1994-2009

I’m looking at Hobie’s basket. His blanket is inside, pressed and pleated just the way he left it the last time he lay in it. It’s the biggest reminder of him left here, but not the only one: today I found a footprint of his outside, in the back yard, along with a somewhat waterlogged bit of his business. His leash and collar are on the deck – they were a little dirty, and we lay them out there, not quite knowing what to do with them first. They’re still there. And today I vacuumed the house, as I do every weekend. I watched as the Hobie hairs filled up the canister twice, watched as the opaque cast they give to the rugs they cover faded under every pass of the beater bar. Q’s room was the last one I did, and that’s where the last layer came up into the machine. A few will go rolling past occasionally, like tumbleweeds, kicked by a random puff of air from where they’d been hiding. But by now, there are very few left.

Early last week, Hobie went after Skittles pretty seriously. I don’t think he really meant to do anything beyond getting her to stop bothering him, chase her off with some teeth music. But she had been walking past him – something she could not possibly have thought would be bothersome to anybody, something she should be allowed to do. Hobie got her enough to make her trembly, collapsed up into the corner where she’d leapt to get away from him, piled in behind her littler box. Her back isn’t the best, and these sudden spasms to get away from Hobie can’t be good for it. She walked with her spine arched for a good while afterward, and was difficult to console. Hobie knew he’d done something he shouldn’t have, and stiffly limped over to his basket, anticipating a scolding.

Which he’d never have heard. He’d been pretty much completely deaf for a few months now, and so paranoia had set in. As far as he knew, everybody was sneaking up on him all the time. When that’s me or Janneke, he just got startled, shied away and then laughed at the situation, sidled up for a pat on the head. But when it was Skittles, or one of the kids, a snap was becoming more and more likely. Four weeks ago or so, he’d gotten Q on the finger. Q had been trying to call him over to pet him, and for some reason Hobie saw that as threatening and caught him with a snap. Q was shocked, hurt, heartbroken. And so were we. And so was Hobie, probably.

He’d gotten T some time before that, and had snarled a her a few times before that. We had been training him to tolerate the kids more – suddenly, three or four months ago, it had occurred to me that every time the kids come home, or wake up, they should call Hobie over and give him a treat. And it had been working, too – he would do his front-legs-jumping joy dance when they came out of their rooms in the morning, would greet Q as he sat down to take his shoes off by licking him on the cheek. I was kicking myself for not having thought to start doing it five years ago. But it only went so far – the snapping, it seemed, was only going to get worse. We started to look at Hobie with a much more worried eye, and to look for other signs of things going wrong.

Which finally allowed us to see them. His wandering around the house at all hours, which we’d started thinking was senility, was actually just an endless quest for a way to get comfortable. Every step he took was at least a little bit painful; lying down hurt, getting up hurt, squatting to do his nightly business hurt. He didn’t whine or yip about it, but the more we watched him, the more it became clear: He was in pain pretty much all the time. He’d fight through it when he needed to, but there was no question this was a fight. Just two days ago, I was on the floor petting him, and he shook his head because his ear itched. He creaked himself back into an ear-scratching position, lifted his rear leg about halfway toward his ear…and grunted, and dropped his leg again, and stood up. “Screw it,” he’d said with every ounce of his body. “I’d rather itch.”

The fatty tumors under his skin were getting bigger. One just under his chest, which was tender, and another on his right ribs, which smarted so much he’d wince when we approached that side to pet him. It had seemed like an embarrassed crouch, like he was somehow not deserving the attention we were coming to bestow, but once we started looking for it, we found it: That hurt too. His ears were harder and harder to comfortably pet; his eyes drooped, his hips were losing flesh, his back legs, under the strain of standing still, would begin to droop and sag, prompting him to move on ahead again, looking for a comfortable position that was never going to come.

A little over a week ago, we decided. It was time.

This past Friday, the 19th, final exams were set to start at the high school where I teach. I’d give one from 8:00 to 9:30, and then have no further commitments for the day. So that Thursday, I called and made an appointment. Friday, the 19th, at 2:00. Cremation thereafter. No, we wouldn’t need to get his ashes back; no, we wouldn’t like the plaster pawprint.

I hung up the phone and sobbed where I stood, hand over my eyes. I’d just calmly agreed on a date and a time to kill him.

All this past week, then, every evening, I sat and cuddled and thumped and otherwise loved that old dog so much I think he got a little tired of it. I had second thoughts – Couldn’t we medicate him, at least for a while, against the pain? Wouldn’t that possibly help with the snapping and the paranoia? Look how happy he is to see the kids coming home – Isn’t this continued progress? Can’t we call it off?

