The End of a Life
People sometimes say that you never really find love; love finds you. I suppose that was true of the relationship I had with my wife, Sophie. My relationship with her snuck up on me from behind, like a mugger lying in wait to hand me a bouquet of roses, rather than a beating and a robbery. That's also how our dog, Maya, found her way into my heart. Something I wasn't expecting, but by the time I realized it was upon me, it was too late. I was conquered.
After 18 months of marriage and a nasty legal battle with the U.S. government, Sophie had relocated with me to Alexandria, Virginia. As a recent immigrant from Zimbabwe, she found herself surrounded by strange people, strange customs but at least a people who spoke a language that she understood. I had hired a K-Street law firm to defend her against the Immigration and Naturalization Service (now renamed, appropriately, ICE) at the cost of my entire retirement fund. My wife now was safely and securely ensconced in the highly mobile, highly transient community of Belle View, where the vast majority of inhabitants stopped along the banks of the Potomac River for a few months or years, just long enough to pass through this training program or that on their way to a promising career in government.
Sophie was still looking for a job and I was often away on business. I worked as a reporter and editor for a niche publishing firm based in Potomac, Maryland. My work took me to Milan, Amsterdam, London, Rio de Janiero, and many other exotic locales. In the summer, Sophie was unnerved by the often violent thunderstorms we have in Northern Virginia. Zimbabwe has the highest incidence of people struck by lightning in the world, so the sound of lightning ripping into the nearby trees, carrying with it the metallic scent of ozone, frightened her.
I decided that the thing to do was get her a dog for the lonely nights when I was in Europe or South America and she was sitting alone in a two bedroom, one bath condo in Alexandria. One Saturday in October 2000, we visited the Fairfax County Animal Shelter looking for a possible canine friend. We found her almost immediately, a little black puppy with a splash of white on her chest and paws that looked like she had stepped in white paint. A card hastily tucked into a plastic pocket attached to the kennel door said, "Maya." The name was an eerie coincidence. My wife and I had agreed before we went to the animal shelter that we would call our new dog, "Naya," meaning "rain" in my wife's native language. The card in the pocket also listed her as four months old which, we later found out, was off by about a month. Maya, a black Labrador retriever-German shepherd mix, lay near the front of the cage, her nose slightly protruding from underneath the kennel door. While the other dogs in the kennel were jumping around and barking, Maya lay motionless on the hard concrete, looking up at me with forlorn brown eyes which seemed to say, "Can't you get me out of here?" I wondered aloud to Sophie how long the dog had been in the shelter. I asked an attendant.
"Oh, she was brought in this morning by the family," he said.
"You mean to tell me this dog has only been in here for four hours? Look how depressed she is!" I said.
"Yeah, that's about right."
I turned to my wife. "We've got to get this dog out of here." Sophie quickly agreed.
With the payment of an adoption fee of $85 (cash only) and a little paperwork, Maya was ours. When she realized that she was getting a reprieve, the little dog jumped to her feet and wagged her tail until her entire rear end was wobbling back and forth. She was so excited that I had trouble getting her through the narrow front door of the shelter, on our way to the car and freedom.
The warm mid-October sun and the hum of the car's tires on the road made Maya's eyes start to narrow. She went over on her side, and soon was fast asleep. A stressful day on Death Row. At home, we prepared a bowl of food and filled another bowl with fresh water and placed them in the kitchen. Maya sniffed at the food, looked at us suspiciously, then went into the far corner of the living room and lay down, watching our every movement. Eventually, hunger overtook fear and she went to her food bowl and ate. When she realized the food was all right, she came over to my wife and laid her head in Sophie's lap. She was telling us that she was prepared to start her life with us. For months until my wife found a job, Maya followed Sophie everywhere she went. The little puppy had imprinted on my wife, a surrogate human mother to replace the canine mother from which Maya had been separated.
We had many adventures with Maya, too numerous to mention in this short history, but fast forward another 13 years, Maya's muzzle had become gray with age, her eyes dimming with cataracts and her hips now bony with arthritis. She could no longer run, no longer jump to catch her favorite Frisbee toy, and she went on walks haltingly, her course shorter with almost every passing week. Two days after I turned 52, Maya collapsed at her water bowl. We rushed her to an all-night emergency clinic. After waiting nearly two hours, the veterinarian came out to talk to us. "Maya has cancer," he said. "She has internal and external tumors. The internal tumors appear to be on her liver and other internal organs, including possibly her heart." He discussed possible treatment options, but Maya was already 13 years and four months old. The longest we could hope to extend her life would be, at most, another 20 months, and treatment would be tens of thousands of dollars. We decided against any further treatment.
