DIED 2018
ONE OF MY FRIENDS has been in People magazine for spending $17,000 on her cat’s kidney transplant. Another has written a play making fun of that sort of thing. As the devoted custodian of a fourteen-year-old dachshund, my feelings about this topic are complicated. Balancing a fierce and wordless attachment with rational decisions about money is no simple thing.
Everything about old pets and sick pets draws me in now. As when I recently visited my friend and his husband and their ailing dog Jack. The apartment had the feel of a nursing facility, medications and syringes on the counters, pads on the floor. Jack, a slender black dog with goofy, cartoon expressions, now had a feeding tube, shaved patches in his coat, a bandage on his foreleg, and the whole story in his worried, trusting eyes.
One of Jack’s dads used to be a deejay in Austin, and that is how we met, back when I had very young children and a sick husband who liked to go out. Sometimes I went along, and how my face lit up when the theme from Sesame Street pumped through the club. He stayed in our guest room that summer, supposedly a favor to him, actually the opposite. Years later, he fell in love, gay marriage became legal, and I was certified to preside at weddings in the city of New York. A little action figure of their new dog sat atop the cake.
Having been rescued from the streets of Queens, Jack was a homebody, never at ease with other dogs, especially after he was attacked at the Dumbo dog run. Minutes after you took him out for a walk, he was ready to go back inside. He much preferred to relax in a patch of sun on the warm hardwood floor, a cat in dog’s clothing, though the way he loved his purple octopus—so passionately he went through generations of them—spoke of a past life undersea. The summer he was nine, he had an accident in the house. Then came the diagnoses, the treatments and medicines; a slim chance he would get better. Very slim. But you don’t just give up.
One of the best parts of having a dog is what it does to coming home, the mundane opening of a door transformed by joy. Two months later, walking out of work, my friend’s heart still brightens for a moment, then he remembers.