Orders of Magnitude

On the occasion of the coming anniversary -

Twisk died yesterday, a minute or two before 2 p.m. He was 15 years, 7 months, more or less exactly. I want to say that loss takes away. It does as an order of magnitude that is hard to quantify, this taking away, this lessening, this loss. But there is also this deeper addition - not deeper than the loss, but deep because of it, a layer of self, another order of magnitude added to the life you continue to live. It is not parity, but a rich exchange, the sadness and deep tissue wisdom that appears in its place.
Twisk was still up and moving, though frail, till about a week ago. He had had a big bout of diarrhea before Thanksgiving, maybe all that free turkey I got with my grocery store rewards card; gravy, skin, meat off the bones, the boiled gelatinous result of the carcass. He loved it and then was very sick out the back end for a few days, with us washing the bed, the towels, his fur, two baths even on cold days. After the second one the next day, he seemed not able to walk well on his left front leg, though he was eating a bit again.
His harness, which I got when he had idiopathic vestibular disease about six months ago - his falling, his spinning eyes, his sideways lurching gait; holding him up against my leg to steer him, lifting him slightly off the ground so he could bear his weight - that harness made it possible to cart him around for his last weeks, up and down those front stairs. I held him for a kind of flying down and gentle landing, and then resistance in his legs while I walked him out the front, maybe to the round stone garden, once even to the pond a week ago, where he did weakly lap at the water, which he use to drink so readily. Then he didn’t get to the garden, then even the front was hard, and we were carrying him in his last days down those front steps. Peter took him to Maynard Animal Hospital about a week and a half ago, where they looked at his legs and said there was no break, no tumor, but if he didn’t improve in two weeks, to think about what is next.
We thought about all that, but looked for him to eat a little here, drink a lot there, pee readily when we got him down the steps, all signs of maintaining. A few nights ago he would make a croaking bark in the night, a call for help of some real need. We tried to answer it by taking him out – did he need to go out? – by giving him water, which he usually drank, by trying food, which he stopped wanting. His last food was a chunk or two of organic chicken we made with him in mind. Peter bought him hotdogs, which he had had a bit of a few days before, but he declined now. He didn’t want his cheese sticks anymore, and he turned away from milk, his staple for so long when he didn’t want his food unadorned. He did lap at the organic chicken broth yesterday, his last day, and always the water, drinking lying down on his pillow if we didn’t lift his head up, great biting, sloppy laps, and stopping for what seemed like exhaustion.
He made his croaking bark a lot on the last days, and nearness seemed to comfort him. The night before he died, Peter slept on the couch next to him with his hand on him, comforting him when he barked. I took a short turn in the wee hours the next morning, yesterday, and then we left him on two dog beds with a clean blanket by the couch facing the Christmas tree, turning his head and body toward the door, or toward the kitchen to give him relief on each side.
The girls had had friends sleep over that night before. Charlotte was a new hoped-for friend for Rachel, and Chelsea - Sandra’s friend, often loud but this time she was quieter and wonderfully young and true. We left the four girls alone with all three dogs yesterday while we went to parent-teacher conferences at school. They petted Twisk when he barked, and gave him water, and got a chance to tend to him. When I got home and Peter went on to Boston, Charlotte’s mom came and got her, and Rachel and Sandra and Chelsea were left, playing happily downstairs, watching our home movies, jumping on the gym mats.
I had tried calling two mobile vets earlier at 8 a.m. The first said she didn’t travel this far out, and the other I left messages for on her answering machine, hoping she’d call. When she had not by my return, I called our regular vet practice, which didn’t have a mobile vet. But I said that Twisk was too old and too frail to take in a cold, bumping car to an exam room. The woman put me on hold and came back and said Dr. Fallaci, who normally didn’t make house calls, would come. He couldn’t get there till 1:30 – he was in surgery – but would that be okay? I said yes and thank you, and said we would be open to his wisdom when he got here.
