That's not happiness

I’ve never worked so hard to make anyone happy as I did with Seymour.

We brought him home with us 8 years ago, freshly neutered and wan and so, so soft. He was a cuddly curmudgeon, so full of nerves from the start. “He’s so happy to see us, he pees whenever we came near his cage!” we exclaimed to the adoption worker at the shelter where we found him.

“That’s not happiness, that’s fear. He’s afraid.”

“Oh,” we said. I chose not to believe her, and filed her away as a Debbie Downer.

Over the years, we tried anti-depressants (his personality and verve completely disappeared), CBD (did nothing), more hikes, more walks, more cuddles. He only really came alive when guests came over – we always joked he liked everyone better than us. He would get so excited (afraid?!) when one particular friend came over that he would lie on his back, tail going crazy, and spray pee in the air, barely missing his own mouth. She had to change her voice to a lower register when she would greet him just to help him stop peeing (the higher her decibel, the greater the micturition).

Six months later, we adopted another dog, one our friend found on the street with a broken leg. This easygoing, red-headed spaniel mix fit into our life so seamlessly, but Seymour immediately became different. He became a self-anointed Protector; standing at attention on our couch and barking at every passer-by, something he never did before his sister arrived.

Things really changed, however, when we brought home our first human child. Seymour wanted patently nothing to do with him. He would jump away from his perch on the couch if we neared it with the baby. Things grew worse as our son grew into a handsy toddler, Seymour snapping or baring his teeth. The last thing Rowan ever said to Seymour was “Look, mommy! Seymour’s snarling!”

“Snoring?” I attempted to clarify, as he was breathing so heavily at that point.

“No, snarling.” Breathless, this velvet sausage could still muster the energy to be pissed at our son for daring to come near him and gently pet his butt (it took a thousand tries, but we did, eventually, teach our toddler how to pet extraordinarily gently, but it was too late – the damage had been done. Seymour still wanted nothing to do with him).

When we received the diagnosis of mitral valve disease, which would assuredly lead to heart failure in a matter of months to years, I was not overly surprised. He had clearly been dying of a broken heart for quite awhile, his little body working in overtime to compensate for the fissures, murmurs, and grudges that lay within. In his last months, he was heaving and coughing constantly; in his last days, I didn’t sleep more than an hour and neither did he, as he was crawling on his belly across our bedroom floor, gasping for breath, heaving and harking up nothing.

We were told we could hospitalize him and drug him, and that could buy him a few more months. We agonized over his life, and what kind of life it would be, waiting for another death sentence any week or month thereafter.

I walked in the door, sobbing. “I don’t want to make this decision,” I told my husband. “I want my mom or my dad to do it. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be…the mom.” He held me, said he felt the same. I signed up for the happy parts, and the hard parts. Not the end parts.

We had a veterinarian come over to put him down at home with us. We had to stay outside, where it was safe – so we laid him down on our daybed (his favorite outdoor perch) and held him between us, kissing him and telling him our favorite memories of him. My husband and I went to the shelter to find him the day we moved in together, knowing that we’d be marrying eventually, eager to start our forever family. His coming home with us marked the beginning of our entire family, of our life together. He taught us how to co-care for a living thing. He taught us that you can’t make anyone happy.

The vet recommended I give him some ice cream while she administered the sedative, to distract him from the needle pain. I went into the house, and mused over our flavors. Would this be the time, the only time, to allow him to taste chocolate? On the precipice of putting him to death, even that allowance felt too morbid. Plus I didn’t want its potential effects to interfere with whatever medicine she would be administering. I selected the Cereal Milk flavor, an easygoing taste reminiscent of childhood, puppyhood. Youth. Health.
She warned us the drug might take awhile to put him into an anesthetized state since his heart wasn’t pumping blood properly, and also his eyes might remain open. We held him and cried, slobbering into our masks as he took a few limp licks of the ice cream. He lay there, staring at us, breathing heavily, and eventually she gave him another dose and after a few minutes, his body didn’t respond to his paws being pinched or pulled, which is how she knew he was unconscious. His eyes remained open, which was completely freaky and made us believe he wasn’t gone yet.

