I Buried My Dog Today

Yeah, if you’re still reading after that I’m not apologizing for the resulting depression.  You can’t say I wasn’t pretty clear up front where this was going, and I need to vent.

Mocha was well over 12, maybe slightly over 13.  She was a rescue dog we picked up back in March of 2004.  She’d had puppies with her brother because her owners were dumb enough to leave them together when Mocha went into heat.  Then they got so disgusted that she “let him do that to her”, that they gave her, and the resulting puppies, (who were actually kind of fucked up; we knew two of them), away.  At the time our previous dog had recently been put down when her kidneys failed so we were looking over various rescue dog web-sites, most of which seemed to involve excess coon dogs from Tennessee, every other one of which was named “Rebel.”  The other half were named “Dale.”

Mocha was one of the few available in Connecticut and she wasn’t a retriever really, she was a mutt with a good portion of Chesapeake Bay retriever mixed in with some spaniel and a few other breeds.  She was on the web page primarily for the puppies, all of which were surrounding her while Mocha looked up at the camera as though asking for someone, anyone, to save her from these goddamn kids.

Mocha was a great dog but she was a lousy mother.

My wife saw her and called.  She was told that of course they had some available and which puppy did she want.  My wife said “No, I want the mother, none of the puppies.”  Rescue people love that shit; older dogs, even at less than 2 years, are hard as hell to place.  We eventually passed whatever requirements they had and picked Mocha up from her foster trailer.  She just met us and never looked back, just got on the leash and trusted us to take her wherever we were going.

And she kept trusting us for the next 11 years.  She was a 75 lb. lap dog who was never happier than if she could crawl onto my chest and go to sleep while I tried to read something.  It’s hard to read when you can’t breathe and the book is shoved up against your nose by a large animal, particularly when that animal is fast asleep, or at least pretending to be.

She had her quirks.  She loved me and would follow me anywhere, except when my wife went to bed, then she couldn’t get up there fast enough and take my side of the bed.  She wouldn’t sleep in the kids rooms, no matter how hard they tried.  She was neurotic as all hell.  She ate socks and twice I paid significant amounts of money to get them surgically removed from her stomach.  The first one nearly killed her.  She still went back for seconds.  If I walked her alone she would get to a certain spot and then stop, demanding to turn around and head home.  If the family was with us she’d keep going; my guess is we could only go so far without everyone before Mocha would get nervous and have to go back and check on everyone.  She almost never chased other animals except the one time I saw a pileated woodpecker and had just got the camera in focus and then she took off after it so I never got the shot.  In turn I claimed it was an Ivory-billed Woodpecker and that Mocha had eaten the last one in Connecticut.

Friday she was fine.  She’d been slowing down and occasionally turning down meals but rarely, and never for more than a day.  And I could always get her to eat eggs.  Saturday she wouldn’t eat and she wouldn’t get out of her chair.  Her chair was from Ethan Allen, was for adult humans, cost more than I’d like to admit and she’d bogarted it pretty much from the day we bought it.  She ate some scrambled eggs and begged for some of my fired chicken but by night time was back in her chair, more asleep and than awake.  I slept on the floor next to her until my wife came down at 6 am and told me to go upstairs so she could sleep next to Mocha.

Mocha wouldn’t eat that day, wouldn’t drink and could barely stand.  We took her to the emergency vets since ours is closed Sundays.  They admitted her overnight to rehydrate her, give her some meds, run some tests and bills me about the same as my monthly mortgage.  When I eventually chased someone down to get the results, (which was not their fault, they are an emergency vets after all), the news was bad.  Enlarged heart, spots in her lungs, weird looking spleen.

My wife picked her up this morning while I was in a court hearing that I could not get out of.  My main accomplishment was not breaking into tears during the argument.  I knew the news was bad when my wife texted saying that the first vet would only release Mocha if we promised to bring her immediately to her regular vet.  The next text was “how soon can you get here?”, to which the answer was “a lot sooner if I don’t drive off the road while blinded by tears.”  When I did get there Mocha was laid out on an examination table, semi-conscious but seemingly comfortable enough.  After this author had stopped crying the vet delivered the diagnosis:  Cancer, mostly likely starting in the spleen and then moving to her lungs, then heart.  Nothing we could have done, nothing that would have showed up on any usual exam in a healthy seeming dog.  The verdict was at most a couple of weeks, more likely a couple of days and in neither case with anything approaching what you’d call a quality life.  Unless your quality of life consists of pissing yourself while not eating or drinking; I don’t judge.

We made what I think was the only decision and Mocha passed peacefully at around 1 pm today.  She was the best dog ever and I will miss her terribly.

If you’ve come this far, thanks for reading it.  Depressing as hell I know but I needed to get it out.