I left PC with about 3 months in severance pay, a 28 week horizon for NYS unemployment benefits, a wife still working on her undergraduate degree and tending to her dying mother in Phoenix, Arizona and 3 young children who needed meals, clothing and reassurance the world was not ending. I was depressed and viewed my future with an attitude somewhere between anxious and panicky. J came back from Arizona, and after a less than stirring home coming at Syracuse airport, informed me we were getting a standard poodle because she had always wanted one (black if possible, due to some obscure aesthetics requirement). Apparently, with a finite cash supply, we would buy a puppy, and without a job to occupy my waking hours, I could focus on training said dog while looking for a new job. It was totally inane and worked out perfectly.
Moses the young dog.
He was the family dog and a companion to all (even if he seemed slightly addled sometimes). We crate trained him and in the late spring of 1999 he was my constant companion in the 3 season room which served as my office and where I eventually found employment with J&J further upstate. His crate was the safe place where he would bark at us and then retreat within because that was his safe place.
He loved walks and winter runs and rides in the van once we got him past the car sickness which troubled him as a puppy. During J's spring commute from Rochester to Syracuse to finish her BSN, Moses would ride along and then nap in the car while she attended her classes. He knew his pack and , I think, in his dog society, I was the alpha dog. He brought a toy to the door to greet any family member returning and liked laying on a bed where he could watch the street. He loved smells; whether flowers, or sheep manure, it was all good. For more than a few years he was my running companion. The sight of my shorts or sneakers, or the shaking of his collar was enough to bring him running. He was devoted to his pack members, but would let someone else investigate a stranger first (as long as they presented no threat) and would first be seen by visitors peering around behind J at the top of the stairs.
He loved removing wrapping paper from anybody's gift, but then expected to retain something for himself, whether a glove, or slipper, or stuffed animal. He would go at stuffed animals until the squeaker was removed and then seemed to feel amiss it was broken so fast and would take more time when another toy presented itself. He became a traveling companion and traveled with us to vacations in North Carolina and Florida.
Moses at the beach.
In life, death waits for us all. It advances inexorably, not with patience, or rectitude, but simply with the certainty of a cannonball’s trajectory in Newtonian physics. Some days we watch the slow deliberate arc in the sky, and some days we don’t, although I believe as Shakespeare said (I think), “Like the sun, no man should stare at his own mortality for too long.” Moses received chemotherapy for his lymphoma at CS Animal Hospital. Median survival time with treatment is about one year (Moses received the short version of a treatment protocol for canine lymphoma developed at the University of Wisconsin Veterinarian School). Twenty percent make it to two years. Moses’ remission lasted for 1 year and 10 days. The same treatment could be repeated with the same drugs for a second round, but median survival time was now 6 months. A long time ago, a doctor who lectured on the public health impact of asbestosis for a Sierra Club working group I belonged to told us statistics were lives with the tears wiped away. With my stats background I simply believe the house not only has the advantage, but ultimately wins every hand. Never bet against death.
In Moses last year (6-7 human years?) we enjoyed our time with him all the more due to our realization of it's very palatable limits. The chemo drugs had little noticeable effect on his temperament and he was soon back to his normal idiosyncrasies. The boys, aware of the endgame, took him walking or skating every night before bed. Ultimately, he would sit and stare at them on the couch every evening if the normal activities had not been concluded, and certainly refused to accompany Mom to bed if he hadn’t had his constitutional. He would run with a chew toy, or ball, into the backyard and bark for people to come play with him. Someone always did. I reflexively greeted him with, "Hi, good boy", because it always invoked a tail wag.
His last night was really hard because we wanted to give him and us every minute possible, but understood what the last treatment was. His breathing was increasingly noisy as his lymph glands pressed in on his larynx and the prednisone giving him little relief from the tissue inflammation. He waited for J to come back from Arizona. He was unable to sleep comfortably and roamed about our bedroom. On his last full day he couldn't be bothered to eat or drink. Upon rising the next morning, he did drink and pee and laid out in the grass under the palm tree in the fenced yard he loved and protected. During that last night, I think he had a seizure about 4:00 and I knew we couldn't continue this. His muzzle was now twice normal size with the lymphoma clogging the lymph glands along his jaw.
Moses last week.
I had talked originally talked about Moses life expectation with Dr. L almost two years ago, and now, after that original horrifying diagnosis last year the moment appeared to be upon us. Was there still time? Should we have waited longer? The boys had said their goodbyes and the last ride was done. Moses paced the room and then laid down as the vet techs prepared his last IV. In calculus, there is always the last delta T before we complete our approximation of f(x), but limits in the real world are not asymptotic eternally. Moses ate some special last meal with some gusto, and I'm filled with doubt. Did we misread his condition. Dr. L says no, he would have told us.
Running in upstate NY with Moses, late winter and his collar jingling, and stop
Barking for us to come out in the yard and play, and stop,
Running downstairs to see if he can ride along on our errands, and stop,
Climbing off the bed next to J as I come into our bedroom at night, and stop,
The last delta T, and stop and then just memories.
That last delta T for Moses will stay with me until my last day comes. The first drug hits Moses and he turns back to me as I stroke his back and looks at me as he surely has a 1000 times, and wags his tail and lays his head down in J's lap. I can't tell him "Good boy", because I can't talk and anything that would come out of my mouth would be convulsed and I don't want him to hear that in his last moments. J convulses in sobs and keeps repeating, "Oh, look how handsome you are", and I hold onto to her because there is nothing I can do, the children J bore us are grown, I'm no longer 20 myself and our family pet is dying in my wife's arms. Moses quietly stops breathing and for the first time in a month, a room with him in it is quiet, except for the quiet sobs of J, Dr. L and myself.
It is now almost three weeks since that morning, and I miss Moses quiet, but constant companionship, as does everyone in the house. Still my shoulder appears to be healing and there are things I need to attend to beside my memories. The personal things of his are gone, and the reusable ones are put away because I believe if things stay on the path they appear to be there will be another dog in our life and hopefully the boys can help train him (or her) during the summer. Moses made me realize I will always like having a good dog as a companion. Moses ashes sit in a small box with pawprints on it with a small plaster cast of his pawprint in the corner of our bedroom. I think about their disposal (St. George Island?), or getting a small urn, but for the present time J keeps them in the small plastic wrapped box in the small plain plastic shopping bag we received them in next to her dresser and refuses to let me place them out of sight. Considering my original opinion of her dog deliberations it does not seem like a large request to honor.
I think Moses taught us it was a good thing to be a good dog with the other dogs in your pack, and it was a good thing to ride and run with the other dogs and smell those things which had any type of scent. I will miss him, but also will remember that in my heart I'm a dog person with my own pack, and my pack knows me as well as I know them and we all depend upon each other, each playing the role assigned by birth and other accidents of fate. And of Moses final trip, I believe Moses, who could barely wait to clear the next ridge at any given time, has run ahead, but we follow the same path.
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