Peter was in Boston and had no way to get back by then. I went down and told the girls to be ready for what might come, to think about it, and I’d call them when the vet came. They ran up the stairs to see Twisk on his pillows by the couch looking at the Christmas tree. They checked him and his water and then they burst downstairs again, swirling the silver tinsel on the tree as they passed, safe inside their childhood, leaving me free to be upstairs.
The idea of what to do in what might be his last hours became a set of choices. I sat ay my desk and worked on the minutes for the last school committee meeting. I emailed policy suggestions, riding my high feeling about the coldness of the committee and its general lack of graciousness, their silent and ignorant reproof to dissent in the face of all the time and care people gave. It seemed right to be writing then, doing that something more then, safe inside my opining, but always running down from my computer when I heard Twisk make his crying bark.
And I made sure his bed was washed and got into the dryer so it would be ready. And I also sat with him and rubbed his paws, which felt very cold, and brought the new little glass bowls from Ikea full of water so he could better drink, and tucked a towel under his head so he could be more upright, and looked at him, and blessed him, and made sure he could see me. Then I would get up and finish the things I began, and he lay there on his pillow while I moved around and above him and by him. I checked the clock. Then it was closer to 1:30 and I had straightened up the room and now was waiting next to Twisk for the vet’s car. Dr. Fallaci had called for directions. Then he drove up with the technician at about 1:45.
They got out of their van quietly and walked up our front steps, two nice people. Dr. Fallaci was just holding a little cloth bag, not more. They came in and knelt on the floor. Dr. Fallaci took a simple stethoscope from his small bag and listened to Twisk’s heart. He said Twisk was ready, that he was having a hard time breathing, and that it would be a good time to say goodbye. I think I asked if Twisk had pneumonia and he said something, I can’t remember what. I said again that Twisk was having a hard time breathing. I said again we would honor his wisdom or something seemingly oddly formal like that. I was crying and I said that I would get the girls.
Sandra and Chelsea and Rachel came up and knelt by Twisk and gave him a bit of a pet, looking awkward, not sure what to do in this large moment with the adults around Twisk on the floor. I asked the vet to tell them what would happen and he explained the shot of anesthesia. They blanched a bit, stood and looked at Twisk, and then went quickly downstairs. The other two dogs had been keeping an odd distance all morning, but were still in the room, by the table off the edge of the rug. I called them up and sent them down the stairs, too, but the youngest came right back up the other way and then the older one, so I put them in the hall and shut the glass door. They lay down on the other side of the glass and waited, quietly.
Dr. Fallaci had taken out a shaver from the little cloth bag and turned it on. There was a loud buzzing; a clinical, scary noise in what had been a soft December sunlit Christmas tree room on that clear afternoon. He shaved a bit of Twisk’s right front leg above the paw, to see the vein. He had a syringe ready somehow, of bright pink liquid, and he and the kind technician looked for a vein, pressing their fingers above Twisk’s cold paw. My face was very red and my eyes were sore from holding tears. I asked if it was hard to find a vein and they said yes. Dr. Fallaci had clearly prepared by reading Twisk’s records ahead of time and he said the notes showed this was the best vein, and then he probed a bit with the syringe. Twisk gave a little barking cry, just a small croak when the needle must have found a place, and I knelt by his head. They had already asked me if I wanted to stay and I had said yes, though please know I was going to cry. The tech moved so I could be by Twisk’s head. We had put a towel under his back end in case of urine or feces being released. I sat at his head and petted above his eyes, along his soft muzzle, saying good dog, such a good dog, Twisk, bless you. Dr. Fallaci gently pushed his thumb down on the syringe.
