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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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Rub your dog behind his ears while you still can (blog version)

This appeared originally on AL.com and much on  Facebook, But  I’m posting here for those who missed. Coming soon: a How-Am- I column and Top 10 (20?) of my blog post AND more music. Gotta keep  the countdown going.

My dog is getting old.

You know what I am going to say next, right?

I’m getting old too.

And you know what I don’t want to say, don’t you?

That I’m sad he is going to die.

Gus the psychodoodle. Photo by Rachel Vissers.

My worried thought came after my wife Catherine said it sounded like our  dog’s’ breathing was becoming more labored. And he wasn’t running the stairs with the same wild abandon.

Gus is his name.  He’s a small, rust-colored, curly mop of a dog, a poodle mix of unknown origin. I call him a psychodoodle. He’s about 12 or 13 agewise best we can guess. We rescued him from a shelter in California. He loves to be rubbed behind the ears.

I love him.

I know most pet owners can relate to that. Still sounds silly that a grown man can care for and love a dog that has complicated life with added expense for vet bills, food, poodle haircuts and just plain worry.

At great physiological expense to us, Gus likes to play a game we call  ‘shootig the gap, or doorway.’

Any space he sees at the front door when it is opened he tries to sprint through. If he makes it before a foot holds him back, he is off to a wild, run-through-the-neighborhood spree, oblivious to the speeding two-ton cars.

Before I was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia at 56, our other dog died. Well, we, my wife, Catherine and I, had to take Molly in to be ‘put down.’ How else do you say it. Put to sleep?

Molly, a yellow Lab who was as kind as she was dumb, had a nice friendship with Gus. Gus would bark at and relentlessly attack, in a playful way, Molly. And Molly  would just let him.

We knew when Molly was dying. The breathing became labored, overtime, suggesting the onset of heart failure. She increasingly didn’t like stairs and quit sleeping in our upstairs bedroom.  Given the age and symptoms, I knew as the son of a veterinarian, she needed to be euthanized. But we  just couldn’t do it, we made up excuses. “She sounds better today, I think,” we’d tell each other.

Molly’s last night with us, I slept beside her on the floor.

By some amazing strength she stayed alive through the night. She looked in our eyes.

At the veterinary hospital we carried Molly, in a blanket because she could no longer walk.

With tears flowing freely we watch the doctor inject Molly.

I’ll never forget the sight of Molly’s eyes. One minute I was looking into her soul, and then the pupils became fixed. She wasn’t there.

Our children, now all grown, learned about death  through these experiences with their pets. And they learned about love.

Gus is lying on a rug right now in front of me.

I  bend down and rub behind his ears.

Maybe Gus, you have some good time left.

Maybe I do too.

Read more about Oliver and his push to raise awareness of Lewy body dementia at his blog, www.myvinylcountdown.com