In which I discuss the topic of Bindu’s death.

I still can’t go into great detail about the day itself; I’d probably freak out if I tried. Suffice it to say that my brother was a rock, my mom was amazing, my aunt and uncle were great, and my G’ma cried with me.

I feel incredible gratitude for my family and the love and support they gave me on the day I had my dog killed.

~+~+~
The short version is that Bindu was 14, she had advanced heart disease (her heart was so enlarged that it took up her entire chest), she had liver disease, she was Cushingoid, and it was possible that she was also having strokes or seizures.

The vet didn’t know if the episodes could be controlled with medication or not, or even what they were.

Bindu spent her last few days panting endlessly with her lips pulled back and the whites of her eyes showing, and having (what I think were) heart attacks. The last night of her life, she had four episodes that were observed, and possibly more that no one saw. Two of the episodes involved the new symptoms of vomiting and lost bladder control in addition to the previously observed issues of screaming and falling down for a couple of minutes.

~+~+~
Instead of trying to medicate all these symptoms, I put her down.

I signed my name to a piece of paper, and the vet gave my dog a lethal injection of medications. They put her little body into a box and taped it shut. My brother and uncle and I took the box out to my uncle’s place and buried it next to a fence. And that was that.

I could have tried heart meds. I could have demanded seizure or pain meds. I could have had her tested and observed and tested some more. If the episodes were heart attacks, and if the heart meds had actually helped, she could have laid around on the floor for another few months, panting endlessly from the Cushing’s syndrome, which was untreatable due to her age, partially deaf, partially blind, unable to do anything or go anywhere.

Without meds, she would have suffered more and then died. I think it wouldn’t have taken much longer than another week or two… but she was a tough little bitch, so it might have taken longer. The episodes clearly hurt, and there were more and more of them each day.

But I didn’t try to extend Bindu’s lifespan with medications. I killed her before she strictly had to be killed. And I feel guilty about it – even though every single solitary person I’ve talked to has told me that I did the right thing, and at least four people told me that they wish they hadn’t kept a pet alive with medications and pain killers for as long as they did. I can’t defend it, but I do feel guilty.

The day before I had her euthanized, I came up the basement stairs. She was lying several feet away, but she didn’t know where the activity was. She looked to the back door, she looked to the kitchen, her ears were up and she was trying to be a watchdog, but even though she felt the vibrations of my footfalls and knew something was happening in her house, she didn’t know what or where. I was six feet away and she couldn’t locate me. It broke my heart.

Later that afternoon, the UPS man rang the doorbell. G’ma and I went to answer it together. Bindu didn’t bark. In fact, she didn’t even get up from where she was lying on the kitchen floor.

If you’re a dog who can’t tell who’s approaching you and who can’t bark at the doorbell, you’re not scoring very high on the doggie quality-of-life scale. As far as I can observe, barking at the UPS guy is, like, the best doggie activity ever. She wasn’t able to be a dog anymore. No more walks? No more stairs? No more barking at the doorbell?

So, yeah, I know I did the right thing.

She was twice as old as she would have been in the wild; she was a runt and too aggressive and Nature would have taken her a long time ago. In that sense, her lifespan was entirely artificial and I cheated her out of nothing.

~+~+~
You have to remember that I’m a vegetarian. I’m so animal-empathetic that I couldn’t eat a steak even if I wanted to, because I can’t perceive it as food. I can only perceive it as flesh, as part of a creature’s body. Factory farming breaks my heart, and the heartless way humans treat all the other beasts that share our planet makes me sick. I don’t think we have the right to behave the way we do, and it nearly broke my mind that I live in a universe that allows me to sign my name to a piece of paper and have a mammal killed. Just like that! What the fuck is wrong with the world that people have that sort of power?!

Yeah, I’m naive. I know. It’s deliberate. The whole human-dominion-over-animals thing is so painful to me that I just avoid thinking about it as much as possible.

I have no interest in carrying the sole responsibility for any creature’s life, now that I’ve had it once. (All the other pets I’ve lost were handled by someone else, or the animal just ran away. I’ve never faced a life-or-death decision before.)

And if any one else tells me I need a puppy, I’ll probably tell them to fuck off. About five times. In two sentences.

~+~+~
It hurt SO BAD. It hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt. I was fucking pissed off that any of it happened; that she got old, that she began to die, that I had her killed to reduce her suffering and mine; that I lived in a Universe with such FUCKED UP PARAMETERS.

Why suffering? Why death? What’s the fucking point of a setup like this?

And in reverse: why do I seem to believe that life, even lousy life, is better than death? Where did I learn that? What’s the point of believing that when it’s clearly stupid? I mean, I believe in reincarnation, for fuck’s sake, so why should death upset me so much? No, really.

For me, my dog’s death was a crisis. A big one. A goddamned philosophical, emotional, and intellectual fucking CRISIS. It hurt constantly, in some non-physical place between my heart and everything else. It wasn’t an emotional place that hurt, it wasn’t an ethereal place that hurt, it was in the interstices, the junctions between the two, and it was like having some kind of soul-rot. It was black and terrible and it didn’t move, it just HURT. It was awful. I was afraid to think or feel or do anything because I didn’t want to imprint that pain on something and never be able to think or feel or do it again without that sick unbearable hurting.

I sat in front of my altar and hissed my hurt and anger and disbelief and rage and fear. It helped. I cried. It helped. I got drunk. It helped.

I watched myself hurt, and I saw that nothing had hurt me: I was fine. I didn’t give the order, or witness the death, or pick up the box, or bury the box. Those things were all done by others. I didn’t have any experience at all beyond taking Bindu to the vet’s office, leaving her there, going for a drive, returning to the clinic parking lot, and then riding in the vehicle that was carrying the box.

My suffering was the product of my intellect and my mind. And I really didn’t like it. It’s been something of a lesson-reinforcing event, really.

~+~+~
I miss Bindu.

I had her longer than any job, apartment, or relationship. I wanted her the very first time I saw her. I loved her, and she used to squeal and wiggle when I came home from work and that made me laugh. Watching her go tits up when she wanted something never failed to make me grin. Listening to her warning bark when younger dogs were around cracked me up. Watching her grow old and deteriorate was sad, but bearable because it’s so safe and mellow here… until she began to actually die.

She had a good life. She played, she traveled, she had lots of dog friends, she ate yummy things like cow placenta and snapping turtle carcass and people-food leftovers, and I never abandoned her. I was appropriately firm with her training to keep her from feeling anxious. I took good care of her, and I protected her from speeding cars and fleas and I took her to work as much as I could, and I scratched her belly nearly every single day for over a decade.

And then she got old and started to die, and I had her killed and buried her. And I can’t quite parse it.

There’s no understanding it; it just IS. And what it IS is fucked, if you ask me, and yes, I do remember the good times, I really do, and it helps some, but in the end I’m suffering because I, a person who shares her bedroom with a wolf spider because I don’t even kill spiders, had to decide to have my dog killed, and it hurt me so very much that I’m quite shocked that I’m still able to laugh and eat and sleep and work and study, and I know that ultimately it was just a dog and that actually many people experience real suffering in their lives, you asshole and I just don’t know how to deal with it, and it’s going to go away all by itself because no one can sustain shock or pain for long, and when it does go away what was the point of the whole thing?

I miss my blue dog. I miss her so much.