The Dog Days of Dog Years

Today, I’m mourning the passing of my beloved dog, Cooper. On his 15th birthday. Even though he’s alive (albeit barely kicking) and sitting next to me lapping up a half-scoop of vanilla bean ice cream after rejecting the just-for-pooches brand I bought for the occasion.

OK; so he’s not gone. Not yet. But I know he’s overshot his average life expectancy by five years. I know he’s got a gradually collapsing trachea — a common ailment of old dogs, I’m told — that’s slowly cutting off his ability to breathe and leads to some disturbing fits of hacking and gasping. I know that I spend a small fortune on opioids and anti-inflammatories to quiet the pain in his grinding joints, and even so, there are plenty of days when it’s a slow, agonizing crawl out of his orthopedic bed.

The writing is on the wall: Sometime between now and his 16th birthday, I’m going to have a hard decision to make, if Mother Nature doesn’t make it for me. And the thought of it is torturing — a red-hot branding iron in the shape of an unknown date searing my heart. I love this dog with my full being. I’ve seen him through the mistrust that came with being passed from home to home in his first year, the challenge of learning to live with a cat invited into his last home without his say-so, the bigger challenge of losing the cat and his cuddle-buddy some years later and a steady physical decline in recent years. He’s seen me through a brutal divorce, depression, the worry and angst of parenting a teenager, the sadness of an empty nest, the loss of the cat and the loneliness of pandemic isolation. I prefer him to most people.

At the moment, we’re both sitting on the deck, winding down from the subdued excitement of presents and treats to mark the milestone — which, c’mon, is impressive. He’s made it to 105 in dog years, if we’re to believe the 7-to-1 trope. But it’s been only a dozen years and some change for me, and they’ve gone by quicker than I would have ever imagined.

It’s been 14 years since I first laid eyes on him. He was already a year old and was on his way to the shelter after the last family he landed with found out they were expecting more than one baby, stealing any time they would have had to care for a puppy. The family happened to be neighbors of a coworker of mine, who casually asked if I might be interested in getting a dog. No, I said; I didn’t think I was. But after hearing Cooper’s impending fate and seeing a snapshot of his adorable, smiling face (don’t argue with me; he does smile), I agreed to meet with this pug/Chinese shar pei mix to see if we were a match.

He went home with me that day.

The first year was a challenge. Mine was his fourth home in a year, and he suffered crushing separation anxiety. This led him to tear into inanimate objects anytime he was left alone in the house. Within the first month, he destroyed a sofa and two upholstered chairs. I don’t subscribe to leaving dogs in cages, so I faced the destruction with calm instruction and a determination to ride it out. I duct taped the shredded couch back together. I would come home and find it ripped open again. I would cover the furniture’s wounds with blankets, only to discover the blankets torn to ribbons. Eventually, he stopped going after the furniture and would settle for a pillow here and there. He preferred goose down, and at least three times I walked in the door to find an explosion of feathers covering the furniture, counters and every square inch of floor.

After several months, he got comfortable in his new surroundings and began to trust that I would return whenever I walked out the door. After a little more than a year, I trusted him enough to replace the wrecked couch and chairs with a brand new sectional, and we never looked back.

Looking at him now, it’s hard to believe how much energy he brought in his first 7 or 8 years here. He loved to run circle sprints in the yard, fast as he could go, biting at the grass and stopping suddenly with his front “elbows” on the ground and his tail high, wagging in the air — an invitation to try to get the impossibly slow humans to join him. We could walk for miles around the neighborhood and along a nearby creek, with me calling it quits long before he was ready. He would regularly take the three concrete steps from the front porch in a single bound, and would take a flying leap off the 4-foot retaining wall in the front yard to chase feral cats back into the street runoff drains in which they lived.

These days, climbing the three steps to the porch is a slow, arduous shuffle. Recently, he wandered over to the retaining wall, put his front paws on the ledge, stretched up to his full height and peered over, as though he was thinking about trying the jump — just one more time, for old-time’s sake. Then he sighed — so help me God, it was a sigh — retreated, and ambled back toward the porch.

I first recognized the signs of decline around age 9 or 10, noting it had been a while since he had zoomed around the yard or bounded off the front steps. His vet noted that the joints in his back right leg were getting “crunchy,” and suggested a supplement to help preserve them.

Since then, he’s graduated from supplements to CBD to an injectable anti-inflammatory used on racehorses and a narcotic powerful enough to make the DEA’s list of controlled substances. I’ve progressed from setting up doggy stairs to the bed, to a ramp for the couch, to a full-body sling that I use nightly to carry his 50 pounds up to the second floor, as any attempt to mount the stairs himself elicits pain-wracked whimpers and yelps. It’s been at least three years since he managed so much as a trot, much less a run.

So, I’m in mourning, because the end of his life is imminent. Oh, I don’t have a crystal ball. It could be another year, if you believe in miracles. It could be tomorrow, if you believe in jinxes. But it most likely will be in the next few months, if you believe his medical chart and increasingly labored breathing.

We’re not dwelling on that right now. Right now, I’m enjoying watching him enjoy his ice cream. He takes a break every few seconds, sometimes slobbering my arm with a chilly lick that I’m certain is meant to show gratitude. In return, I rub his ears and coo about what a good dog he is. He can’t hear me. I’m told he can see only a cloudy version of me through the cataracts. But his sense of smell is as good as it ever was, and after the ice cream, we’ll take a laboriously slow stroll down the street, stopping every few feet to sniff out whatever dog or cat or raccoon or rabbit has been there before him.

We make the trip every day, sometimes twice a day. He can only take about 2,000 feet at a time. It’s been several months since I hauled him around the entire block. That took 90 minutes, and I really thought I was going to have to carry him on the last leg from the corner. Shorter is better. But we’ll keep walking, and sniffing, even if it’s only to the mailbox and back, as long as he can keep doing it. Because it makes him happy. And I intend to make him as happy as a 15-year-old dog can be in the time he has left.

It’ll still be a pretty lopsided exchange. Whatever contentment I can offer him over the coming months will never come close to the joy he has brought me over his lifetime. He is the ultimate Good Boy.

One racks up some war stories in 105 years. Even if they’re dog years. I intend to tell some of those stories in the coming weeks — a sort of retro-journal of one Good Boy’s life. I hope you’ll bear with me on that ride.