Angie
August 19, 2009 | 
Author 
On August 17th at 5:45, I held my eldest dog, Angie, as she took her last breath. I rubbed her gently behind the ears and kissed her forehead, taking in as much of her as I could before I let the technicians take her away. In the 36 hours since I let them lift her out of my arms, I've been wandering around the house looking for things she might have left around–clumps of hair, a toy, a half-chewed bone, a hidden towel. There was nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was the first time in my life I lamented my own neatness. She was really gone.
She was 15 and had been sick for a year. Homeopathy had kept her miraculously vital and calm throughout that time even though she had been diagnosed with both bilateral cardiomyopathy and metastasized carcinoma. I knew it was coming. I thought I was prepared. In these last few weeks as I had to help lift her up to go outside so she could urinate, I tried to tell myself–as so many others were telling me–that when the time came I would be relieved. I would know it was the right time and it would be okay.
I know they meant well, truly. But I was not relieved. And it did not feel right. It was not okay.
When the doctors gave me the news more than a year ago, I made a committment to myself and to her that I would see her through it all. I would minister to her while she was here and when it was time for her to die, I would be fully present. It was the least I could do. She had been my truly faithful companion for more than 11 years since I'd rescued her. She was my first dog, my mentor, and my trusted guardian. So when the time came I did what I promised I would do. I held her and I watched her die.
In the back of my mind I held out hope that the people who'd talked to me about the "naturalness" of death were right. I had prayed for comfort in the way they had promised. But I didn't feel it at all. I know that when I let go of her body, limp and without any of the fight she had in life, the Angie I loved and trusted and trained and struggled with for all those years was simply not there anymore.
As I held her and felt her chin go limp against my thigh, the strangest though popped into my mind: I'd heard people speak of dead weight before, but she seemed terribly light, nearly weightless to me as if the greatest part of her, her ballast, had departed with her last heartbeat. She–Angie–was not there anymore. Just a brief moment ago she had been there. But then she wasn't. It was stunning. And I do not understand it. I find that no matter what I do or how I appeal to reason and the modern, scientific schema I cannot understand that disappearance. Where is she? Where did she go? She was just here. The first night I paced the house like a child as I whined a mantra, "I want my dog back."
It must sound awfully naive for a therapist and homeopath to be so surprised by death. I have seen death before, though luckily not very much. But I don't think the exposure has helped me understand or accept it much better any more than the platitudes about the cycle of life have helped to ease the pain.
When I was a very young psychotherapist, not two weeks out of graduate school, I worked at a hospital in New Rochelle on the med/surg unit. There were 30 some-odd beds and all of them were filled all the time with very sick people. I was only there for two months, but I watched several people get covered in sheets and rolled away by stretcher. It was a hospital. I was saddened by it, but I expected it.
There was one woman who was different. She never had a visitor, not a family member or a friend. She was a quiet person with short, brown hair who always asked for books to read. Most people got in and out of the unit within a week or so. But she was in her room a long time, always propped up in bed, never in a chair or walking around. She was not assigned to my caseload, but I spent time with her anyway. She seemed so lonely. She didn't talk much when I visited because she found it difficult to breath, but she seemed to like it when I read to her or talked to her about the news, offering her some connection back to the world outside the window.
Once when I sat by her, she lifted her fingers straight up, though her arm remained flat on the bed. Because she was suffering with terminal lung cancer, I thought she was restless or uncomfortable and offered to move her pillows or adjust her bedding. She shook her head until I realized she just wanted me to hold her hand.
It only took a few days from the time I first held her hand to the last time. Her spiral downward was quick, as if she could leave now that she had company. Or maybe she needed a witness. I don't know. I never really got to know her. But I came to care about her and never forgot her. I still think about the changes in her breathing as her time approached, how the muscles in her hand would occasionally contract as if to make sure I was still there, how thin she looked but how firmly her jaw was set as she finally let go. I stayed with her till the end but I can't even remember her name. In my mind now, she was more than any name or any identity that could have ever been assigned to her.
