A Big Little Life

the second time, she ate a dish of kibble and a tablespoon of peanut butter.
    She wanted to be stroked and held, and to hear us tell her how good she was, how beautiful. Dogs come to love the human voice, which they strive all their lives to understand. In better days, when we sat in that same place, I made up silly songs about her, impromptu odes sung to some of my favorite doo-wop numbers. She grinned at me when I sang, and her tail thumped when she heard her name embedded in a melody.
    Now it was clear that she had ridden down in the elevator and had found the strength to walk to the terrace because this was where she wanted to be when the end came. We expected her to pass at any moment, but she held on for hours, raising her head from time to time to look out at this place she loved: the broad yard and the roses and the sky curving down to the sea.
    This was not only a Saturday, but also the first day of an unusually long Fourth of July holiday, and we worried that Trixie might have another seizure later in the afternoon or evening, when we wouldn’t be able easily to get help. If it was not her fate to die suddenly, we could not let hersuffer a prolonged passing. Shortly after one o’clock, I called Newport Hills Animal Hospital, and discovered that both Bruce Whitaker and Bill Lyle were off for the weekend; another veterinarian was covering the office. When I shared our situation with the receptionist, she told me that Bruce was at a tennis game and that she could reach him.
    He called back within minutes. When I told him how Trixie had struggled for breath and described her current condition, he wanted to come to the house to see her rather than frighten her by having her brought to the office. Before one thirty, he arrived.
    Trixie raised her head, grinned, and twitched her tail when I led Bruce out of the game room, onto the terrace. She submitted to examination with her usual grace. Bruce said she would probably die in the night or on Sunday at the latest. Although she was currently in no pain, she was weak, with low blood pressure and perhaps with internal bleeding.
    “When it happens,” I asked, “will she be in pain?”
    “Possibly, yes,” Bruce said.
    “For a moment, for minutes, how long?”
    “There’s no way to know.”
    I asked him one more question that might have seemed odd to him, though he gave no indication that it was. “Will she cry out? Will she cry out in pain?”
    “She might, yes.”
    In her life, this stoic little dog had endured serious physical maladies followed by four surgeries and four recuperations, without a single whimper or protest of any kind. If she cried out in pain and fear, her cry would shred my heart, and Gerda’s. But it was not Gerda or me about whom I was concerned. I didn’t want this brave dog, this creature of such fortitude and fine heart, to hear her own cry as the last sound she knew of this Earth. In her final moments, I meant to help her be what she had been during her entire life: an embodiment of quiet courage, unbowed by suffering.
    Little more than half an hour later, at two o’clock Saturday afternoon, Bruce returned, carrying his medical kit. With him was a vet technician: David, who had advised me not to drive recklessly on my way to the specialty hospital eight days earlier, and who had said, “God is with her.”
    In my view, in the case of a human being, a natural death is death with dignity. Animals are innocents, however, and we serve as stewards of them, with the obligation to treat them with mercy.
    So there on her favorite couch, on the covered terrace, where she could breathe in all the good rich smells of grass and trees and roses, we opened for her the unseen gate, so that she could walk again not on her now weak legs but on the still strong legs of her spirit, walk beyond that gate, an innocent into a realm of innocence, home forever. As her mom cradled Trixie’s body and told her she was an angel, I held her sweet face in my hands and stared into her beautiful eyes, and as always she returned my gaze forthrightly. I told her that she was the sweetest dog in the world, that her mom and I were so proud ofher, that we loved her as desperately as anyone might love his own child, that she was a gift from God, and she fell asleep not forever but just for the moment between the death of her body and the awakening of her spirit in the radiance of grace where she belonged.

XXIII
“in my end is my beginning”
    LOVE AND LOSS are