One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.

• Pope Francis

When you see me fly away without you

Shadow on the things you know

Feathers fall around you

And show you the way to go

• Neil Young

 

Ain’t but three things in this world that’s worth a solitary dime. 

But old dogs, and children, and watermelon wine.

• Tom T. Hall

Last year was a year of pet loss.  I had to put my 20-plus year old cat ‘RentaKitty’ to sleep in April.  She was a great cat, a tough old broad who could tell a story or two, and she had outlasted a husband, several moves, three cars, and two career changes.  My son had known her from birth, and it was very sad for both of us when we had to say goodbye.  Then over the summer I lost the last three hens that had moved with us to the farm when I remarried, as well as a rooster and a rabbit that had both been abandoned before we took them in.  It was sad.  I shed tears.  I let go.

In September my dog of twelve years became ill.  She had seemed “off” for a day or two, nothing I was too concerned about, and then she was suddenly at death’s door.  My husband and I carried her semi-comatose body into a clinic where I do some relief veterinary work.  I ran some blood work and took x-rays.  She had an astronomical white blood cell count, an enlarged heart, fluid in her chest cavity, kidney failure, and a visible tumor in her abdomen.

I knew it was terminal.  I asked the staff to help put an IV catheter into her so that I could take her home and euthanize her.  My husband demanded, “You’re a veterinarian; can’t you fix her?”  I relented and agreed that we would give her a chance.  I hooked her up to IV fluids at home and set up a hospital pen in our kitchen.  I gave her massive doses of antibiotics and corticosteroids… and she rallied!  By morning she was vastly improved.  She continued on fluids for a couple of days and on antibiotics for two more weeks.

We had three fantastic weeks with her when she acted like her old self.  I knew it was only a temporary reprieve.  I knew in my heart that she would be gone by Thanksgiving.  I cherished every moment and took time to show her how much she was loved.

And then in October she crashed and burned.  I received a panicked message from my son that she was “really bad.”  I excused myself from the conference call with the USDA that we were on at work, and I headed home.  She was flat out on the floor.  My son and I lifted her onto her bed, I started treatment to make her more comfortable, and I drew a blood sample to access her organ function.    Maybe she would rally again?  I drove the sample to where I could meet a colleague who could run it at his clinic.  When I arrived, my husband called.  She was dead.

I had learned from all the people and pets that I have loved and lost that life goes on.  I got up and went to work the next day.  I cried all the way there.  I put on my big girl pants and did my job.  I cried all the way home.  When I buried her, I got out my guitar and tried to sing her an old Neil Young song, “Birds,” but I could not stop crying long enough to finish it.  It was milking time, and the skidsteer was darting in and out of the barn, cleaning the walkways while the cows were in the parlor.  The neighbor pulled in with his pickup truck, stuck his hand out the window and yelled, “Hi, Jane!” while I was standing there holding the guitar.  The cows got milked.  The chickens and ducks got locked up.  Dinner was cooked.  The cats were fed.  Life goes on.

The next day I cried all the way to work and all the way home, and the day after that, and so it went for weeks.  Although I can now get through most days without crying, I have shed more tears for her than anyone I have ever lost, more tears than I shed for my maternal grandparents who were the most powerful positive influences in my life and who formed the rock that held my family together.  I have shed more tears for the dog than I have for lost friends, mentors, my father, relationships that ended badly, and all the unrequited loves of my youth put together.

Then it reached a point where I had to look at my grief and ask myself, “What the hell is wrong with you?” I wasn’t a person who talked about my dog all day long or covered my desk at work with photos of my pets.  I have a son, after all, and my pets are not children (although I named one of my cats “Secondo” in jest).   Yes, I loved my dog; however, I don’t think that veterinarians love their pets any more or less than anyone else.  Obviously we love animals, but so do most people in the world.  What sets us apart is veterinarians are scientists who happen to like animals more than we like people.  And then I realized why I was grieving so deeply:  she was my last connection to so many parts of my life that have been lost.

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I was in private practice when we found each other twelve years ago.  It was mid-January, and overnight it had reached the coldest temperature of that winter, -15 degrees  F.  A puppy had been brought in to veterinary hospital where I was working.  She had been abandoned outdoors in a cardboard box at a fuel oil company, and a worker had found her in the morning.  Her right hind leg had frozen solid.  The support staff was trying to thaw out her leg in a pail of lukewarm water.  She looked at me.  I looked at her.  She was an abandoned animal with a major medical problem, and if we notified animal control they would issue a euthanasia order.

Euthanasia is a hard fact of veterinary practice, and I estimate that I have euthanized well over a thousand animals in the past twenty-two years.  Any veterinarian will tell you that occasionally there was an animal that they simply could not euthanize, and they ended up adopting it.  For whatever reason, this puppy was my one in a thousand that I could not euthanize.  I knew I couldn’t save her leg, but some unreasonable part of me wanted to try.  I thought that if I could save her leg, I could find a good home for her.

I took her home and told my then four-year old son that we weren’t keeping her and that we were going to take care of her until she was all better and could go to a new home.  My son’s response was, “Let’s name her CarCar.” (He was going through a Woody Guthrie phase at the time).

Of course I couldn’t save her leg and I ended up amputating it.  I already had a dog and wasn’t looking for another one; in fact, I already had another three-legged dog.  It’s strange how God works sometimes.

