I wrote about the melancholy of my dog’s gentle decline two years ago. Since then, progress towards the “good night” has been, well, less gentle. I imagine anyone who has been there could have tipped me off, but perhaps it was better not to know.
Oscar has degenerated from slow to terribly stiff, with weak, wobbly hindquarters; he has four pills a day and a monthly jab for his rheumatoid arthritis. For more stamps on his vet loyalty card (no, they don’t have one), he has had multiple teeth extracted plus a late-life castration, after developing hormone-related bum tumours. The indignity. He is hard of hearing and seeing and intermittently hard of thinking: I often find him barking in confusion at his own bed. Old age is a shipwreck, as an elderly lady once said to me in a Belgian supermarket, and he is sinking.
He is lying behind me on the bed as I write, as he was the last time I wrote about him. But this time, I had to lift him up there. He’s asleep – he sleeps most of the time – and looks peaceful; we managed a short walk this morning. It’s a good day. On bad days, he seems distressed and agitated, moans and won’t leave the house or eat.
After a few of those days in a row, I start wondering if it’s time. You know. Time to “cross the rainbow bridge”, which seems to have become the preferred euphemism for a shot of pentobarbital. Oscar is an aloof soul: there is no way he will be waiting for me on the other side, tail wagging, in a celestial meadow. “Dognitas,” my husband and I say crassly to each other – and him – after a broken night, or another ruinous trip to the vet, half joking, half earnest. There is a saintly man on Instagram who devotes his life to looking after the dodderiest rescue dogs with complex needs, that no one wants. I, on the other hand, get exasperated when Oscar refuses his expensive food garnished with carefully ground-up dementia pills and spits out his painkillers; I hate his unerring ability to find and bark at hedgehogs in the garden when he can barely find the door. We rub along, but I wonder how long we should, when he can’t even enjoy balls (tennis or testicles) any more or sprawl, legs splayed like a centrefold, on the forbidden sofa. I had hoped he would bake his old bones lying outside this summer, which he used to love, but he shows no interest.
“Put yourself in your pet’s position – how do you think they would rate their quality of life?” I read online, hoping someone will tell me what to do, but it is a tough question. My husband thinks that, at 14, Oscar is way beyond his natural lifespan and is confused and scared. I don’t know. Our whippet isn’t Immanuel Kant: I expect he mainly thinks “Ouch”, “Dinner!”, “That bastard hedgehog!”– and perhaps, given the disappointed way he looks at me: “You again.” I have filled in endless surveys – does he eat? Enjoy exercise? Interact with you? – but so many answers are: “It depends.”
I think about what to do (or rather, when to do it) all the time. It would be nice to have expert guidance, but when my husband took him to the vet (again) this week, he said 20 of his colleagues would give 20 different answers. I know Oscar best, so it’s down to me. “You’ll know,” people say, but I can’t make decisions about the simplest things. The last time I had to have an animal put down, it was a rat with cancer, and I agonised for weeks until the vet basically told me to get on with it.
I haven’t mentioned the love; but there is that, too, of course. All those years. The way we can tell each other things with a glance; the feel of his skull through his thin silky skin when I rest a hand on his head. He is part of me.
We are lucky we get to choose. My husband’s parents have been asking us to help them die – not now, but when the time comes – for years. We can’t help them; we can help Oscar. But when?
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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