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RIP Gus

Gus is dead.

The rust-colored family dog, a poodle mix, breathed his last breath Monday morning, moments after a veterinarian injected him with a lethal drug.

He was 17.

I wasn’t there at the time of death. I couldn’t bear adding anything to the trauma it brought to me. As someone living with Lewy body dementia, things like this give me a double- wallop.

My wife, Catherine, who was at the clinic in Avondale, said Gus died peacefully about 8:30 a.m.

I’ve been through this before. My father is a retired veterinarian. Molly, my yellow Labrador, was euthanized in 2012. I was stroking Molly when the injection was made, and Molly’s eyes went from deep pools of consciousness to click and fixed.

I wrote about my experience with Molly and then later wrote about Gus’ health declining . Euthanizing Molly was an easier call to make than Gus. Molly went from walking to not walking in just a couple days. She lie sprawled on the kitchen floor wheezing, likely due to heart failure. We carried her literally to the car to go to the vet.

Gus’ situation made it more difficult to make a call. At 17 Gus was already well beyond life expectancy but he was not senile and he was fairly mobile. He had a tumor larger than a golf ball on one side of his chest. It was benign. His back legs were in various stages of paralysis and climbing the stairs at night to come sleep on his dog bed was becoming more arduous. More than once he slipped and rolled down those steps. Only to pop up and try it again.

The newest deficit was incontinence. Unable to make it to somebody who would let him out, Gus ended up leaving ‘surprises’ for us nearly every morning. His eyes were clouded with cataracts, and as far as I could tell he was about 90 percent deaf. To hear you, Gus had to see your face, kind of like a lip reader.

Counting family pets growing up, I’ve had more than a half-dozen dogs during my life. Gus was probably the second smartest one I’ve had. Maggie, a dog we had in the 1980s, rescued from the Etowah County dog shelter near Gadsden, was a mixed border collie and literally could understand everything you said. Catherine rescued Gus from a shelter in San Francisco. Gus’ nickname was psychodoodle for his frenetic energy driven behavior in earlier years.

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Is this my last column? (blog version)

This is not my last post. At least as far as I know this minute in time.

Because I have an incurable brain disease my life will likely be shortened; I just don’t know by how much.

So this has  me thinking about my last post.

I’m still getting along pretty well at 58 after my Lewy Body dementia diagnosis about 20 months ago.

Why think ahead to my last post? I don’t really want to think about it. How bad I’ll be when I can no longer type. I may not even know my last post when I write it.

But I’m thinking about it because I want to make the life I have now as precious as I can. With full knowledge of my assets and deficits, financially and physically.

I want to make decisions directly related to those things. I want to provide for a smooth transition for me and my family. Let’s call it transition defense.

Let’s make super difficult times into not-so-difficult times. It’s easier to smile, laugh and be with your loved ones if you aren’t worried about how to pay the light bill after retirement.

Everybody is going to die. There has been no change in the human mortality rate in, oh, forever. It’s holding steady at 100 percent. (Trust me, I keep my eye on this stat.)

Death should be an open conversation. My wife, Catherine, as a pastor who has worked as a Registered Nurse as well, has visited and cared in both of her roles for dozens of critically ill people in Florida, California and Alabama. Too many didn’t leave instructions or at least legally binding ones. She has helped from the patient’s advocate view to make sure the patient’s wishes are kept.

That means questioning our health care systems where doctors are taught to save and prolong life but not how to prepare for death. The system is  set, intentionally or not, to financially incentivize interventions and heroic measures. When the patient is a pain addled  95-year-old person, open heart surgery may not be the best idea . The system  doesn’t  do death well.

Have you thought about it? Like I’m doing here. Got a will? Power of attorney? Does your spouse or someone you trust know about all savings accounts, investment accounts, retirement funds? Passwords?

Heck, I’ve got more passwords than brain cells at this point.

If you have a spouse will they stay in the house? Or downsize? Maybe it’s time to think about downsizing now. Maybe you should look at assisted living facilities or step-down communities that provide increasing care depending on your health situation?

Do you have a financial plan for retirement? Other than waiting for Social Security. Are you at the age where you need to start moving the stock heavy positions in your  IRA or 401(K) to safer havens  like money market, cash or bonds?

Seek advice from a fee-only financial adviser. In other words, one who will take a flat fee, say $300, and build you a financial plan without trying to sell you any investments for which he or she may get a commission. Ongoing financial oversight of your investments generally costs about 1 percent of your holdings.

Have you talked  about death specifically. Funeral. What do you want to do with your body? Cremation? Have your ashes shot out of a cannon like Hunter S. Thompson? Pour the ashes in the ocean.

Do you want your wife or husband or trusted love one to authorize pulling the  plug or do you want your doctor to make every effort to keep you alive? Do you want that at age 85? age 95? Age and condition would be key considerations.

There’s a specific thing called Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) which you would need to discuss with your family. What happens when you become incapacitated and can’t make the decision yourself?

I do know I don’t want to consume a lot of health care resources when I’m too incapacitated to blow my own nose. I would like to say goodbye in a final column, go home and  kiss Catherine, Hannah, Emily and Claire on the cheek then slip quietly out the back door..

‘Night night,” I’d say.