Then the phone rang. Dr. Fallaci was half way through the syringe and the phone rang. I thought it might be Peter and I thought he had the right to know what was happening so I ran to get it. I saw a mobile number I didn’t know, and then the girls picked it up from downstairs. But by the time I came back across the room, Twisk’s face was still and his eyes were open and full and liquid and beautiful as ever. The moment I had kept private vigil for, between the here and then, had already happened. To make sure, I asked if he was gone and the vet said yes. He took his stethoscope out of that little cloth bag, almost empty now of the few things he had brought with him, and checked Twisk's heart and looked at me. I was crying and red, and he kindly said again that it was over.
They were both good and sensitive people. Before Twisk died, I had said I had had a bed ready in the other room, and should I put him there ahead of time? The vet had said Twisk was comfortable for now where he was on the pillows, but now the nice tech woman asked if I wanted help moving him to the bed and I said yes and brought the basket from Peter’s study into the living room, with Twisk's clean bed tucked inside. Together they lifted Twisk’s soft and floppy body into the basket and arranged him in a soft curl. It was a tight fit and Dr. Fallaci folded his paws under to hold him in the basket. Those were the same paws that had stopped flattening out when he walked. In the last month, they would buckle under when he stood, so Twisk’s last steps were often on the top of his folded over back paws. They carried the basket into Peter’s study and put it against the bookshelves. I said we would keep him there till Peter got home and we could dig the hole for him.
Then we stood up again and I walked them to door, asking if there was paperwork, how much to pay. Dr. Fallaci said they would just send a bill later, not to worry now. I hugged them both and they hugged me and I cried to the door. They left in a quiet soft kind way, the way they had come, down our front steps, and then they drove away.
I went back to the living room and put the dog beds Twisk had been sitting on out on the deck. I put the towels and blankets in the laundry room, and his bowls in the sink. I left the Christmas tree lights on. I went and sat on the study floor and looked at this beautiful soft and true dog that had been with me and us so much of the past years, these big and growing years of our life. He was still very slightly warm, now in a forever fetal curve. He was a luminous dog with his huge eyes, and he had the softest fur with its sweet smell of skin beneath. His smell was so not human, but so meaningfully redolent of his canine life, of his own distinction as a living being.
Twisk had lived through everything. He had died so softly, in a quiet that accorded with the quiet that was always inside him. He was often taken for granted. But he was always assumed - brought along and cherished and cared for and included, always a quiet and accommodating life that accepted everything we gave him, took everything we did to him, finally quietly watching and waiting from his pillow.
I can say that I think his suffering was only the worse for those last days. Even that was quiet suffering, though yesterday maybe there was more audible, visible uncertainty, but then it was just over. The mercy and love I believe that came with choosing that he die yesterday, seemed like a short gift at a sudden and simple end.
These are things that loving another living thing can teach you: that each is alive in his or her own right, and there is a whole truth to that; something that shows me there is a whole truth to life, a sign of wholeness that does mean that after this life there is a way ahead. It is the wholeness of it all that makes me believe this must be so. And when I die I will tell that to Sandra and Rachel, and that to Peter if I die first. I will believe that, if Peter dies first, and I’ll be ready to know that when my mom and my dad go. Is that the faith that we have to face the fear of dying? All this comes back to the loss and the layering gift that comes with loss. Twisk was witness and testifier to all of that. He was beloved, cherished, taken for granted as part of this family. He was the best dog.

Twisk.
May 1991 – December 2006.
Born in Los Angeles at an unknown (drunken) breeder’s; named for a small town in Holland, northeast of Amsterdam; lived in California, Switzerland, England, and Pennsylvania; flew in many planes, swam in the Pacific and the Atlantic, hiked the Alps, the moors, the highlands, and the woods and fields of two continents; died beloved at a house named for him -Twisk End – in James, Pennsylvania.

Now it is almost one day later and the sun is on his grave we dug out back, the big stone on top prominent and grey in the tan dried grass and dark brown dirt around it. Rachel and I are back from grocery shopping and it is lunch time and cookie-making time. I have a well of sadness inside me, the loss, and will look this afternoon for the new layer of self.