Sweet
I’ve never liked animals. I mean, I’d never hurt them intentionally (although I do eat them, and eating pigs causes me not a little pain of cognitive dissonance), but I never wanted one in my house. I grew up with a couple of dogs. My parents say I loved the playful mutts we brought with us from Florida to Kansas, but the only one I can remember was the Purebred Cocker Spaniel from my adolescence. That dog sucked. She left fur everywhere, barked, nipped at strangers, peed when excited and kept us from spontaneous activities.
Miranda brought home a puppy about 12 years ago. It was a test drive; the puppy was a sister of another that her boss had purchased and he and my wife both loved the breed. And of course our adolescent girl and kindergarten boy loved the Havanese. I mean, what’s not to love about a puppy? Everyone loves puppies.
We named her Dulce, the Spanish word for sweet, based on the little research that Havanese were bred in Cuba for joy and rat control. Dulce was small, didn’t shed, and was said to be smart. (I should say smart with some kind of emphasis. I think that the idea of intelligence in an animal usually means that they can “take to training.” Thus, dolphins, chimps, and certain breeds of dogs. I argue that this definition is ridiculous. Being trainable isn’t smart; resisting it is. I respect the intelligence of corvids and, grudgingly, cats. I mean, cats. They train us, don’t they?) It’s hard to think of Dulce as sweet, though. Curious. Mischievous. Loveable. Clever. I guess, maybe, sweet, but sweet like a sour patch kid, not cake frosting.
We dropped her off for training from an expert. We expected to pick up a dog that obeyed commands like “off, “down,” “out,” “no,” and other key indicators that we humans were in charge, dammit.
What we got was a call from the trainer that Dulce wasn’t taking the training well, and we ought to leave her with the trainer for another week so she, the trainer, could make the training stick.
What we eventually got was a dog that was OK on a leash, inasmuch as she didn’t try to pull us toward any vertical landmark and sniff for whatever amount of time she, Dulce, wanted. Other than that, we had a very stubborn, very active little shredder. Yet I was proud of her because I equated — and still believe — that what the hoi polloi call stubborn is actually strength of mind, certainty of purpose, and depth of character.
We’ve always called Dulce “garbage dog.” She’d eat anything. She even grabbed the lettuce or spinach that fell to the floor while we made salad or tacos. She had x-ray hearing for food, and we’d hear her little claws on the wood floor rushing to the kitchen, as if food falling through the air produced enough sound for her to perk up from rooms away and snap up whatever was falling almost before it hit the floor.
She was a bad dog in a lot of ways. She ripped apart backpacks to find empty lunch boxes, candy, apples, whatever might smell remotely edible in the pockets. She spread any trash from any trash can containing food or wrappers (we learned not to throw actual food into the trash, and to buy tall cans with lids). She was a yapper, pawing at the window panes and glass door, adding hundreds of snotty nose prints on the glass and scraping the wood on the windows and the floor. She’d run out of the yard or through an open door, ignoring the shock from the electric fence completely, to bark and freak out joggers and cyclists. She seemed so ferocious right up to the point where she reached her target and, as if she’d proved she could have done something, walked away having done nothing.
And oh my gawd when she found something absolutely disgusting and stinky, she’d smoosh her face into the dead or decaying thing until her long fur stank from nose to chest, inside her ears, and all over her beard.
She was awesome, though. Awesome in a way that only dogs and toddlers can be. So full of energy, promise, adoration… But also uncontrollable, bratty.
And unlike a toddler, a dog doesn’t have a lot of facial expressions. And her eyes (the groomers call them “teddy bear eyes”) were almost completely black, so it seemed as if she was always looking directly at me, even when she was probably side-eying some filth on the floor.
I’d come home and she’d do a little circle dance and then sit and look up at me as she made little anticipatory noises and wagged her tail on the floor.
She laid on the floor or chair behind me as I worked. If either of us heard a noise I’d look back at her and she’d raise her head to see if I wanted to pursue the noise. She’d shrug it off: “what do you want ME to do about it?” When I petted her she looked at me but avoided my eyes unless she and I were on the same plane. And if I was mad at her for barking or tearing up some kleenex or an Action Comics #1, she’d avoid my eyes completely. These are common dog behaviors, I know, I know, but somehow I came to see them as a special language that only she and I shared.
She followed me around everywhere. I’d get up to go to get a drink or the bathroom, and no matter the time, she’d hop up and go with me. She might just have been just hoping that I was heading to the kitchen, because, yeah, she did love it when we went to the kitchen. In my office she’d guard me outside the door. In my bedroom she’d wait at the foot of the bed, or under it, or nestled by Miranda, who, unlike me, sleeps all night in one position, never needing to get up until she starts the day. I got up to hit the bathroom nightly, and often, and she’d go with me, keeping me safe until I crawled back into the sheets.
We went to Home Depot. She loved the car window. Some mornings we got up early and walked around the neighborhood to hear the sunrise birds.
I’d ask her a question and she’d consider it with a tilted head. Considering an answer I never quite understood.
I cautiously hung out at the firepit with her but always kept an eye on her activity (…because, as I mentioned above, she was always looking for something to rub on herself so she’d stink a little more).
