A Dog, a Birch, a Birdsong

 

 

I made the appointment with the veterinary clinic, then turned off my cellphone. After months of struggling to make the right decision, reality sank in and nausea overwhelmed me. Our husky Lupin and I had twenty minutes left in our life together.

 

It was a home visit and Dr. Chip stepped into our kitchen. Lupin had always taken a shine to Chip. As soon as she saw him, she plastered her ears back and went all a’shiver. It was an up day for her. But in just a glance, Chip nodded his head and reaffirmed our observations. It was time.

 

He gave her the sedative and the four of us walked to our backyard. My wife DyAnne and I put Lupin’s blanket in the shade of the birch by her kennel where she often played or supervised the neighborhood. She laid down and nodded off.

 

I expected the second injection, the one that sent her over, to take instant effect. But Chip had to administer three doses of the drug. We could see her breathe occasionally. DyAnne and I continued to give her scratches on the areas of her body she most requested. I don’t know how conscious Lupin was of it or of our talking. Because I had some questions.

 

Lupin had suffered enough. Her illness, whatever it was that even specialists couldn’t determine, had become a year of extensive tests and eliminations that showed what it wasn’t. Diagnostics had been exhausted. Dr. Chip’s best estimate was a circulation cancer like lymphoma or leukemia.

 

I asked why she wasn’t passing. Apparently, the sedation shot significantly drops blood pressure. However, that makes hitting a vein directly for the lethal injection more challenging. Fortunately, the sedative made Lupin completely unaware of what was happening. Scientifically, that sounded reasonable and I wanted to believe it. But I wasn’t emotionally convinced.

 

Not knowing is cold-blooded helplessness. I could have more easily lived had Lupin decided to depart on her own. We’d have dealt with her absence and at least been spared the additional agony of us determining when she’d die. If the decision were ours, I’d have loved being handed a distinct answer, to have that work done for me so her pain wouldn’t string out. But that’s just selfishness on my part. Higher powers don’t swoop in and get us off the hook. I had to put in the work that life was asking of me.

 

Chip and I carried Lupin’s body in her blanket to the bed of his pickup. We would get her ashes back. Oddly, throughout this ordeal, I realized a bird had been singing right above us. I didn’t see it and didn’t recognize its song. But it had a bubbling, flute-like melody. When Chip drove away, I looked for the bird, but the song had stopped. Dy told me later that she’d heard it, too.

 

Lupin’s disease started when she was nine and woke up with a closed left eye. Only the week before, she had received an outstanding checkup at her annual visit to the clinic. She had remissions during her illness, but over time we knew her condition was declining severely. She was off her dish, turned down favorites like peas and carrots, and wasn’t sneaking up behind me to snitch the last of my banana. Dy eventually handfed her anything she’d ingest just to get some kind of nutrition in her. She ate so slowly we thought maybe her mouth was sore.

But her personality was waning, resting or hiding, too. Sometimes it felt as if she had already left us. She was coping with whatever was wrong and we weren’t going to begrudge her a thing. The night before she died, we let her sleep on the bed with us.

 

On her day of passing, Lupin’s high spirits like her old self only compounded the decision to euthanize her. However, Dr. Chip offered us the most insightful advice I’d ever received to make that dreadful decision. He brought science and emotion at least somewhat closer for me.

 

He told us this was the window of time we wanted for her. Our hearts want to hang on. But we had to look at the slope of her condition and ask, what are we going to make her go through? “If someone knows their pet won’t live until spring, why put them through a dark, cold winter?” he analogized. Her comfort was primary during this window and it had a single criterion: If the decision to euthanize was unmistakably clear, then we had waited too long.

 

We wanted to keep her passing moment private and close to home. We’d let neighbors and friends know in due time. But word spread without us uttering a peep. For sixteen years and counting, our neighbors have known each others’ dogs by name, living or deceased. Each neighbor frequently checked on Lupin’s welfare. After she left us, they came to our rescue in their own way. And not all of them were human.

 

The two women who lived across the back alley brought us a bouquet of flowers they had handpicked from their garden. When the guy across the side street saw Dy walking alone in the alley behind his house, he inquired about Lupin’s absence. Dy explained, and as she turned to continue her walk, he gave her the Catholic sign of the cross. The deep importance of his beliefs conferred ineffable blessings to us.

 

Lupin’s descent also occurred during the peak of COVID. As a result, the veterinary clinic had cut back drastically on home visits. But they made an exception for Lupin. Dr. Chip, Dy and I were with her in the backyard talking through our protective masks. As we waited, Chip mentioned some personal feelings that most vets can’t help but have. They treat patients who they uniquely care about. When those animals pass, their departure is emotionally difficult for the doctors. One of those dogs was Lupin, a husky who made the clinic staff smile and who didn’t flinch during a blood draw.

 

Not long after her passing, a tree service crew showed up at our house and my nausea returned. We had consulted them about the longevity of the birch tree. It was weak and ragged. The likelihood of it surviving winter was slim. If we waited too long, it would surely fall and damage our garage. In just a few hours, its branches that had provided shade in summer, color in fall and places for birds to perch would no longer be part of our lives.

 

But the crew disassembled it with such dignity that my queasiness subsided. The strategy for each cut was performed with fascinating perception. They had no cherry-picker. Instead, they harnessed a lacework of ropes and pulleys among the branches for a cutter to ascend the tree and not fall out. Trunk pieces and large branches were lowered to the ground one at a time rather than sent unceremoniously crashing down. When nearly finished, the cutter stood towering above the uppermost tip of the trunk with nothing but the climbing spikes around his calves holding him on. The operation was so impressive, neighbors gathered to watch.

 

Only twenty feet of the trunk remained. There was a gaping void in the backyard where the birch used to be. So much visible sky. So much new to see. But just before the final cuts were made, a small bird returned to the birch and joined the cutter in the tree. The bird clung to the one remaining twig sticking out of the bark. It chirped a few notes. It was the same song we had heard from above Lupin when she crossed over.

 

One of the women who brought us the flowers was standing nearby and heard it. Dy mentioned the bird’s song when Lupin passed, and how we were unsettled with the three injections and length of time it took.

 

Our neighbor and friend leaned in gently, “She wanted to hear the end of the song.”