The sedative is coming. Twenty minutes after it, maybe less, it will be done.
Blue is lying with his head down on the cushion, his right paw stretched across the plaid. Veronica’s face is pressed into the top of his head.
He isn’t looking at her. He isn’t looking at me. He’s looking a little past both of us, and his eyes are suddenly unafflicted by the growth and the glaucoma. There’s light in them.
I have my phone in my hand. A lifetime behind a camera and the moment speaks to me. I take the picture.
There were thirty-six puppies. I didn’t pick him. He picked me.
He looked up and locked eyes with me, and that was it.
Veronica drove us home with him in my lap the whole way. We played in the yard a little. I went inside and sat down to lunch. I looked down and his head was neatly tucked between his paws at my feet.
He’d come in on his own. Nobody called him.
That night I learned the other half of him. We’d never used a crate for toilet training. Never needed one. So I put him in the ensuite bathroom with a little folding gate across the doorway, thinking that would hold him.
It didn’t. He would not tolerate separation from us. He fussed and fought and threw himself at that gate. Crying to be let out. Working on climbing over it. He would not be deterred. It was remarkable, how determined something that small could be.
That was Blue, the whole dog, on the first day. He could fight you to the wall on anything you tried to make him do. And he would lie down at your feet without being asked.
This last year took things from him one at a time.
A growth on his right eyelid. A soft cyst on his right shoulder that grew to the size of a baseball glove. His nipples swelled. His belly bloated. He saw less. He walked less. He stopped feeling well.
As he started to fail, we started using a folding ramp to help him into the SUV. Eventually he learned to walk up it without a thought.
Then one day he stopped. He didn’t trust it anymore. Or maybe he didn’t trust his eyesight anymore, or his balance. Coax him and he balked. Push him and he planted himself. The ramp went back in the garage. He started getting left at home, and it broke our hearts.
Months went by without a ride. Then one day in the spring I set the ramp against the open hatch, climbed in with Blaze, and ignored him. I was trying to use his own psychology on him.
He walked right up.
We went for a ride, his first in months, and he was so happy.
Nobody could make Blue do anything. But leave him out of something, and he’d decide for himself. Once he decided, it was done.
In the final months we built a ramp to ease the four steps down into the front yard. He kept finding new ways to fall off it, so it kept getting more elaborate. Rails. Extensions. Every fix answered a new fall.
In the end even that was too much. We took it out, and I started walking him out the main gate and around through the side gate into the field instead.
Then he stopped eating, and something strange happened. The cyst shrank from a baseball glove to a hardball. The growth on his eyelid pulled back and nearly disappeared. It was as if the tumors had nothing left to feed on. They were starving right along with him.
On what turned out to be his last night, I was headed for bed when he started to cry out, again and again, sad and pitiful. Veronica and I both knew then that he was in real, undeniable pain for the first time. It seemed like an eternity.
Finally he settled down, and I took him out to pee. It was 2 a.m. I had the flashlight in one hand and the lead in the other, and I was fumbling with the latch, getting flustered, trying to hold everything at once.
When I finally got the gate open and turned around, he was standing at the top of the steps. No ramp. He’d just walked up them, the way he used to.
He looked at me like: what are you doing?
The next morning came and he was calm, and quite still. I called the vet and they said they could take us at 3 p.m. We had a quiet day consoling him.
When it was time, we rolled him onto a homemade stretcher and carried him out to the car. He let us. He didn’t fight. He didn’t cry. The dog who threw himself at a gate his first night home lay still and let the two people he’d chosen carry him.
I used to think his will and his devotion pulled against each other. They didn’t. His devotion was his will. He gave it where he chose, and he chose us. Every time he refused to be forced, he was keeping it his to give.
I’m seventy-four. I’ve buried several dogs. I know what’s coming for me.
For me this picture is spiritual food.
I look at it and I see how I want to go. Eyes wide open. Knowing I gave my life everything I had. Knowing I did my parents and my grandparents proud.
That’s what’s in his face. Not resignation. Not fear. A dog who did everything he came here to do, and knows it.
When I reach that final moment, I can only hope to match his courage, his nobility, his trust in the beyond.
His head is on the cushion. His paw is on the plaid. Veronica’s face is in his fur.
The same eyes that picked me out of thirty-six puppies are open. The light is still in them.
“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now
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