By Tamara Walker
Dear Journeys Community,
The story in this week’s blog is longer than usual. I wrote it a few years ago, just weeks after my husband and I euthanized our 16-year-old canine companion, Kali. At that point, I’d been a veterinarian for many years, and the journey saying goodbye to Kali was a collision of two worlds for me. I was the owner of the clinic at which my dog was being euthanized, saying goodbye to one of my most beloved friends in the world. But, at the same time, I also held memories of all the dog and cat families whose grief I’d been present to in their own goodbyes in the exact same room. I still miss Kali almost every day, but now the missing feels like a testament to the depth and staying power of love rather than the sharp pain of losing something vital.
We’ve chosen to publish this piece on Journeys’ website because we believe it holds some of the grief, and the love, and the questions, we’re all struggling with as we move through Covid-19 and what it means for our lives, our country, and our loved ones. I’ve always felt that engaging with difficult questions involving our animal family members allows us to have conversations that carry less baggage, guilt and regret than our far more complicated human relationships. At the same time, the love we have for our companion animals is real and moves our hearts in the deepest of ways. So, I share this because it’s like sharing a piece of my heart with all of you in one of the most challenging times our country has ever faced – and perhaps gives us hope that our enduring memory of this time can also transform to one of love rather than loss.
Deepening Grooves:
Honoring Grief and Loss in an Old Dog’s Goodbye
In that moment before waking, when a dream might still be floating if I could just catch it, remember to remember, it comes to me. The fog rises, slowly at first, like I know something’s not right but I just can’t quite….“Oh. Our brown dog’s in our freezer.” She’s with our American Alps cow, because two years earlier, I checked the wrong box, and we were delivered half a cow instead of a quarter, and it had taken an eternity to eat all the beef. I’ve wanted to call the cow something for a long time now, but not knowing her/his gender, I get stuck between Bessie and Ferdinand, thanking her for his life every time we have meatloaf, spaghetti, steak. Our freezer had been a small sample of my life, its blocks of meat organized in walled off compartments according to size, use and texture, but Kali’s arrival changed it into chaos. Our brown kelpie dog with amber eyes and fruit-bat ears was now a shocking resident of our freezer.
My husband, Steve, and I euthanized her a few weeks earlier in my veterinary hospital’s exam room #9. I found the whirring of her intravenous pump, the pale lamplight, and the brown leather couch surprisingly comforting. I worked as a veterinary surgeon in this same clinic for ten years and shepherded many other people’s beloved dogs and cats into another life in this same room. Now it was my turn to feel my heart twist in place.
A year earlier, my colleague and friend performed emergency surgery on Kali to remove a cancerous intestinal mass that was leaking bowel contents into her abdomen. She was so sick, she spent several nights in our ICU before and after. I’d go home at night, but often couldn’t sleep, so drove back to work in the deepest part of the night. I’d take her to my office, wheeling her fluids with her bed tucked under my arm, while she slowly followed me down the hall. Curling my body around her on the floor, I whispered words begging her to stay. One night I was sure I was going to lose her, and on my way home I walked into the black forest along a trail we shared for years and a hooting barred owl called to me in my grief. I didn’t know if Kali was leaving or staying, but I pleaded with the universe for just a little longer.
After that, I savored each day we had like a beloved poem with a glass of cabernet. Borrowed time is a precious gift from modern medicine when it returns to you something you’ve understood to have lost. It’s an opportunity to relive memories while making amends for past regrets and guilt. I hate fast-food hamburgers, but I’d go through the drive through and buy two, one for her, and one for me. We took extra walks at the beach, and I relished her heavy head on my body at night, reminding me she was still there. I loved how she ambled along with her asymmetrical lumps or splayed out on the floor to rest content when her tired old legs gave in.
Kali and I said goodbye in pieces. Toward the end, I expected her death and would wake up in the morning, roll over and hold my breath until I saw her breath on the floor beside me. Still there. Her mind also started to leave, as she drifted farther and farther into a world of her own making, and we lost each other in her growing anxiety and confusion. Our attachment became so thin I could barely understand her panicked eyes and panting tongue. I’d let her outside to pee and she’d forget why she was there. Anti-anxiety medication calmed her, but then her weak legs slid out from under her, and her life became a skating rink of slipping carpets and wooden floors. One time, I bought lime-green grippy rubber paw-boots, but they didn’t fit, and she immediately shook them off in disgust. I tried Paw-Friction, crazy blue micro-balls of rubber that I glued to her feet, but two days later we went to the beach and her sandy pedicure rubbed them off. Another time, fifteen feet from me on the end of her extendable leash, she thought she’d been abandoned. I cried as I reeled her in, waving my hands and shouting her name, hoping to penetrate her terrified haze.