Just a couple of nights ago she woke me up with her thumping feet. I thought she might have found something under the bed and was trying to work it loose so she could destroy it, so I said “Dulce, knock it off! Dulce!” She didn’t stop, so I got up to find her. I did. She was on her side, lying in feces or vomit or both, and only one foot was moving. She looked up at me, barely able to keep her head up. Her face was inscrutable but her body shook and her eyes were desperate.
The noise and light woke Miranda and together we cleaned Dulce and wrapped her in a towel and a blanket. Miranda called the animal hospital who told her that they were “only accepting patients actively dying.” We called our vet and found out when they opened.
Get Grant Lloyd’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Dulce was shaking and wasn’t able to control her movement much, but she wasn’t crying out, and she could feel all of her legs, resisting my gentle pressure, testing her ability to feel me touching her to see if she were paralyzed.
We were scared. We kept talking to Dulce with the kindest voices, telling her it’ll be OK. Telling her we’d figure this out and get her back to normal. I suspected she’d had a stroke, so “normal” was going to be strange at first.
It was all my fault, of course. I fed her human food a lot, and she always found even more. She was overweight and had become sedentary as I had changed my exercise routine to a format that wasn’t as Dulce-friendly as it once was. She was getting older and seemed to like short bursts of high energy, like running around the yard like a little idiot while I got the mail. I spoiled her, and I think now that I understand the double meaning of spoiled.
It was my fault and I was going to do right by her. If she had to take daily shots for diabetes, I’d do that. If she needed surgery, we’d pay for it and take whatever time she needed to recover and do the therapy with her. Miranda and I talked little during those hours between finding Dulce and taking her to the vet, but we talked enough that we knew we agreed, and we looked at each other with love and hope in our expressive faces.
We finally made it to the vet. I put Dulce in a little basket we use for mismatched socks, got a piece of dirty laundry for her to smell to keep us in mind, and dropped her off at the vet’s. Our relief was palpable. And I can’t remember loving my wife more than I loved her that morning. I also realized I loved Dulce, too. I loved a dog.
We were confident that the vet would fix Dulce.
Miranda got a call from the vet while we were out looking at a townhome to move into after selling the house this summer. It was bad news: It wasn’t a stroke, but something like it. It was an acute disorder that could become chronic, centered in the vestibular area of her brain. Dulce couldn’t process balance, and was suffering from vertigo, unable to focus, unable to right herself, physically and visually.
But OK, this is bad. it’s bad but It may get better; it can get better, in the long term, maybe. But it’s bad.
The images the vet took also showed a rapidly declining, cascading group of issues including liver, heart, lungs, and bladder. Dulce could make it through one of these but all of them? No. Her little body was declining rapidly, and the vestibular issue may be a symptom of that rapid decline, but addressing that trauma would be the first step of many, and all of the steps would compromise Dulce’s quality of life.
This news broke me. It broke Miranda. It didn’t break us, though. We agreed almost immediately that, just as if it were one of us diagnosed with a similar prognosis, we’d prefer to have a shorter, happier life than a long painful death.
…
My mom died a couple of years ago. I wrote notes for a eulogy and it was nowhere near as complete as this essay. I loved my mom, and she and I had a complicated relationship but she was a good mom for so many years. I cried at my mom’s death. I stopped crying quickly, though, and ever since I stopped, I’ve felt guilty about how seemingly easily I moved from mourning to remembering.
I think there’s a difference between mourning mom and mourning Dulce that transcends species. I didn’t take care of my mom. I wasn’t responsible for her well-being in the way that I was for Dulce. I feel guilty for my actions in both deaths but I had direct influence on Dulce’s health and I failed her.
…
We took Dulce home for a couple of hours so we could all gather and say goodbye. The vet loaded her up on painkillers, enough that she was not hurting but was still Dulce. She shook a lot. She panted. She wasn’t comfortable. But her eyes, sometimes moving in independent directions because of the vestibular issue, still seemed to be her eyes. We called the kids and we all held and petted and talked to Dulce, crying from hopelessness, anticipating the pain of loss.
Miranda and I returned to the vet clinic. Miranda held Dulce while I drove and I held her as they injected the anesthesia in the special room for last moments. At first, I felt relief. The heavy sedative kicked in and Dulce relaxed in my arms, the first time in twelve arduous hours that she wasn’t shaking. No pain, no fear. I felt her heart slow and steady through my palm. Miranda put her head on mine and her hands on Dulce, also feeling the little dog relax. For a brief second, minute, I don’t remember how short it was. Too short, to be sure. The vet said, “OK. now?” Miranda and I looked into each others’ eyes, red eyes almost blind from tears, and nodded yes. Now. There was no delineation of time, no indication of a transition from anesthesia to poison. Dulce’s heart stopped. It just stopped, and now she’s gone and she’s gone and she’s not coming back and oh god I miss her already and what are we going to do how can I ever get over this it’s my fault and why couldn’t I have been the person Dulce thought I was?
. . .
The set of people I love is very small. The set of things I love is tiny. I could easily deal with the house burning down, as everything in it is either (ultimately) junk or replaceable. Our photos are in the cloud and despite the evidence from this little eulogy, I’m not sentimental. I didn’t realize Dulce was in that little set of things I love. I never considered her part of the “people” set nor the “things” set, and I never had an “animals” set. But here we are: I loved that little dog and I still do and it hurts. My chest feels like it’s got a frozen cube of tears in it and no matter how much I cry the cube doesn’t melt.
I just want my dog back.
