It is mid-morning here, a time of day that our pets – both canine and feline – by some inner, common accord, decide to nap. Today, however, they are sleeping too-near Brandi. By ‘too-near’ I mean closer than they usually would. They seemed to form a palisade around her.
They know Brandi is dying.
Brandi is a female birddog who joined our family when a friend came to realize his work schedule did not permit him to care for her as well as every pet deserves. She first opened her eyes in the ownership of a breeder who worked her mercilessly in this regard. Her only tasks were to get pregnant, deliver, and get pregnant again.
Our friend bought her and trained her to be a ‘falconry dog.’ My understanding of this term is that a hawk and a bird dog are trained to work together. The dog finds, points, and flushes the prey; the hawk wraps things up.
Brandi blended into a pack of far larger dogs because she always played ‘Omega.’ She never challenged any members of the pack.
Through-out the day, she will try her best to talk [Oh, for a few vowels!], beat a staccato rhythm on the floor [the Brandi Two Step], play prance with the other dogs and wag that long metronomic tail of hers in pure exuberance, to the point you worried she would become air-borne. And she still does all that, but now less and less. Her eating is unpredictable now.
Sabrina discovered some lumps on her some eighteen months ago. They should have been benign.
They weren’t.
The final diagnosis was a wide-spread metastatic cancer; life expectancy three months.
Eighteen months ago.
It serves to underscore the perils of prognostication. As in human medicine, it’s our job to diagnose, Heaven’s job to say when.
She is in no pain, and still has good days. But now it seems fewer of them. In this long prologue to coming death, Sabrina and I watch her carefully to see that she in no way suffers.
When you love a pet, that’s what you do.
[Author’s note: two evenings after I wrote this piece, Brandy was walking across the floor, looked back at my Sabrina with a plaintive glance which Sabrina later described as “Help me.” She immediately began to walk off-balance towards her cushion, some four inches high, and could not get up on it.
Cancer makes humans more prone to strokes, probably the same is true of animals. In any event, that’s what Sabrina and I assumed. As she stumbled, her tail still wagged; but, as with cats purring, and dog tails wagging, it’s often, but not always, a good sign. Sometimes it means they are suffering.
She had been with us ten years; she was thirteen years old. Brandi was small [forty pounds] but her valor could never be questioned, defying her death sentence as long as she did.
I think back to how many pets [dogs and cats] – how many blessings – Sabrina and I have had over the years: our family; our pack.
So we called the vet; she came to our home and sent our Brandi on to rejoin her Heavenly pack.
What I pray is: once a pack, always a pack?
I remember her dancing, her yawning until she squeaked (so widely did her mouth open I truly feared she would swallow her head; then what would I do?), her face – her pure enjoyment of the moment.
She dug holes all over the yard. None of the other dogs did. Today it is my sorrowful task to fill them all in, for alas, there will be no more.
We do so miss our Brandi.
– Lucky Garvin
