Each Labor Day weekend for twenty years past we and our dog or dogs have accompanied chum G to her dacha, a rustic “vacation cabin” on Forest Service land in the Sierra foothills. There on Redacted Creek and, currents permitting, the nearby American River, we sun ourselves and splash about. Afternoons and evenings we chat, visit other lucky leaseholders, grill flesh, fish, fowl, catch up on back issues of the NYRB, with which the cabin is stocked in abundance. And the dogs, hers and ours, go traipsing through the forest, snuffling the expanded spectrum of smells (“Jeepers! Is that really bear scat?”) laid out for their delectation, to all appearances a welcome and exotic change from the urban message boards (“Reply all”) of their Oakland strolls.
This year, to our regret, considerations of health obliged us to break the cycle: it would not be feasible at this stage of her affliction for Lina to be a two-hour drive from her medical team, and they tell me that the cost of a ride in a medevac helicopter has gone through the roof. Accordingly we were not on hand to help G “close up the cabin” (as we “opened” it last Memorial Day) this time out.
In 2023 we managed September the trip, and so did poor Ravi, by then increasingly frail and incontinent (two words: “whelping pads”), who slept much of the day but who would eagerly bestir his sixteen year-old bones and totter outdoors whenever a turn along the trails was on offer. It proved his last hurrah. By October, as the slope of his decline steepened, we had begun having “the conversation”: we’d long felt that, however onerous his care might become, we would preserve the creature for as long as he appeared to enjoy his life as a dog more than not, and it was beginning to feel as though his morale was faltering. By the first weekend in the month we were thinking “This will probably be the week,” and Sunday afternoon his condition went gruesomely off the cliff. On Monday (“Indignant People’s Day” as we call it around here) we carried him to the car and drove down the freeway to “Creature Comforts,” whose head vet Ravi always liked and trusted—for example, he never flinched as we drove into their parking lot.
For the last quarter hour of his life, he tottered and sniffed around CC’s enclosed yard. A blanket was laid out for him; invited to lie down upon it, he did. Lina stroked his ears and Dr. W administered a sedative that induced slumber and then a compound that slowed and then stopped that noble heart. Lina held it together better than I did: I wept—I will not say unashamedly, because that’s not how men of my cohort and background roll, but as discreetly as I could, blotting up several sheets of tissue.
And so we have been a year and change now without the companionship of our dog, who brought such delight to our lives for almost fifteen years. He was released from the burden of his old age; we from his maintenance. It would not have been otherwise possible for us to leave home for ten days last spring chasing the total eclipse out at sea. And although we have both felt keenly impoverished for want of a canine presence in our lives since then, I would have been hard pressed to give even a healthy dog the time, energy and attention it would be entitled to, as Lina’s care has become increasingly a full-time undertaking. And when Lina is gone, which seems as though it must inevitably occur in the coming weeks, I don’t know that I could in conscience take on a pet whom I might leave bereft. But if this household is never to include a dog again, I take some comfort in reflecting that with Ravi we saved the best for last.
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