Luna

(Luna in 2010)

Luna

The morning after we said our last goodbyes to Luna I sit and realize that in all the thirteen years I knew her, we never once sat to meditate together. She just wasn’t the meditative kind of dog I guess. But in the suddenly too quiet house I sit and feel a raw and hollow place inside, and think it must be some kind of shared karma for my slightly fumbled attempts to ease her passing.

Dear reader, if you don't want to explore the details of a dog's death now is a good time to find something different to read.

I’ve put down pets and farm animals in just about every imaginable way, and if I were to gather all my regrets in a bag, the taking of these lives would make up the bulk of them. So yesterday I was determined to make Luna’s death a good one. I kept thinking, “What would I want done if this were me?” The violence of a swift bullet to the head was something I wanted to avoid.

When Luna had suddenly declined for the worst at the beginning of the week, unable to move really or even bark, but still wanting to eat, we’d spent a few days trying to gently starve her, like they do in hospice. When that didn’t work, and she just got stronger, regaining her incessant mindless “woah-woah” bark, but without any ability to move more than her head, we decided to feed her sleeping pills for a last supper, or in her case breakfast. The only kind we had on hand were Benadryl, so I searched the net for directions and crushed up about five times her body weight in milligrams to mix with beef broth and milk. As Carol and I went off to dig her grave we left her to sleep in peace….

An hour later instead of being asleep she was barking for food again. I checked the bottle and discovered it had expired 15 years ago, so we tried again, this time with some Advil PM with the same sedative in the same over-dose. An hour later she didn’t look any more tired, so I gave her another round of the Advil over-dose mixed with a handful of food and splash of milk. And then the hours passed as we did weekend chores and projects outside. And each time we checked-in she’d be there awake, alert but weary, even wagging her tail some, and barking occasionally as usual.

Five hours later with her own barking still apparently keeping her awake I figured maybe a nice big soup-bone would distract her enough to let her guard down and allow sleep to take her. So we thawed what we had, an old Chuck Roast and then I spent a strenuous ten minutes or so sawing through the bones to get her a manageable piece. But she gave that hunk of meat and bone, something she'd once inhale, only the briefest attention, and it was clear it was time for Plan B.

Carol took the other dogs for a walk and I carried Luna outside to lay her out on the shady lawn.

One of the worst things about aging is being reduced to a husk of your former self, and as I carried her frail and bony body, half the weight it once was, I remembered how she had been a vibrant obsessively energetic dog. She could play fetch long past the endurance of any human. She could run up and down a trail making a marathon out of a good long day in the mountains. But she always made a wonderful loyal companion, and was the perfect mentor for the pug who learned how to run and swim and climb to keep up with her. For Luna was always ready for an outing, that is up until the last few years when her joints made walking a painful hobble, and her deafness made her seem even more in her own loony Luna-tic bubble than ever.

Several times in the past few years we thought she’d had a stroke and was dying, only to have it be a bout of canine vertigo – a temporary condition which comes on and passes so mysteriously and is so debilitating that many people and even some vets confuse it with something fatal and put their dogs down prematurely. So for her joints, at the vet’s recommendation, first we tried glucosamine and low-dose aspirin, which seemed to help a little. Then I found some expensive canine vitamins online, a pre and pro-biotic powder I’d sprinkle on her breakfast each day along with her two aspirin. And it worked wonders. Within a few weeks it seemed like Luna was five years younger, and Carol was remarking that she wanted to start taking it too.

For a couple of years there it seemed like Luna was going to be immortal.

But eventually, and it seems with bigger dogs inevitably, the hips fail and all they can do is lay there, looking at you, and in Luna’s case, barking endlessly for something it’s easier to interpret as hunger. So, there she was at last out on the lawn, looking around calmly but eagerly at all the stuff I imagined she could once hear, soaking it up, not like a bright and sharp pup, but like a dulled tool, or old factory machine reduced to operating on automatic, worn down but persistent, running on empty really, literally powered by a will to survive when by all rights she should have been dead asleep.

We lay like that for a while together, she experiencing the simplicity of the moment as only a dog can, and me trying to imagine the world through her tattered senses. In her own world, there was a peace around her that I felt only peripheral to but wished would never end.

As she soaked up the warm spring afternoon I put the .22 magnum pistol to the back of her head and without hesitation pulled the trigger.

Somehow I’d thought the gun’s barrel right up against her head would muffle the sound, but it didn’t, and a .22 mag is actually really loud. With the shock of the shot painfully ringing in my ears I figured this was a bit of my instant karma for helping her in maybe not the most skillful of ways.

When I went to move her body to her grave there was a lot of blood I had also not considered. Apparently a .22 mag is also a lot more powerful than the regular .22 I was more used to using, and since Carol and the other dogs were due back soon I flooded the lawn with water to dilute it. But at the spot where the bullet had gone through and into the ground it just kept seeping out bright red blood, like the earth itself was deeply wounded and wouldn't ever stop bleeding. For just a moment it all seemed too surreal.

Today, in the too quiet morning, with one less dog to feed and clean up after, there is a tangible and not so subtle emptiness where Luna had been. She may have had a head like a block of wood, but her heart was as sweet and kind and pure as a bright spring day. I will miss both her head and heart as I watch that fir tree we planted on her grave grow.

(5/10/20)

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