The World's Best Dog is Gone
And I'm Stuck Here Without Him
My dog Pirate, a couple of hours before his death on Sunday.
I’m embarrassed by the photo because he looks so good.
How did we euthanize him? How?
He had metastatic cancer, with a huge abdominal mass (provisionally but pretty confidently diagnosed by a vet’s ultrasound as an angiosarcoma), and for many weeks had ascites belly fluid sloshing around inside when he walked. His right back leg ballooned up from lymphedema. He had difficulty standing on slippery kitchen tile floors, and so for the past 2 weeks of life had grippy pads glued to his paw bottoms; my younger daughter got them for him. I thought he’d hate them, but he was the eternal optimist, just happy to not have his legs skating out from beneath him, “Happy to be here man, hey when’s dinner?”
This fall, the vet was praising him effusively. His weight was great, his hips and legs strong, he had pep and energy, he was always happy to see everybody. At 14 — the equivalent for a human of being in his 80s or 90s — he looked better than Labrador retrievers half his age. Only some tooth decay and gray fur around his muzzle showed the passage of the years. Twice a day he’d take us on a long stroll through the seaside green space near our New Bedford home, usually with a mid-walk pause to throw himself on the grass and writhe around, scratching his back on the ground and bicycle-kicking his legs in the air.
Pirate was my 5th dog. First was Pinzel, my dad’s dachshund when I was a toddler; I’ve seen some photos and have some vague memories. Second was Buffy, the runner up dog-of-life, a short-haired yellow little mutt. Someone bought her, named her Buffy, discovered an allergy to pet dander, and turfed her to my mom to give to me when I was in elementary school. Buffy was small, round with stick legs, with a dirty blond coat and white paw socks, sort of cranky and gassy and ridiculous, but we had our adventures. She died immediately after I went off to college, which caught me off guard — like a typical college student egotist, I had barely patted her on the head on my way out the door.
Then came the three dogs of adult life: Tuzi, Buddy and Pirate.
Tuzi and Buddy were optimistic quick decisions with near-immediate buyer’s regret (on my part, if not my wife’s). We bought Tuzi when we lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, when I was working as a journalist; my father-in-law fell in love with her, and soon, to some relief, she moved in with the parents. We bought Buddy when we lived in Maryland, when I was working as a paramedic and going to medical school; my father fell in love with him, and soon, to some relief, he moved in with my parents. I’m aware it’s not a good track record.
Tuzi came into our lives as we were driving out of the city, for a weekend at the family dacha, the no-frills country house concept embraced across Slavic society. (My wife’s family are Ukrainians, who variously live in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kyiv, rural Ukraine, and the United States). We made a quick stop. I hopped out of our rickety old Soviet jeep, a used Niva with a cherry red paint job, and hurried down into the Metro station underpass, with all of its commercial kiosks. It was a time of hyperinflation, and the walls of the ramp down to the underground station were always lined with people holding goods for sale — flowers, used household items, lottery tickets, you name it. One woman was holding what looked like a live bear cub. I bought it without a second’s hesitation and returned to the car holding it triumphantly overhead.
“I sent you for bananas!” my wife protested, but she was as gleeful as me.
Tuzik is a common dog’s name in Russian; Tuz is Ace, and Tuzik adds a diminutive to make it endearing. Since my bear cub-puppy was a girl, it was decided she would be not Tuzik but Tuzi. She turned out to be a Caucasian shepherd — a working dog, bred to protect sheep from wolf packs prowling the Caucasus Mountains. The Caucasuses are a hard place, home to Europe’s tallest peak and a geographic fence dividing Russia from Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and beyond that Turkey and Iran. (Unlucky Chechnya is on the wrong side of that mountain fence, on the slopes facing Russia, and Moscow never let it go).
Caucasian shepherds are fiercely protective and powerful — again, they are bred to fight wolves — and Tuzi would stand tense and quivering at our apartment window, staring at our crappy red jeep parked outside, and barking furiously whenever someone walked past it. We hired a dog trainer, and Tuzi seemed to respond well; but she was so intensely possessive of “our family’s stuff” that she once barked threateningly at the trainer when he picked up his own shoulder bag after having briefly put it own on a bench in our apartment foyer. Tuzi’s attitude was: “You put it down in our home, so that’s ours now!” In between, she was a giant shaggy ball of loving dog. We would hike through the wet high grass fields by the dacha, and Tuzi would cavort, and flip entire startled frogs up out of the grass into the air, catch them in her huge jaws and eat them, with bones crunching and frog guts spraying, and she’d wag her tail.
Eventually, after lots more Slavic drama, Tuzi moved in with my in-laws. My mother-in-law made yarn out of her fur, and wove Tuzi-fur socks for me that I still wear around the house. Surrounded with love, Tuzi mellowed with age, and eventually passed away.
We moved to the States, and I vowed to do better. I decided we needed something more traditionally family-oriented than a Chechen warlord dog.
We went to a farm in rural Maryland that bred labradors. My wife and I gazed in awe upon a small corral of adorable yellow puppies, and I let her choose.
“That one!” she said with delight.
“That one?” I replied. “With the bony lump on its head?” The puppy farmer was equally surprised but quickly hid it, pleased to be moving a lemon off the lot. Our daughters named him Buddy, since they were fans of Disney’s “Air Bud” franchise about a golden retriever that plays basketball (and then in the sequels, plays football, baseball, soccer, volley ball; engages in snow boarding; goes into outer space; helps Santa; etc.)
