said something about the dog and his favorite memory with her and I asked him to pull over. I left the car, telling him I’ll walk home. My brother was still on the phone, most likely confused why I was leaving. The moment my dad left, I screamed and cried into the phone saying, “I felt her heart stop beating I felt her heart stop beating” and my brother asked “Why would you do that?” and I said “My hand was right there.” I told him that the whole time I was thinking of him. I thought of him when she was dying and I thought of him when she died and I think of him now as I write this. I told him my therapist quit and he said, “I know.” I told him I am okay and he said he wished he was there, but I could hear laughing in the background and I hoped he didn’t mean what he had said.
Yes, I cried because Sugar was dead, but mostly I cried because she was so happy when we killed her. Her tail wagged and she licked my dad and my face and gobbled up the food we gave her. She was so happy, but she couldn’t move. Her spine had turned to cement in the past 24 hours, but she loved us and hadn’t noticed because she was just so happy to be there in the room with us. Hi! I love you! You guys are the best! Dad said that he thought she was saying “Get me the hell out of here!” I didn’t know if “here” was the vet or Earth.
I think my greatest fear is that I am incapable of loving people as much as they love me. It doesn’t really add up given I am always falling for people decidedly out of my reach. That’s the thing though, I am more comfortable with that detached “love”. I’m more comfortable with unreciprocated love. That’s not really true. The truth is I’m not comfortable with anything at all. I feel gross. Sugar licked me and gave me all the love she could and I cried because I could never love her as much as she loved me but for all she knew I loved her more than anything in the world because maybe I did because maybe that’s how I love, by accident.
Did you know I almost died this summer? After a surgery, the hydrocodone the doctor gave me made me throw up and the pain worsened with time. I eventually ended up in the hospital per the doctor’s recommendation in extraordinary pain. They gave me opiate after opiate trying their absolute best to relieve the pain. I begged them for a morphine drip. The last time I had morphine it relieved all the pain I had ever felt and made me feel like I had never even learned what pain felt like at all. They administered the morphine through a syringe rather than through an IV. The nurse injected it slowly and then suddenly all at once. I immediately started shaking and I vomited and my whole body was soaking wet with sweat and I remember the doctors rushing me out of the room towards the trauma ward and hooking me up to hundreds, thousands, millions of machines. Infinite tubes and needles puncturing every inch of my skin, all of my bodily functions immediately outsourced to a whole room of technology. The chaplain came and prayed by my bedside and my parents wailed and the doctors were swarming around me and people were shouting. I don’t know what happened, but I remember they told me I had come close to “being gone.” How do you come back from that? I remember a girl from my high school almost died and she took that as a sign from god to start writing bad country-pop and buy thousands of Instagram followers. Maybe I need to do something like that. All I did was make a video out of it. That video is currently being displayed in an art gallery in New York City along with a few other works by me.
After hanging up the call with my brother, I walked a few blocks towards home and called my buddy who came and hugged me and picked me up off the side of the road and drove me back to my house. My mom said the moment she opened the door, Spice came and licked her legs. She tasted her sister. I think she knew then that Sugar was dead because she put her tail between her legs and walked up to my room and came and laid her head on my foot and wrapped her leg around my ankle. I played guitar for her for a bit and she fell asleep right there on my foot and I saw myself in her and I thought one day that will be me with everyone I love and I just hope that I too have somewhere to rest my head when that day comes and icy death comes and takes those whom I love more than words. Every time I close my eyes I see someone I love dead and I mean it. That’s how I know I love you, I fear for you.
Dad said “this is a part of life” when my friend died, but I just kept thinking No, it's the other thing! The only other thing. And so I screamed and cried because that is what I do when something is suddenly nothing.
Thank you again for reading. Feel free to write me back if you feel compelled.