Louie's Last Day

Remembering Louie, and the gifts dogs give us.

Louie died on Monday.

During his morning walk, everything started out fine, until it wasn’t. I’ll spare you the grisly details, but as with the first time we learned he was sick a few weeks ago, again I had to carry him home. Such pain.

The difference was that this time, I knew that he had a terrible diagnosis looming overhead like the sword of Damocles. And with this Monday walk, the happy days of health we’d be granted as a way to prepare for his leaving us had come to an end.

And indeed, these two weeks were so joyful that we got into some crazy magical thinking that maybe things would be fine after all. We even arranged a phone consultation last week with our veterinarian just to make sure that the original diagnosis — aggressive hemangiosarcoma of the right ventricle — was correct. After all, he was happy on his walks! Eating plenty! Wagging his tail! Excited to see us when we came home!

Alas, she confirmed the diagnosis by reading us his cardiac echo report; she also kindly supported our decision to delay the euthanasia until he needed it.

So carrying him home in my arms on Monday morning in the steady rain of the season’s first nor’easter, I knew that the denial period was over. He suddenly was suffering again, and couldn’t “do dog things.” I put him in his favorite bed, and called Carolyn who was on her way to work; she reversed direction and met me at our vet’s office.

Curled up in his bed at the vet’s, his breathing shallow, his face expressing confusion and discomfort, Louie looked back at us as we petted him. There was an injection to put him to sleep, then a second injection to stop his heart — and he was gone. We’ve taken some consolation in that we both were there with him at the time.

Since then, we’re living in a dog-free house for the first time in 12.75 years, and a pet-free and child-free house for the first-time … ever. (We moved here with our toddler son and cat.) There’s no cute face looking up at me from his bed as I head downstairs to get morning coffee — “gosh you wake up early” Louie seemed to say each day. (Guilty as charged.) No nails scurrying into the kitchen to catch bits of cheese as I make my daily lunch. No one bopping the back door dangling bell with his nose to let us know he’d like to go outside.

And all the paraphernalia that remains — he had 4 beds (why not?), multiple throw toys, a water and a food bowl, a couple of “puzzles”, a leash and a harness, a veritable mountain of treats. Boy did this guy get a lot of treats these past two weeks. Deserved them, too.

One thing that keeps surfacing in my brain as I think of Louie is how much our life has changed since we got him in early 2013. Our daughter was in high school, our son still in college nearby — now they’re out there in other cities, living their adult lives. My father and Carolyn’s mother were still alive. It was pre-pandemic — an event like 9/11 that carves our memories into a “before” and “after” like few others.

So many friends and family have reached out to us for support, it has been truly wonderful. For additional comfort, I’m reading this book by the brilliant cartoonist Harry Bliss; could there be a better title?

I’m interspersing it with selections from another book, which my amazing editor at NEJM Journal Watch Kristin Kelley thoughtfully sent me, and which regularly elicits wet eyes:

How about this profound statement for an example?

Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?

Another excerpt, if I may — this time a poem, one emphasizing the dog’s brilliant evolutionary gift: Their undying expression of love for us, their human owners:

THE SWEETNESS OF DOGS

What do you say, Percy? I am thinking
of sitting out on the sand to watch
the moon rise. It’s full tonight.
So we go

and the moon rises, so beautiful it
makes me shudder, makes me think about
time and space, makes me take
measure of myself: one iota
pondering heaven. Thus we sit, myself

thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s
perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich
it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile,
leans against me and gazes up
into my face. As though I were just as wonderful
as the perfect moon.

And if this very public mourning of mine seems like an indulgence, my apologies. I’m finding it very therapeutic and promise to stop on this morbid topic after this one. After all, Louie’s time with us is over.

But I’ll finish with an even more public expression of grief — and argue that it captures better than anything how we dog lovers feel when the all-too-short lives of our beloved canines come to an end.