the dog who came to stay

Photo: VanVliet

This picture is not of my dog (my mother's dog -- Peaches). But, after scouring boxes of photos, I realized I didn't have a single photo of her, and this photo, from Flickr, looks like her.

A week ago I had to put Peaches down. She was 17 years old, blind, almost totally deaf, and without much sense of smell left, either. She still loved to eat, but her concerns were increasingly problematic and without solution, and she was increasingly disoriented.

So, I had to take that step I'd long been dreading. When I called my vet, I couldn't believe that the minimum price for euthanasia and group cremation, was almost $400. So much for poor people having pets. I phoned around and that seemed to be the going price here in Toronto -- though the City of Toronto will do it for $37.10 (not vet assisted). I didn't have the nerve to ask how they did it, but I had visions of a club.

After scouring the Internet I found a pet hospital in Peterborough, only an hour-and-a-half drive from Toronto, which performed the necessities for a third of my vet's price. I also liked the idea of making a special trip for the act. It gave it more dignity and made it harder for me to change my mind.

Peaches had been my mother's dog, and a wonderful companion to her. When my mother passed away two years ago, I brought Peaches back to Toronto with me. Not because I necessarily wanted her, but because between my two brothers and I, my situation was the one most practical to her presence. I was attending school, and never felt the need for a pet.

But Peaches was family, and she was a connection to my mother. She adapted to her retirement home in a Toronto highrise with surprising ease. She didn't have to navigate stairs anymore! And as her eyesight worsened, she adapted and still found her way around with relative ease. It was amazing to see how she adapted.

But we are kinder to our animals than to people. We don't make them suffer to the last breath.

I am so glad I took her to Peterborough. The pet hospital had a little hospice room with wingback chairs and boxes and boxes of Kleenex tissue. The vet explained how he would give her a tranquilizing shot, like valium, that would put her to sleep. He would leave for 10 minutes and come back to give the shot that would stop her heart.

She was a small dog, hardly weighing 15 pounds at her advanced age, so the first tranquilizing shot worked quickly. She sat in my lap and I could feel her start to go limp from the drug. It didn't take long at all. The vet left us alone for 10 minutes and came back with an assistant. They placed Peaches on the towel-covered examination table, shaved off a patch of fur on her right front leg, and the doctor gave her the final shot. I had my hand placed on her, as I thought I would be able to feel her stop breathing, but the tranquilizer had slowed things down so much, I couldn't tell when she was gone. The doctor had the stethoscope, then tapped her eye, and said she was gone. The doctor's fingernails were dirty -- a detail I couldn't understand, and which still snaps back into my mind's eye as incongruous.

I was impressed with their kindness and impressed with how gentle the process had been. Peaches lay on the towel looking as if she were taking a nap. It also made me realize how easily one can kill with drugs.

I left Peaches at the hospital where she was to be part of a mass cremation at some point, and then taken by the hospital to a pet cemetery in Ancaster, near Hamilton. According to a website, a nice, apparently haunted, cemetery.

Peterborough had a foot of fresh, beautiful snow on the ground. I drove down to Riverview Park in the late light of day and trudged through snow to the river. It was cold and comforting and warming as silence and nature can be. Cedars draped and bent to the water, icy and clear, picnic tables barely visible content in circles. I cried and cried some more, and was very glad I had made the trip a special one.

I stayed the night in Peterborough as the weather threatened white-out conditions, and, because I wasn't in a hurry to get back to Toronto and my empty apartment.

I've never been a 'pet' person. I often thought people put too much trouble into them, attention better spent on another person, rather than an animal.

I knew I would miss Peaches. She ate on the floor, by my side, at meals, and was just there --as dogs are. But, I miss her more than I thought. The hardest part is coming home from work, or anywhere -- the grocery store --, and forgetting for a moment that she's not there.

Except, I've learned, that she is here. That dog came to stay, and has.