Buddy was in some ways more trouble than Tuzi. He would come leaping out onto the front lawn of our Maryland home, and my elementary school-age daughters and their friends would shriek and run in every direction, knowing what was coming. Buddy would chase and catch each of them in turn, grab them by their pony tails and slam them to the ground — wham! (child down wailing), wham! (another child down wailing). He didn’t have a mean bone in his body — this was pure hilarity from his point of view (and mine, I admit). He was a good dog, ish. My dad in particular fell in love with him and eventually Buddy moved in with my parents. He too lived out his years, passed away, and years later my dad still mourns him.
Enter Pirate. With two strikes, I was no longer confident in my dog-choosing skills, and I found myself approaching a West Virginia puppy mill with a sinking heart. It was inside a 2-story townhouse (!) — if I’d known that beforehand, I probably wouldn’t have come. A young couple lived downstairs, while the entire upstairs was open plan — no furniture, just pens holding an army of gleeful chocolate lab puppies.
The litter I studied was just eight weeks old, barely old enough for sale, and the wriggling puppies were all covered in each other’s poop. In fact the upstairs wall-to-wall shag carpeting was more poop than shag. I told the breeder I’d made some mediocre puppy choices in recent years, told her I had to get it right this time, and asked her which she’d recommend. Without hesitation she plucked up one of the lot, brushed off the poop and handed him over for inspection. He was the smartest puppy she’d seen in ages, a unique animal, a 10,000-year-old soul. It was either sincerity or a great con, but I asked for directions to the nearest ATM. Before she put the puppy back in the pen to await my return, she marked an X on his belly with a Sharpie; my confidence in her soared when, upon my return with cash, she easily plucked him back from that sea of identical-looking pups and turned him over to show the X.
My daughters were ecstatic. “Pirate!” they cried in unison. (Pirate? Sure, why not!)
And he was … the perfect dog. He was always up for anything. He loved to play, and if you didn’t want to do that, he loved that too, and wherever we lived, he was a celebrity. My younger daughter (who wanted a horse) built hurdles of escalating heights and took him over them, and we learned Pirate could almost leap over a standing adult. You could teach him any trick — she taught him to play dead in a single afternoon. We would pack the car so full for family vacations or camping trips that there would be a dog-sized rectangle left between the car ceiling and the baggage — but I would slide him sideways into it, and he’d wag his tail in approval as we all laughed and took photos of him.
When we lived in the Boston neighborhood of Brookline, where he was hands down the fastest, most exuberant tennis ball-chaser at the local dog park, people I did not know would recognize me as “Pirate’s dad.” We would hear kids walking by point out our apartment complex and say, “That’s Pirate’s home!” (We are in Brookline this week — after we put our poor boy down, we needed some time out of the house; I also had a series of ER shifts to work at Beth Israel Deaconess, so we took a hotel — and even though we had moved away years ago, my wife met today with old friends who told her they still call our old apartment building “Pirate’s place.”)
Several years ago we bought a cottage on Long Pond, a pretty sizable lake in southern Massachusetts. It’s our American dacha. Pirate loved it. He was in the lake every day unless it was frozen solid — he had a coat like an otter’s and could swim for an hour in freezing water without any apparent discomfort, especially if he could later snooze contentedly in front of a wood-burning stove. The streets at the lake are quiet and he’s smart, so he was free to roam, and would daily pop over to our next door neighbor’s — friends who became his second family, and who stuffed him with prime rib and other decadent treats.
In summers, Pirate and I would wade into the water, and I’d gather up clams from the sandy bottom and skip them out into the lake. Pirate would swim out and turn back, head high out of the water, poised and alert, and he’d try to catch the clams as I skipped them past. We’d play this for hours, him swimming back and forth, panting in joy, with my younger daughter occasionally protesting that it was too frustrating for him. “He’s getting disoriented, stop it!” On the rare occasion when Pirate actually caught a clam shell in his mouth, he’d triumphantly crunch it up and eat it while treading water, and I’d roar with laughter, and it’d be my wife’s turn to scold us.
If Pirate had a flaw, it was that he never wanted to be left behind. You’d get up and go to the kitchen — he’d go to the kitchen. He was often underfoot. He once swam across an entire lake looking for us when we’d set off swimming and kayaking without him, once ran along miles of lake shore chasing us when we were out in a motor boat, once slipped the leash to chase me through busy Boston streets as I bicycled to work. You’d be dismayed to find him behind you when he was supposed to be safe at home, but he’d just be thrilled — “Hey man, I’m here! How’s it going? I missed you!”
In the end, he was so tired. He would trudge slowly outside to pee, and then struggle with the single step up back into the house; I’d often have to lift his bottom. He was eating boiled chicken and wagging his tail weakly in thanks right up to the final morning. But his muscles wasted away in just weeks, his belly grew, and he was in some pain — how much pain was hard to say, because he handled it with his native optimism and good cheer, and always wagged his tail to say thanks for the gabapentin and galliprant pills wrapped in prosciutto.
He walked into the vet’s office under his own power Sunday morning, they placed an IV, my wife and I sat with him on blankets on the exam room floor and cried. I have good, healthy, loving relationships with my parents, my wife, my daughters — but my loving relationship with Pirate was so simple — no complications, just pure love, with all of its awesome and dreadful wonder.
My wife had an old strand of yarn left over from making socks out of Tuzi’s fur, and she tied it in a bow around Pirate’s front leg — for luck, and love, and really who the hell knows why she did that. The vet said to call when we were ready — we weren’t ready — but I called, the vet pushed a syringe full of light blue barbiturate liquid, and Pirate lay his head down in what I like to think — I have to think — was grateful relief. And then he died, and we cried, and cried. The best dog was finally at rest.
*hugs*
Just **destroyed** me.
So happy he could live as he did, tho.