This is Zeke, he came to live with us on Halloween, 2009. We adopted him from a rescue group in Mesa AZ, and I was told the woman who fostered him couldn’t keep him anymore and that he would be killed if he ended up back in the shelter, so he came home with us. He was two years old.
We lived outside Phoenix and had the typical AZ backyard. One day I bought some sod and created a little strip of grass and Zeke was ecstatic. He rolled on it and played on it and didn’t want to leave it. I felt so bad for not giving him grass earlier. He was a good dog, he wasn’t a barker, until the first monsoon rolled in the next summer. What followed was years of sleepless nights each time a monsoon blew in. I dreaded them.
The Triplets
Pippin joined the family a year after Gary. As you can see, our cats are terrified of Zeke.
We moved from Arizona to Reno, into a house with a big beautiful backyard that had lots of shade and Zeke loved it. He also decided my daughter’s room was his room too and he became her dog.
We moved again in 2014, when Zeke was 6, and I got him a puppy. Gus was a tiny puppy, half Dachshund and half Border Collie and he LOVED Zeke. Having a puppy transformed Zeke. He went from acting like an old dog to being a puppy again. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Zeke is twelve this year and has slowed down a lot. His joints hurt now and he can’t jump up on my bed anymore.
In the last month he got sick really fast. He had been slowing down a bit and I started giving him supplements for joint pain, but one day his front leg hurt so much it made him cry. I had never heard him do that, and I took him back to the vet. They gave him prescriptions for pain, but he very quickly got to the point where he couldn’t stand up on his own.
The vet had been preparing me for this, she said it would probably have to happen soon, but I did not believe it was something I couldn’t fix. On his last night, he was in so much pain, he cried every time he moved.
Yesterday I took him to the vet and held him as he took his last breath.
He was lying there, shaking and panting because he was in so much pain. The vet put the needle in the catheter and pressed the plunger slightly. He relaxed and stopped shaking and his breathing slowed, and for a few seconds he was there, looking at me, free of pain, and he was back to the old Zeke, and I wanted to tell her to stop, that he was ok, that we could find something that would help him, but I knew it wasn’t true, then she pressed the plunger more and he closed his eyes and was gone. I knew the moment it happened, I watched his chest rise and fall as he was breathing, and then it fell and never rose again.
How is it possible to consider the decision to end the life of something you love to be a good thing?
He was a good dog and we loved him, I hope he knew that.
Postcards From Dirt 