The Light

Our dog is thirteen. A thirteen-year-old dog, and especially a big thirteen-year-old dog, shouldn’t make too many long-term plans.

She is still cheerful and loving, and a joy to be with, but she has slowed down. She has a hip condition, dysplasia, which entails degeneration of the joints and muscles. We’ve put her through various treatments but at her grand old age anything invasive seems graceless.

When her energy and appetite went through the floor, we assumed that her dysplasia had reached its final stages. Certainly, it seemed quite sudden. But a string pulled tight eventually snaps. One day, coming home from work, I couldn’t open the door. She was lying next to it — unable to stand.

We took her to the vet, who told us that they had some painless means of keeping her afloat. Sure! Why not? Still, we were cautious about the future. We did not want to keep her going for the sake of it. A dog is not a human being. There is no point in being alive if it entails more pain than pleasure and we don’t want to be selfish.

Besides, I’ve never been convinced by Dylan Thomas’s injunction to rage against the dying of the light. Death comes for us all. If we can accept it — make our peace with it — why spend our final moments angry?

That night, as I walked the dog, she stopped hobbling down the street and looked up at a streetlight. I had half a sense that she felt like the end was near.

We went back to the vet the following day. They were curious and wanted to do another test. It wasn’t dysplasia causing her decline, they found. It was a vicious internal infection.

They wanted to operate and we agreed. Invasive surgery to help her manage an ongoing and irreversible condition seemed like too much trauma to be valuable. Surgery to fix a condition, though? Certainly. Raging against that which is curable is a different matter.

They operated and we went for a walk — ending up at the bar for such an anxious beer that we must have looked like we were enduring an atrocious first date. Finally, the call came. The operation had succeeded.

Dogs are amazing animals. One hour after being cut open and losing a hefty chunk of her insides, she pottered home — clad in a “recovery suit”, which is much nicer and more stylish than the cone of shame. They had told us to keep her warm, so we tucked her up in bed with a blanket. She got up and started pottering around again, with the blanket hanging off her and dragging along the floor.

By the next morning she was far more like her old self. She wanted to eat. She wanted to trot about. She wanted to yell at other dogs while taking a piss.

I never thought that she would make our city park again but she practically scampered there a week after surgery. (We were wrong to think her main problem was dysplasia but it was fortunate that she got some medicine for that before they could discover the infection because I’m not sure that she could take it along with her antibiotics now.)

A dog is a dog. I don’t want to sound like I’m celebrating this as if a child was cured of cancer. Hell, she could get a different and less curable disease tomorrow. But we’re so glad that we have got to spend more happy days with our friend — and that she has got to enjoy more happiness with us.

Besides, I appreciate that my effortful stoicism might have exaggerated my differences with Dylan Thomas. It is worth accepting death when it is unavoidable. But is it unavoidable? The light before you may not represent the end of the tunnel of your earthly existence. It may be coming from the street outside.