The second time Ogden, my dog of six years, came home with a feeding tube in his neck I wondered if I was just being selfish. He wasn’t improving, but I wasn’t giving up. Not on this dog.
For six years, eating had been his second favorite thing to do after watching others eat. The latter combined the thrill of the chase with the inevitable reward. As he stood politely while I pushed and pulled and slowly depressed liquid food directly into his stomach, by surgical tube, I knew he hadn’t asked for this.
We were, for better or worse, in it together by this time—an unspoken acknowledgement: he’d fight as long as I fought. We drew strength from the other because we were, each, running low on optimism. Like two people sharing an oxygen mask in a plane crash. I’ll keep breathing if you will.
For weeks I blended food and warmed the liquid mush just enough that it would easily digest, but not cause indigestion. I wondered if he even wanted me to continue? Blending. Him, standing there, sometimes it seemed only on my behalf.
How did he see his own life—or himself—amidst all this? Whether via conversations at doggie daycare or the dog park, or wherever he got his information, did he know that some dogs spend their days in crates and eat dry kibble and aren’t allowed on the couch? Never had a hatchback purchased on their behalf (a blessing when it came to lifting him into and out of the car to and from the vet). I’d like to think he knew good, and I think he was smart enough to know the opposite. Which I’m sure he saw all of this as.
Over and again, I swore to stop trying, paying, hoping only when he was back to his previously healthy self. If not a full recovery, then when the patchwork quilt of shaved hair spots had a chance to fill in to a proper coat—various lengths like waterlines signaling past surgeries.
My ambition was fueled largely by a savings account deep enough to permit thousands of dollars to be spent at a time, sometimes those times occurring in dizzying succession. Money I’d been saving for a home. Money I’d worked hard to replenish after a divorce and what felt like starting from scratch. He and I, in a moving van driving across the U.S. We ate Applebees in a parking lot, next to our UHaul, watching others on the highway. When the people food was gone, he put his chin on my knee and we sighed. He had a way of keeping me going.
So I bet on the future, his and mine. To buy us hope was the initial thinking. Then the money only delaying the inevitable. A buttress against being without him.
Not that I was obliged by him, mind you. I just wanted to return the favor he’d shown me all those years. Of full faith and selflessness. He knew me in times when I didn’t feel much like getting off the couch, or getting out of bed. He’d wedge his nose under my arm or stretch closer into the crook of my leg, simultaneously signaling his presence and encouraging me to move. The times when making my dinner only happened because I was already in the kitchen to make his. He never stopped trying, so how could I?
Still, now, a year after Ogden gulped down a final peanut butter treat and stretched one more time into the crook of my leg, I wonder if I was selfish or heroic. I suppose it doesn’t matter either way. Buying time was as good an investment as I could think to make in the moment. No matter if the money didn’t make him better. It gave us more time to appreciate how loved we were, he and I.