Tuesday.  We took the dog to the vet on Saturday and decided to put her to sleep.  It was not an easy decision even though she had not doing well for months.  The decision and the vet visit marked another period in our lives.  Another end.  Not just to be maudlin but because it is on my mind, I will write that here was another circumstance that put me a further distance from David.  I was talking to my sister on another matter over the weekend and we talked of Latkah some.  I said that the desire to stay the same, to not change anything so as not to forget anything, is so very strong.  And so, in this rather dramatic decision to end Latkah’s life nested yet another decision to change and grow further away from David.  

The vet did a cursory exam and said that the Latkah probably had either a brain lesion or a tumor.  Or some other neurological condition.  This is so much more complicated than I had imagined.  I imagined that her systems were failing due to age.  Well, both may have been working.  The vet offered steroids, prednisone, to relieve what she believed to be inflammation in her brain but when I asked how long that would give Latkah, she said a week to a month.   A few days of relief, perhaps a week or two was not tempting.  Well, that is not true.  It was tempting.  I wondered if that was the right course, but to be back with a dog that could not see, hear or hardly walk and who was peeing almost all the time in the house and now just allowing herself to get wet from her pee -- I didn’t think she was going to come back to her perky old self in any sense.  Had Latkah been a bigger dog, I would have acted sooner.  I’ve been carrying her up and down stairs, even the few stairs to get our of the house.  She was also drinking a lot more water than usual and then peeing a great amount.  I was right to be alarmed by that as the vet said that that was probably due to the beginnings of kidney failure.  

No, the dog, my dog, the dog of Cheshire’s childhood and our family life from a Christmas in Indy to Julia learning to love her dog, did not need to suffer or endure a much reduce quality of life.  I do believe that I made the right and loving decision.

I posted on facebook and so many friends left messages.  I appreciated them.  A cousin wrote that I should go and get a rescue dog and that would make me feel better.  I guess that is one way to handle loss.  Replace.  But pets, no more than people, are not fungible for me.  I don’t know if I will ever get a dog again.  Dogs require daily maintenance.  Not that it is so difficult but with a high maintenance kid around, another being that needs caring and feeding can be overwhelming at times.  So, we shall wait a good long while before even considering.

Yesterday, Monday, we had a small funeral.  The vet found a small box in which Latkah’s body had been curled -- not unlike she usually slept.  I thought that in her earlier days she would have appreciated a box that size.  The vet also kept Latkeh’s body from Saturday until Monday because it was such a rainy Saturday and no time to dig a dog grave.  Julia wanted to have a funeral and a grave site and I was very willing to go along.

So yesterday, I picked up the body and dug a deep hole in the back corner of the garden behind a hydrangea bush.  When Julia came home from school, we cleaned up the site where many apples from my neighbor’s tree had fallen and were rotting.  Then we gathered flowers for a bouquet and wrote Latkah’s name on a big rock and thought about what we could say about Latkah.  We wrote a list and texted Cheshire in case she wanted to add anything.  Then we pet the dog for the last time, told her the things we had thought of, put the box into the hole, covered it with dirt and put the stone and flowers into place.  

Cheshire chimed in this morning reminding me of the lovely story of how when we were on vacation one day when Latkah was a year or so old, she had been staying with her family of origin for the week.  One day my next door neighbor called us and told us that Latkah was sitting on our front steps.  It seemed that our dog, who we always said had very little brain, had managed to walk between the two houses, a walk which would take us at least a half hour or so.  Latkah had never walked that way and had only been driven from one house to the other twice.  And she found her way home.  

And my thought this morning is that I am quite sure that Latkah’s spirit, for what spirit there is, once again finds her way home.