“I always warn people before we do this that their eyes might remain open, and everyone is always shocked when it actually happens. I think I need to make myself clearer.”

“I think it’s just…there’s a lot going on right now,” my husband mumbled, picking his mask off his face to wipe his snot on his shirt.

“Now, I’ll be giving him the shot that puts him to sleep. It should happen fairly quickly.”

I looked at his sweet, perfect dog face, a face that used to display such comical expressions, but had settled into a sort of unsatisfied perma-grimace ever since we had children. I looked deep into his brown eyes, large and round and open, and I saw my face reflected, my striped mask covering most of it, my pink glasses, and my swollen, wet eyes. I watched myself watch him as his eyes went dark, like that. I knew the second it happened.

“He’s gone,” I blubbered, and my husband next to me slumped his face into Seymour’s belly, moaning so loudly in pain, wracked with sobs the likes of which I had never heard come from him in our 9 years together.

I briefly wondered what our neighbors must think of us, after all these godawful months in quarantine. We lived half our time outside in our large yard, as our house was too small to house the infinite, not not frightening energy of two toddlers, two adults, and two dogs. We were constantly yelling: at our dogs to stop barking at passers-by, at our kids to stop fighting with each other, to share, to stop whining, to tell them to get out of the mud, to stop being too rough with one another.

And now, this. Two adults in broad daylight ululating over their dog on an otherwise silent, tiny street. I have the capacity to be quite judgmental so I would think our family was an absolute whackjob, but the “they” is “me” and so I tend to over-compensate by greeting our neighbors as warmly as one can while swathed in a mask whenever I see them on the road, waving gregariously, hoping the excessively friendly and normal exchange would erase from their memory the last time of the 700 that I yelled “JUST. STOP. WHINING. AND STOP YELLING FOR DADDY, HE AGREES WITH ME. IF YOU PUSH YOUR SISTER ONE MORE TIME I AM TAKING AWAY YOUR TOY FOREVER.”

And then, technically, I did. Not as a punishment, to him or to Seymour or to anyone of course, but to have mercy.

Seymour’s death meant that we finally had to explain the concept of death to our 3-year old son. Despite his tender age, this pandemic has meant that we finally had to explain a lot of heavy things to him: what a virus is, what different skin colors can mean, why our daily walk was overtaken by throngs of people walking in the street with signs, yelling angrily on microphones, so impassioned that tears sprang to my eyes, why he can’t hold hands with his friends, why he can’t hug our friends that come stand at our gate and proffer cookies, cakes, and home-made tie-dyed shirts in earnest consolation for being stuck with two tantruming toddlers in quarantine.

We explained what death was, careful not to marry it to being sick lest he think that every time one of us gets sick, we might die, though of course now that’s more of a possibility than ever. But we didn’t tell him that. We told him that our dog’s body stopped working; that he couldn’t breathe anymore.

“I’m sad,” he said quietly, and we said we were, too. We asked him if he wanted to draw Seymour, as a way of processing what just happened, as a way of memorializing him. He agreed to the idea immediately, using crude, angry, quick, triangular strokes – not his usual style.

“This is Seymour,” he announced.

“Where are his eyes?” I asked. “His nose, his mouth?” He added them quickly.

There was no face – he had just drawn the impression Seymour gave, perhaps. Micro-agressions over time, swishing his tail away into another room, retreating into his velvet chair that he had festooned with his own perma-shedding fur, snow always falling wherever he trotted.

The day after he died, I received a NextDoor email with the subject line:
"Small white dog with blue collar running alongside the 110 freeway.”

Seymour was a small white dog with a blue collar, and freeway is just adjacent to our house. My stomach dropped and for a moment, I believed that maybe we really did just put him to sleep, that he woke up and he was trying to make his way back to us, little white hairs an allergenic spray in his wake. I immediately deleted the email -- I didn’t want any details that might make the supposition categorically untrue. I wanted to draw my own Seymour, with eyes, a nose, and a mouth, running home to us. Maybe we were all just asleep, and now we’re awake. We can all touch each other again, and it's not fear, it’s happiness.