Mostly what I remember now is what I didn't understand and what I still don't.
Peter Kreeft, one of the brightest and best when it comes to writing about the great mysteries, said, "We are shocked at the irreversibility of death although it is utterly familiar, utterly universal, utterly natural. We find the natural unnatural. Why? Let us be shocked at our shock…'This is our natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations.'"
I AM shocked. I am stunned by its finality, its emptiness, its contrariness–not only to everything my senses can fathom but to what my heart holds truest, that He has "put eternity" in us and no matter how we try to rationalize, empiricize, or explain it away with, "well, that's the cycle of life," it never, ever feels right. And I, like Kreeft and many others, believe that it can't feel right because that is not what our souls–or our hearts–were created for. There is something in us, or to be more precise, we are made of something which is not temporal, which does not bow its head in acceptance to the last breath, which does not feel at home in the mortal, time-bound world and never will.
It is why, no matter how many times I hear from people "it's the way of nature", it will never feel natural to me. And if Kreeft is right, then that gives me the most hope of all.
"Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned." (Edna St. Vincent Millay)
Posted in Faith-based Counseling, Holistic Psychotherapy | 
Tags: death, dogs, Faith-based Counseling, Holistic Psychotherapy
Your story was moving, your sorrow familiar, and your love for Angie apparent. I have been there many times over the years…too many times…and your words are like my own. My first dog, Skipper, was the only dog I ever truly loved. He came in to my life when I was 2 and left it when I was 17. To this day I cry when I think about him..and that was 45 years ago. I have lost many kitties and I loved each and every one of them. When the time came to let them go, it was the best I could do for them so they would no longer suffer. Only one died on the operating table..the rest I had to make that long, awful journey. The worst was a 9 month old kitten that suffered almost his entire short life. He helped me through hip replacement surgery and stayed by my side. But in the end, I had to send him on his final journey as he could take no more treatments. He had an incurable disease that is one that cannot be truly diagnosed till after death – so the treatments simply eliminated all other causes. Angie will always be in your heart. Yes, death is so final and so sad for those left behind.
Jennifer, thank you for sharing your story with me. It is the worst and most exquisite of pains, this love, this loss. I could not imagine my life without it. And I thank Angie every day for all she ever taught me. She put me on the path of dog rescue and every dog in some way rescued me.
Many blessings to you,
Jude
Judith, this was so moving – and so sadly familiar. This is the diary I wrote about my girl Katie's crossing on January 30, 2009. (Louis is my beloved, who lives in Spirit; you'll see why I'm not posting this on HP.)
***
Katie left us tonight. The heat we have been enduring this week was, I think, the tipping point. We have had days on end of temperatures reaching 43C (111F) and above, and not going below 27C (80F) overnight. Until yesterday, Katie seemed to be coping with this, going out in the morning for a sniff round the back yard, before coming in for her breakfast and lying in front of the cooler for the day. We don't have air-conditioning at home; we can't afford it. We do have two evaporative coolers, but they are only meant for small rooms, and struggle when the heat hits the mid 30s, let alone the mid 40s.
This morning, when I got up, I heard Katie complaining – and she's always been a vocal cat, whether pleased or not – but she was plainly uncomfortable, at least. When I came out to the lounge, where she sleeps, I saw she'd vomited her dinner some time during the night. She seemed a bit happier when the fan was put on, but was still clearly having trouble with the heat.
I rang Mum twice during the day. The first time, it sounded hopeful; Katie had drunk some milk and water, and wasn't complaining. But a couple of hours later, she had lost it all and was lying crying.