One day, Steve and I were watching TV while Kali panted, fell down the stairs, and pressed her head into corners as if she’d find some salvation there. Not knowing how to help was so frustrating. “Kali! What do you need?” I begged as I laughed and cried at the absurdity of her enormous satellite ears scanning for sounds only located in the past. I tried to ignore her, then gave her treats, water, a bed. Finally, she peed a huge puddle right in front of us between the couch and the screen, a desperate dog’s attempt to yell back at me. I’ve never been so clearly told or felt such paralysis to understand. Until then, she seemed immune to time, but that night she gathered it up and dumped it in front of me. I knew the final day had come when I came home to our broken house strewn with the history of her lonely day of pain and confusion: a broken mirror, feces on the floor, and a look of panting terror in her eyes.
I carried her in my arms to the car but stepped on a wasps’ nest as we were getting into the back seat. As the car swarmed with wasps, and I yelled at Steve, Kali and I were both stung multiple times. I’d had an allergic reaction the last time I was stung by wasps and so as inner and outer worlds collided, our car and the drive to the veterinary hospital became a mirror of Kali’s panicked world that we all descended into together.
Not matter how often I participate — as a veterinarian, or as an owner — I never get used to the complicated fact that euthanasia is a choice. Sinking into saying goodbye to Kali, its old familiar question haunted me: Was today really the right day? Could we change our mind and wait a little longer? Kali drifted about the room on wobbly legs with her hair falling out in clumps and plastering my clothes. My sobbing caught her attention, and she came to me, concerned about the noise. I desperately wanted her not to worry about me and shoved my emotion down for later. She still knew, just before going, that something was wrong. I thought I too would die, as she looked at me with her big question mark eyebrows and seemed to ask, “Is something happening to us?” She licked my nose and tried to get up and leave before she was gone: gone, asleep, then gone GONE.
In the quiet of the room, and the whirring of the IV pump, to both Steve’s and my horror, I blurted out: “We have to take her home.” Before saying goodbye, I told Dr. McNabb we wanted a private cremation, ashes back and a paw print too. But suddenly different words poured out of my mouth. “No, no, I need a coffin please.”
Although this need for a coffin was surprising, it had its roots with another dog I euthanized 16 years earlier. Kruger, my big-hearted Doberman, had died unexpectedly when he was just nine. Kruger and Steve had an uneasy relationship because Kruger was jealous, and Steve didn’t really understand dogs. Kruger regularly put his long legs against the wall and pushed Steve out of bed. We were all adjusting to Steve moving in and me studying for surgery board exams, my home office a white storm of research papers and textbooks. Kruger and I took occasional afternoon runs through the Palouse’s rolling dark hills, but one day he could barely keep up. I thought he was just getting old, but that evening he hung his head over his water bowl, and I knew something wasn’t right. A little later Steve and I were downstairs watching basketball when we heard a yelp and a thump. Running upstairs, we found his big body seizing on the floor.
Together, as we carried his rocking, knocking body to my car, Steve asked, “Do you want me to come?” He stood on the street and watched me drive away, not yet knowing how much a woman could love a black and brown dog, or that such questions answer themselves, but too late. We spoke of that moment for years afterward, me saying how abandoned, horrified and bewildered his question made me feel as Steve gradually understood that Kruger had been a part of me, a family member, and not “just a dog.” We grew closer as we started to share this relationship with our animals, and by the time we were saying goodbye to Kali, we were grieving together.
After three days of tests and medications and Kruger lying in a coma in ICU, I chose to euthanize him. I desperately wanted to know why he died and agreed to a necropsy — a dog autopsy. But I couldn’t escape my training, and was haunted by images of him in pieces, laid out on the sterile steel table, his inside and outside jumbled together in piles. The final report named his cause of death “liver abscesses,” but this dissatisfying answer just became another impossible question. Liver abscesses? Why? Why? Why?
Science rarely answers the most meaningful questions in our lives. Perhaps Kruger’s death and necropsy were why I suddenly knew, without considering what we’d do with her body, that I couldn’t leave Kali in the clinic. So many of us leave the bodies of our beloved pets behind at the vet when they die. Before Kali, I never considered doing anything else, and it’s amazing how hard it is to break old habits, but I may never leave another animal I’ve loved, dead and alone, their spirit suddenly gone, wide eyes staring.
After Kali’s body relaxed and I knew she was dead, I wanted to scream, sob and melt, but the business of taking her home calmed me. Folding her into the cardboard coffin, Steve and I carried her out to my Mazda, which was still covered in the doghair and wasps of our wild ride a few days earlier. Driving home with her body in her familiar place in the back, I felt quiet inside. In the past, I left many animals' bodies behind in the clinic, and I was surprised by the difference, and how Kali still seemed partly present. This body goodbye was gifting me a more gentle leaving than I had experienced before.