"We've gotten her stable, but she's had internal bleeding, and likely will again," the vet said. "Don't expect this to last more than four to six months."
We took Maya home just as the sun feathered the clouds in a faint salmon glow against the eastern sky. For the rest of that week, Maya was very weak, but we nursed her back to health. Soon she was back to her old happy self, going for walks, wagging her tail, asking to be let out, sometimes even going back to her old tricks of getting into the garbage. We even occasionally roughhoused with her, wrestling as much as we dared and as much as Maya could take. We would play for a few minutes, and then she would quickly tire and roll over on her side. Sometimes she would sit in front of us while we watched television and whine, asking for us to be with her. It was as though she knew her time was short and she wanted the companionship and the comfort of a human touch. The warmth and heartbeat of any living creature would have sufficed. I consciously spent much more time with her, going on walks, letting her go at her own pace, and respecting her wishes when she stopped and turned around to go back to the warmth and safety of home. She was a happy dog during those next four months, as she had been nearly all of her short life. One Saturday in early December on Pearl Harbor Day, of all days I found Maya in the bathroom, her belly flat on the floor, all four legs splayed helplessly out to her sides and feces oozing from underneath her tail.
I cleaned her up and took her into my arms. Her breathing was labored and thready. This was it. All three of us knew it. "Let go, Maya, you can go if it's too painful now," I told her as I stroked her fur. "Remember when I promised you a long time ago, Maya, that when the time came, I wouldn't let you die alone? This is where I keep that promise. I'm right here, Maya. Let go of life if it's too much to bear. It's OK."
Maya's breathing became less labored, calmer. I'd like to think it was because she felt the comfort of having me with her, of knowing that I had kept my promise to her. Sophie came into the room. "I love you, Maya," she said, but was too overcome with emotion and had to leave the room.
I wrapped my arms around Maya. She sighed. It was not a sigh of pain, but more like a sigh of relief, or resignation, a surrender to the inevitable. "Let go, Maya. You don't have to stay for us. We'll be all right. Go now. It's time." While the words still hung in the air over us, Maya suddenly rose up on her front legs, baring her teeth. I noticed something white coming out of her mouth and thought that she was frothing at the mouth. When I looked closer, I saw that what I thought was froth was actually her tongue, which had turned as white as a sheet of paper. Her head began to twitch, first subtly and then more violently. The twitching soon stopped, and very slowly, even gently, her head lowered back to the floor. Her eyes remained open. There was no breath, no heartbeat, my friend and constant companion, a member of my family for nearly 14 years, lay dead at my feet. "I'm sorry, Maya. I'm so sorry," I said through my tears, apologizing not for myself but for the way of all living things, so sorry that all things may only borrow the gift of life for a time, that none of us, human or animal, can ever truly own it. I was feeling the pangs of separation of the most permanent and eternal kind, but more than that, I wept for myself, because I knew that my fate would be separated from Maya's by only a brief span of years.
Sophie and I wrapped Maya in a heavy wool blanket that she used to sleep on when we had picnics together. We bound her up in blanket and twine, her favorite bone tucked in with her.
The next day, it snowed. I went to the edge of the woods behind our house where Maya spent many hours playing, and began the grim task of digging her grave. I took an ax and cut through the many tree roots that I encountered. I hacked at them viciously, with resentment. These damned roots that refused to yield enough ground to give Maya the decent burial that she deserved. After nearly four hours and my fingers cramping, I tucked Maya gently into her resting place and filled the grave back in. I said a quiet prayer over her. For no reason that I can fathom I added, "All dogs go to Heaven." I picked up the ax and the spade and crossed them over the handles of the wheelbarrow. My back sore, my hands numb from the cold, my mind stilled by a chill that runs far deeper than the absence of warmth, I lifted the wheelbarrow and pushed it toward the garden shed. The snow that just hours earlier gave every leafless tree a cheerful look now turned to a freezing rain that glazed every dead thing.