There was no denying it now. She was suffering in this heat, and if she couldn't keep water down, it would not be long before her kidneys failed. I couldn't imagine that, with her advanced cancer, there was anything Nick, our vet, could, or should, do, other than release her. I rang the clinic, was told he'd be in in fifteen minutes and that he'd call me. Then I spent forty-five tense and unhappy minutes waiting for his call; he'd been caught with a surgical patient who needed urgent attention. When we spoke, he mentioned that the clinic was caring for several pets suffering heat prostration – these were healthy animals, but were on saline drips. If healthy animals were suffering, it's no wonder that my little girl had been pushed past endurance.
I asked if I could bring her around this evening. I have to take her there carried in a shopping jeep, since we don't drive. It's only a fifteen-minute walk, but I wasn't going to take her out in the full daytime heat, even for a one-way trip. But Nick very kindly said they had so few appointments that day, that he'd put aside a time and come around. We arranged for him to be here at about 5.15, which would, we hoped, allow me enough time to get home. Melbourne's under-maintained trains have been breaking down or being cancelled in this heatwave (as happens every summer; the network is appallingly run) to the tune of hundreds every day.
These calls were made at about 2.00. I didn't feel at all like staying at work after that, so (with my boss's okay – he's a decent man) I headed for an earlier train. I was lucky: both the tram to Caulfield Station and the train itself were on time. I rang my sister, Joan, to tell her Katie was leaving us, and she said that she was leaving work too – the power had failed there, so there was no point in staying. She said she would drop in on the way home.
I got home at about 3.45 to find Mum distressed, and Katie on the kitchen floor, obviously very ill. She was gasping, her eyes were dilated, and she was crying out. I didn't realise it immediately, but her heart was failing. It's probably what was happening all day, now that we look back. I was horrified to see how bad she was; not because there was any hope of her staying with us, but because she was in pain.
Joan arrived about two minutes after I did. She recognised heart failure. It was how her Lucy-dog left this world. I didn't know what it was, but I knew Katie needed help immediately. It was only a matter of minutes before Joan had rung the clinic to say we would bring Katie around straight away. There was no way in the world I was going to wait another ninety minutes or so for her to be put out of her pain. She convulsed as we gathered her onto a towel to carry her, and a minute later, as I sat in the back of the car, gave one big kick. I didn't realise it at the time, but she had gone – died in my arms, the only one of my cats to do so. She had crossed over without even leaving her earthly home, without having to go into the clinic. I realised it a minute or so later as we drove out, when I saw she was not breathing. We had to take her to the clinic anyway, since they are arranging for her cremation. We took her in, and Nick checked for a heartbeat. There was none, of course. My little girl had gone, on the thirteenth anniversary of the day we brought her home as a three-month old, insufferably cute, self-assured kitten, from the Lort Smith Animal Hospital. (The “insufferable” tag was how our other cats would probably have described her.)
Naturally I was not in the frame of mind to be really aware of Louis's presence while this happened. I knew he was there, though I couldn't sense him. He had said while we were on the way home that he wouldn't leave my side. I asked him later if she jumped into his arms. She did; that final kick sent her to him. She's at home now – her real home, her permanent home. Louis is with her, settling her in, though it doesn't sound like she needs much help. She's been sniffing around and making the place hers, and has had some sort of fish for dinner. She's enjoying the only sort of heat we like – that from a fireplace, and she's curled up on the blue velvet rug I saw Louis trying to arrange for her the other week. I miss her, and will miss her more as the days pass. I'll miss her smug little expression, looking out from lowered eyelids; her silent “mh” which hardly rates as a miaow; her squeaks as she'd run indoors for her dinner; her habit of sitting watching me eat breakfast; her fondness for sleeping on top of me in the cool months, while I'd watch television; the silkiness of her fur, and her sheer prettiness. But as much as the missing is the relief for her. She's free of pain and illness. She's young again, and healthy, and will never be otherwise. She has her magnificent long tail again! She has a wonderful home, a garden that offers vast possibilities for exploring, and at least two admirers in the persons of Louis and Richelieu. And I will see her every time I cross over for a nighttime visit to my beloved husband, Katie's bon papa.