I thought all this as I sat in front of him and petted his neck, as he buried his snout in my lap and sighed and snuffed and enjoyed it. And suddenly, he fell over. Toward his left, like a tree, crashing onto his shoulder and his hip. And he thrashed, confused, just for a moment, until the thrashing was prohibitively painful; then he slowly began to heave himself into a position where he could hoist himself up to his feet again. The grunting he did was so low that if I hadn’t been right next to him, I’d never have heard it – continual, high, nearly-whining grunts of effort, pain, and – tragically, horrifyingly for me, who was his master, who was right next to him would never let anything happen to him – fear.

I only had one way to protect him from that.

I counted down the times we would go for our evening walk. It was incredible the way every night, it took longer and longer. As if he were illustrating for me the precipitousness of the decline we were on the edge of, measurable easily from day to day. He still sniffed eagerly to see what was going on in the neighborhood that day (“reading the newspaper”, as T and I like to call it), but he was breathing heavily at the end of every three-hundred-yard turn about Lindley Terrace, head hanging so low you thought his tongue would touch the pavement, back drooping in the middle. His eyes bulged as he looked up at me, seeming to smile, but I now knew that smile was as much fearful as ingratiating. I can’t do it, he must have been thinking. I can’t go as fast as Joe wants me to. And I didn’t want him to go fast – now, I didn’t. I just wanted him to go. But he didn’t know that. Just as he didn’t know that we weren’t sneaking up on him, that no one was out to take advantage of his weakened state, that we hadn’t all just decided to stop saying “Good boy!” a few months ago. He didn’t know any of this, and I couldn’t tell him.

Friday morning, T woke up when I did, and asked if she could come walk Hobie with me. “Of course,” I said. She dressed and put her shoes on, and asked if she could hold the leash. “Claro.” And as she had done at least twice before during the last week, she looked over her shoulder at me, gestured toward Hobie, who was clambering stiffly down the one step form our front door to the porch, and said: “I feel bad for Hobie. He’s going to die soon.”

Of course, we had been preparing the kids for this event for at least a couple of years. Dropping it into conversations that Hobie had had a good, long life, and that his slowing down would eventually turn into a full stop. But T just picked up something in the air, and translated it in her mind perfectly, saw just what was about to come about. I don’t know how she picked up on it – our plan was to tell the kids that we’d come home Friday and found him dead in his bed. They never knew we’d made an appointment, never knew that Friday was the day. But T rolled out of bed to hold the leash for one more walk because somewhere, deep down, she knew. I’m still in awe.

I drove to Lenox, gave the exam, and drove back. We had run out of dog treats, so I was taking every opportunity to give Hobie slices of pepperoni. I must have given him five between 10:00 and 12:00 Friday, when Janneke came home. She pulled into the driveway, where Hobie was sniffing the bushes and I was shooting baskets, just to have something to do. She looked at me through her window and began to cry, and then I did.

One last walk around the neighborhood; one more clamber up into the back of the car – the trick now was to lower one side of the back seat, and have him step in through the back door, up onto the seat, and into the hatch. He was a pro at it by now, knew just how to do it.

Hobie smiled in the wind in the back of the car. His ears lifted on the breeze like they used to do whenever we walked him into a headwind – the reason we’d decided his breed name would be the “Schwaebische Schwebendehund” (Schwabisch gliding dog).

Things happened – papers, checks, nodding, holding, petting, listening, sitting beside – an eternity – and then suddenly, all too suddenly, his warm weight was in my lap, loose and relaxed as it used to be when we would cuddle on the carpet, before marriage, before children, before stiffness and tumors and deafness and age. We were all three together, and I was holding him, Janneke was holding him, and he was my warm, soft boy, my good, good boy, for the last time.

We walked out the back door, through the veterinarians’ laundry room, in a daze, emerging with our arms around each other into the bright, humid afternoon, with Hobie’s collar and his leash, and unknowable numbers of his hairs, clinging to us.

I go to pull the T-shirt form Friday out of the laundry, and find the hairs, still there. Itchy, sticky, and curved, advertising to the world that we have a semi-long-haired, white and orange dog at home.

Over there sits his basket, and inside, his blanket, folded and pressed in the shape of my Hobie. With precisely the number of hairs inside as there were the minute he left.

He isn’t afraid now. He doesn’t hurt.

But we do.