Izzy died on August 21, 2020, around four in the morning. During the week or two before, he changed his behavior several times and did some unexpected things that were particularly striking and meaningful to me.
Over the last two years of his life, he had been on a CBD tincture that dramatically improved things. Prior to that, arthritis had nearly disabled his rear right leg, and he had restless, painful nights, groaning audibly as he shifted himself trying to get comfortable. The CBD changed all of that.
He always looked forward to his forty-five-minute morning walks with us and was up for everything and anything, often scrambling over rocks into streams, up and down banks, fully in his element.
We got a ramp to help him in and out of the truck, but he didn’t trust it at first, and only grudgingly later. Towards the end, he would place his front legs inside the truck and I would hoist his hindquarters up and into the vehicle. He gradually came to expect that. Sometimes, though, he would surprise us and get in and out on his own, especially getting out. He had his pride.
Over the course of that spring and early summer of 2020, he began sleeping a lot on the couch after these expeditions, often through the night. Sometimes he would make it to his bed next to me, but mostly he stayed on the couch.
Around two weeks before his death, he started sleeping in a number of different spots on the floor: behind my recliner, near the fireplace, on the front stoop, in front of one of our recliners. I didn’t understand it then. Now I think he was taking inventory, revisiting the places that had mattered to him, saying quiet goodbyes to each one.
Eventually he started to decline in his ability to do much of a morning walk. While on the trail, he would pause and stare blankly into space for minutes at a time. His last week, we skipped the walk a few days in a row. But he acted like he wanted to go anyway. I stayed home with him while Veronica took Blue and Blaze, and walked him out our front door. He would make it to the garage and then turn around and go right back—a total of twenty yards each way.
The day before his death, he insisted on going on the walk, and we loaded up the three dogs and drove to the Long Trail. Veronica headed out with Blue and Blaze while I lingered near the truck with Izzy. He surprised me and made it farther than he had in weeks, about four hundred yards each way up a moderate incline. He paused often and gazed into space. At first it appeared that he was suffering from dementia, but I came to realize that maybe he was just taking it all in—the sunshine, the breeze, the smells, the totality of being in the moment—and I tried to do the same. These are special memories for me, both of us just standing there, gazing at the trees, feeling the breeze, trying to just be.
At the start of his last week, he stopped eating. We were unable to give him his twice-daily thyroid pill and CBD because he wouldn’t eat the bread roll we hid them inside. He became very restless, waking up and wandering aimlessly, going from his water dish, which he did not avail himself of, to the front door, but once outside, he would just come back having done nothing.
We started holding his mouth open and dropping his CBD down the back of his throat, which he did not appreciate, but it definitely calmed him down. Still, the nocturnal restlessness persisted. One night, after letting him out several times, we let him stay out. It was definitely on the cool side for a summer night, but we didn’t know what else to do. We figured it’s where he wants to be and he can always scratch the door to come in if it gets too cold. In the morning, he was nowhere to be found. He gave us quite a scare. We searched high and low. Veronica finally located him, curled up and trembling, hidden amongst the tiger lilies on the side of the house. It was as if he’d gone looking for a place to die.
During his last two days, he spent hours laying in a few different spots in the backyard. I felt like he knew he was dying and was seeking out mother earth, auditioning different sites beneath the big sugar maple out back. I sensed that maybe he wanted me to bury him in one of those spots.
On his last full day, after lunch, after he had been laying next to the garden gate for several hours, we heard a hoarse, hollow, raspy shadow of a bark. The sun had found him and I figured maybe he was too hot. I carried him in my arms—down from sixty-five pounds to a mere forty-three—all the way around the house, in the front door, and over to his favorite spot on the couch. He did not try to right himself as I lowered him down the way he usually would, limply falling into the cushions.
Something happened at that moment. It was like his dimmer switch had started automatically dialing him down. He never got up again.
That evening, when it came time for us to go to sleep, Veronica and then I, individually, spent time with Izzy, saying goodbye and kissing him, fearful that he might pass in the night.
I woke up twice and checked on him, around midnight and two a.m., and he was resting comfortably, still breathing his shallow breaths.
I woke a third time, a little after four, and he was gone. He was still warm, but already starting to stiffen.
In my heart of hearts this was exactly what I had hoped for Izzy, especially after what we had gone through with Buio seven years earlier: a frantic trip to the vet, euthanasia in the parking lot, part of which Veronica missed because she was being asked for her credit card, and then cremation. I wanted to spare Izzy and us the drama and the stress. I wanted him to die peacefully in his sleep and to be buried on our property. It just seemed like the natural and truly ideal way to go, if at all possible.
Unfortunately, I had pulled my groin muscle and had a bad knee and shoulder, so hand-digging a grave was out of the question. That summer we’d had a great experience with a young man named Cole Palmer who had just graduated high school but also had his own excavation business. He’d helped us fill our new raised beds and did some tree work and grading as well. I knew it wouldn’t be practical to use the mini-excavator out back again, as we had already reseeded the grass after the first job.
Then it dawned on me: we could bury Izzy over at the log landing on the western edge of our property, which also happens to be the neighborhood “view spot”—an unobstructed, sweeping panorama of the Green Mountains.
I texted Cole around six-thirty in the morning. He was here by seven forty-five.
By eight-thirty, Izzy was reunited with mother earth. We wrapped him in the blanket that Veronica had made for him years ago, white fleece on one side and a patterned fabric covered in dogs on the other.
Cole refused to charge us, so we gave him a two-hundred-dollar tip and suggested he spend it caring for his one-year-old female golden retriever, Bailey. It was a whirlwind of serendipities. I could not have dreamed up a better scenario myself.
Later that day, Veronica and I went back and did more work at the burial site. Standing there, looking out at the mountains with the fresh earth at our feet, something shifted in me. I’d been telling Veronica for a while that I wanted to be buried on our land, and I’d recently found out that it’s entirely legal in Vermont—you just have to file a form with the Town Clerk. While we stood there, Veronica came up with a great idea: maybe we could subdivide our land, peeling off a tiny parcel that would include the log landing—say fifty feet by fifty feet—and have it declared a private cemetery.
It is a wonderful spot with a view beyond time itself. Izzy found it for me.
