Saying goodbye.

[Just a warning, at the beginning, that this is about saying goodbye to a pet.]

I remember driving home the night we picked Dio up. We had found him on Craigslist, where he had been listed by a family who had rescued him from a traumatic first year and a half of life. They couldn’t keep him, and it was just chance that we saw the ad, responded first, and went to meet him. Kat wasn’t sure—she’d never had a dog before, didn’t know if she’d want one as big as a husky, even a 50-pound runt like Dio—but he was curious and sweet, with soft fur and that big husky smile, and she’d wanted me to choose, so I did. We took him home with us when we left. Somewhere around the time we crossed Airport Blvd., I think she decided on him, too. And that night, in the car just before New Year’s Day in 2008, I remember thinking, At some point around 2020, this is all going to break my heart.

That’s the specific kind of brain I have, one that can’t help but calculate worst-case scenarios and future tragedies, even in joyful moments.

When Dio got sick two years ago, when the surgery he’d needed went bad and the vet told me that he had a fifty-fifty chance of surviving, I sat on the floor of the clinic room, waiting for him to calm down and start pacing. Eventually he did. He barely knew I was there, but he lay down and I scooted over to him and started petting that soft fur again. I understand if you have to go. It’s okay if you do. But I hope that you don’t. Kat was working in L.A. then, and my friend Lindsay suggested we go to the mall to take my mind off of it. There are things to touch and smell and look at, at the mall. I remember driving there and telling her that, silly as it was, I thought him being so sick was unfair. I wanted those extra two years I had imagined the night in 2008, driving over the train tracks on the way home.

It’s 2020 now, though. I’m writing this with a calmness that I don’t really feel, but which is growing a little bit inside because writing has always made me a little more calm. But the past few days have been bad for Dio, and after talking to a few vets, including my brother-in-law, it seems pretty clear that there won’t be better days coming. He’s not eating, can’t stand up on his own, stumbles when he walks. I won’t go into the details because they’re just really sad, but we tried the medications the vet prescribed hoping they would make those things better, and they haven’t. And who is this dog, if he can’t go for walks, can’t look forward to his treats, can’t relax enough to enjoy being petted?

These are the things I’ve been thinking for the past few days, while waiting to see if any of this was going to get better. He’s in pain and he’s scared and he’s anxious and he doesn’t understand why he can’t stand up. That’s not the life he should have, and we can’t make it better.

And people who have had old and sick pets know this, and they are very nice about it. They tell you that you are being kind and taking care of them one last time, even though it is the hardest time, even though you start crying while you are typing about it. They want you to know that it is the most courageous act of love you can show your dog. So we called a vet who makes house calls, who will come tomorrow afternoon and wait patiently with us while we say goodbye, and she will probably say some of those things to us, too. And I am trying to take in, but it is just so sad.

But I don’t want to think about him and be sad. I don’t want that to be my experience of our last day together. Right now, he is asleep on the bathroom floor—he claimed that as his spot about a year ago—and he is mostly calm. I just walked over to him and he let me pet him for a while, didn’t react much. I put my hand on his side and felt him breathe. I said the same things I said sitting on the floor of the vet’s clinic, but without the “if.” I told him I loved him, that he has been such a good friend, and I thanked him for being my dog, which I’ve done almost every night since he had that surgery two years ago.

Those two years, they were a coin flip away from not happening. He had one surgery that went badly, then a second surgery to repair the first, which worked. There was a long recovery process, and then he started to come back to himself. Kat was in L.A. for a lot of that time, and Dio and I would take long walks every night, three or four miles, as our way of taking care of each other. I remember thinking, very earnestly and truly, every day is a gift, because I had already said goodbye, I had already accepted on some level that our time together would be finite, and then we got two more years. How else do you describe something that valuable, besides a gift? And even as the walks got shorter, as all of the stuff that is causing him pain now first started taking a toll on him, after Kat came back from L.A. and we all started spending every moment together because of the pandemic, even as our walks included long stops for him to rest, I still said it, sometimes just in my head because I didn’t want to be weird. Thank you for being my dog.

Because that’s a gift, too. When we went into that apartment in 2008 to meet him, we had very little information to go on before choosing him. I knew he liked rawhides and that he didn’t bark when we came in. I knew that he was soft to pet and seemed both sweet and wary. I had to hope that he would be my dog the way I hoped he would, and then he was. (Really, he decided early on that he was Kat’s dog, but we are a family, and those distinctions don’t really matter.) Even as he’s gotten sicker, even as he’s stopped being able to do the things he loves, even as it stopped feeling good to him when we would pet him—even now, when the only thing he’ll eat is a little bit of baked chicken directly from my fingers—he is still bravely trying to be a good boy, and I am still grateful to him for being my dog.

I’ve never really been through this before, and I know it will be really hard. It’s already hard, and it has been hard for months. Tomorrow is just a different kind of hard.

I don’t think there is much that will help, at least in the short term. But I’m going to try to hold onto what a gift is has been to have a good dog in the hard moments. It really has been such a joy. I knew from the beginning that, at some point, tomorrow would come. I drove over the train tracks and brought him home anyway, and we all took care of each other for the next twelve years, because that’s what you do with family. I guess all there is left to do is to try to honor that, and thank him one more time for being my dog.