Those were happy times.  All of my prior dogs I had adopted as adults from dog pounds, and this was the first time that I had the pleasure of raising and training a puppy.  My son had a playmate.  She loved to run through the house, squeaking her ball in her mouth, while my son chased her and squealed with joyful laughter, and my older three-legged dog barked along.

My son was still a sleepwalker back then, and I would frequently encounter “zombie baby” in the hallway in the middle of the night.  He turned five and started kindergarten, and was still sleep walking and unable to sleep through the night.  Over Christmas break we tried two new things that were life changing for my son and his sleep patterns:  the first was melatonin; the second was putting CarCar in his room at bed time.  Suddenly my son could sleep through the night, and as restless a sleeper as he is and was, CarCar never got impatient with him, never nipping or yelping when he accidentally kicked her in his sleep.

My grandmother was still alive, and I would take Carcar next door every day to visit.  My grandmother adored her.  The two of them would hang out on the couch together all day while I was working.  If for some reason I took Carcar to work, then Grandma would ask my mother, “Where is the dog with the big head who belongs here?’  After my grandmother died, Carcar would sleep with one of her bathrobes every night and clutch it like a pillow.  I buried her with that bathrobe.

In the fall of 2007 I left private practice to teach full-time in a veterinary technology program.  I needed a live patient for students to demonstrate auscultating heart rates and taking femoral pulses on for a lab practical.  Once again my dog astonished me with her patience, never objecting no matter how long the student took or how clumsy they were.  She diligently worked for seven years of lab practicals with approximately 150 students.  I knew at the time that I would never be able to replace her.

Life changed.  I met my husband, we married, and we all moved to the farm.  CarCar now had her own sofa to sleep on in the master bedroom. Her three-legged companion had died in 2007, but she still had RentaKitty to keep her company.  She no longer went to see Grandma on a daily basis.  I wondered if she ever got lonely.

In the summer of 2013, we took in three kittens that were born on the farm.  One of them, “Secondo”, started to regularly nurse on CarCar.  The two of them would sleep together, and we would hear him nursing and purring all night long.  It was bizarre.  CarCar never seemed to notice or care.  Secondo kept up this aberrant behavior for two years, until CarCar died.

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There’s a boulder over CarCar’s grave.  I siton it sometimes and talk to her, but not for very long because I start weeping.  I realize now why her loss has been so hard on me.

She was my last connection to my last full-time job that I held in private practice.  It was there that I amputated her leg, the single most emotionally and technically challenging surgery I have ever performed.  I had the privilege of being a large animal veterinarian for the first several years of practice, but small animal practice for me was like a dark jungle interspersed with quick sand, the stuff of nightmares.  I carried the weight of all my perceived failures:  the surgeries that had not gone well; my bumbling social skills which led to poor client relations and client dissatisfaction; the diagnoses I missed due to lack of experience or unavailability of the proper diagnostic equipment; the patients who died or whose condition worsened under my care; the crazy cat lady who made a complaint against my veterinary license.

There are veterinarians who thrive in companion animal practice, but it left me feeling traumatized; I wanted perfection, but the practice of medicine is not perfect. I couldn’t keep things in perspective, that 95% of the clients are decent people and most of the time we do more good than we do harm when we try to help.  In school a 95% was an ‘A’; in private practice all I could focus on was the 5%.  But in my saddest, darkest moments, when it seemed like the world was against me, I had my CarCar, my living example that there were at least one or two things that I had done well in practice, and maybe I wasn’t the horrible, mean, dishonest criminal that the crazy cat lady had portrayed me as.

Private practice was also a place where it is possible to adopt a new puppy and take her to work with you every day while you are training her.  These days I am gone 12 hours a day and work at a job where no pets are allowed.  CarCar was a once-in-a-lifetime dog, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to have another; but even if I wanted another dog, I no longer have the lifestyle for being a good dog owner.

She was my connection to the house that my son and I lived in before I was remarried.  It was a big, quirky, rambling, workman’s house, built into a hill.  The carpet was the same color as the Jungle Room at Graceland.  There was ugly paneling in four rooms, unfinished floors, plumbing and electrical problems, and crumbling stairs.  Slowly I started to make improvements.  I saw the potential for what it could look like if I ever had enough money to finish the renovations.  My son and I lived there with CarCar and RentaKitty.  We were happy.  I loved the house.  I still own the house, but someone else is renting it.  They don’t love the house.  The house doesn’t feel the same now.  Everything has changed.  I miss the days when I lived there and I was happy.

CarCar is intertwined with my memories of former students and the teaching career that I left behind when I went to work for the government.  And, of course, CarCar was my last connection to my grandmother.  I believe that I am grieving for Grandma when I grieve for CarCar, and that’s wht this loss is still so raw for me seven months later.  Grandma was love.  CarCar was love.  I picture them together in heaven:  Grandma is sitting on the couch with CarCar’s head resting in her lap while Grandma strokes her.  Or Grandma sits on the couch and throws the squeaky ball for CarCar to fetch.  CarCar could no longer hold her squeaky ball in her mouth the last couple of years of her life, but heaven is a perfect place.  She probably got her leg back.  They are both happy.  It makes me smile even though I am weeping.