Arriving home, Steve and I negotiated over her coffin in the back of the car. I wanted to carry her inside and let our three cats see her body, but he loved the cats deeply too and was afraid of traumatizing them. I thought they’d want to know what happened, and not just have Kali disappear forever. The protective father in him deferred to my veterinary knowing and we carried her inside. Her body was still soft, and I tried to curl her up in a ball, and gently close her eyes, to prepare her for her time of sharing space with the cow. "What are you doing?" Steve asked, as I pushed her into the corner of her cardboard coffin, took her stiffening limbs and her cold brown nose, and tried to wrap her up in herself and her blanket. "I’m trying to make her small," I said.
Wild Gala was the first cat on top of the cardboard coffin: sniffing, smelling and circling. She was the oldest, the leader, and the most attached to Kali, and she showed the way. Soon enough all three cats were seriously investigating. When Steve and I opened the lid, Gala's surprise and confusion was obvious. Why was Kali so still? She circled and circled and looked and circled. Finally, a small gentle paw reached across the divide of cardboard and blanket, and the living and the dead, and Gala tentatively touched Kali’s frozen face. We then watched her consider walking across Kali’s body, gingerly testing with a step or two, but deciding definitely “No.” Little Moon also touched Kali, but Raven stared with wide yellow eyes. What was this? Gala balanced awkwardly on the adjacent folded cardboard lid and searched for another perspective as if she might find an answer there. Finally, we all sat in quiet darkness and got used to Kali’s still presence. Later, we left them alone for a while and gave the cats space to do what they needed without watching.
In the late evening, I moved Kali to our bedroom. In her coffin, covered in her blanket, she slept that night beside me, as she had for years. I’d wake disorientated, remembering something was wrong before remembering what, but I was comforted by her presence throughout the night. About midnight I noticed the smell: a subtle musty forest floor being turned over. The smell of death. How many of us spend the time to learn its early subtleties, like thin smoke catching in a spider’s web? It grew, becoming green, and old, and sweet as time wore its groove through the night. Its changing character, complexity and light persistence surprised me. I expected death to be heavy, overwhelming, pungent, but here it was entering the room in small steps. By morning, I became afraid of the mess that might be gathering, but there was none, and the odor was her whole body transforming.
Steve and I carried her heavy body through the quiet morning to the freezer and the cow. I said to Steve, “I don’t know why they’re so heavy when they’re dead.” Maybe it’s because a soft, alive body drapes itself in your arms and molds itself to yours, but when they're dead and all angles, their heaviness has no center, like a tipping awkward piece of furniture, corners without handles.
I dreamed of a sea burial for Kali, imagining her big brown ears filling with ocean water and her body gently drifting to the seabed far below. But this was complicated and illegal, and we cremated her instead. I don’t know how we learn to say goodbye to the beings we love, but I discovered a ponderous approach gives the mind opportunity to catch up with the tears. Death doesn’t have to be sudden and shocking. There is an in-between where the soul takes time to say goodbye to a dead body, where green and musty are welcome guests, and paddles made of tears can even send the non-human beloved in their canoe across the water to the far shore.
Those first days after we “put her to sleep” my mind jumped with shock and surprise, trying to find a place to rest. My dad was life threateningly ill at the same time, and the space between dog and no dog seemed as impossible as the space between dad and no dad, but the dog was in the freezer, and dad was still in the hospital having his own cosmic negotiation. The truth of life was falling like a hammer: Everything you love you will lose. I wondered, would I have said “No” to the broken dog with the giant ears and wild golden eyes knowing I’d have to say goodbye in 15 years? But I did know, didn’t I?
Why do traumas layer themselves? Each new one relives and re-remembers the parade of our lives, and saying goodbye to Kali, I find the eyes of a lifetime of loving animals lined up behind her. My heart hurts. It feels a cracking, a catching, like maybe if I waited a second too long, I’d stop breathing too, because I forgot, or didn’t want to, or it just hurt too much. I also discover I’m mourning most the Kali I used to have, while feeling peace for the confused and anxious one just I lost.
A favorite memory surfaces from our climbing trip to the desert many years ago. I say to Kali in her new place without me, “Do you remember when you and me and our camper van went on our extended climbing road trip?” Steve joined us for a few weeks and he and I climbed Castleton Tower, a spire of Utah sandstone, while you stayed at the base with our gear and some water, living life in dog time. Halfway way up the tower, Steve and I stopped a while to watch you burning grooves in the sandstone, running dusty laps around the base. We laughed as we watched you run by again and again, your long tongue lolling, running for the sheer joy of it. I feel you out there again, running laps, waiting for your people to come down out again out of the sky.
Tamara Walker
