2/15/96 - 4/4/11
They are telling me I have to kill my dog today.
They are telling me to end my best friend’s life
and I don’t know if I can do it.
There has been no howling in pain or
screams of agony from a slipped disc or broken back.
He just sits beside me, shivering and scared in the icy arena
of life and death at the clinic. His legs were getting weak
so I brought him in for some treatment,
something that I am sure existed
to aid in older dogs with carrying their own weight.
But they say he must die.
They say he has kidney failure and is in terrible pain.
He is being stoic
and not showing me how much it hurts.
He is being strong for me
and so I have to be the one to stop this.
This life and this relationship
that I have probably dragged on too long
through all his hours of surgeries and his hematoma,
the horrid colitis and hospitalizations over the years. Allowing modern medicine to give me
all those extra years with him I felt we both deserved.
They enter with the solution that will stop his heart.
I sign some paper, some damn slick sheet saying yes,
I will allow this.
I will play God out of mercy today,
a sinful and illegal act to provide for anyone who
would actually ask for such a gift.
Legal only for our silent counterparts. So I lay beside him, staring into those eyes, those eyes which have looked on me with admiration for fifteen years
and just hope he doesn’t see the uncertainty in me.
That I wished I wasn’t doing this.
That I wasn’t sure if this was right.
That I would graciously and selfishly except another year.
That I would build him a cart to unhappily drag his ass in.
Was he really even sick? He doesn’t seem so bad to me.
But the time has come. And it is too late.
The plunge of needle
into shaved forearm.
The last willful sigh.
He is gone now.
The swatting of hand
and judgement granted
to species smaller.
The release of stored
sunlight, fire within
the wood, chemical
change, forever.
Silence.
“His heart
has stopped,”
they tell me.
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