Good dog, Greta

Yesterday we put Greta, our sweet 15 year and 4 month-old Pembroke Welsh Corgi to sleep. Permanently, I mean. She had been doing little except sleep for the past few weeks, but recently she had stopped eating and reached levels of nonarousal that I'd not seen since my junior year of college, when my roommate, for reasons unknown to both of us, did not leave his bed for the final 2 1/2 weeks of the school year, assuring himself of a year apart for that particular academic institution.

We'd brought her home from the hospital the previous night, after she'd spent two days there on intravenous antibiotics and fluids. This on the chance that her decline was the result of an infection and not an irreversible reduction in kidney function. We knew it was a slim chance at best, and once it was clear that she wasn't getting better, we decided to bring her home, keep her as comfortable as possible, and bring her into the vet the next morning with the assumption that, unless the vet suggested otherwise, we would not be bringing her home again.

While home, Greta, never the most tech-savvy of us, had her first experience video chatting with her big sisters, who did all the talking. It was nice for them to have the chance to say goodbye to a friend who'd always been part of the family.

Our vet, who knew Greta for her entire life, was sanguine about things when we brought her in. He estimated her kidney function at 5-10% and said that old dogs simply do not recover from this. And this was an almost spectacularly old dog. It seemed like she'd go on forever, but none of us do, I suppose, including those of us who are small and cute and furry.

The vet said something that struck me, though it was just kind of an aside, that a dog's life is compressed. I'd read something recently about how a person's view of what constitutes a complete life lacks any perspective on the beginning and end of their own lives, and so if they are to gain that kind of understanding that they would need to look elsewhere. I didn't see Greta's birth, but I've seen puppies born before, and she was only a few weeks old when she came home with us. Greta had a good life. She survived a weird, if kind, breeder, was healthy and happy for almost her entire existence, and when it was time, which she signaled us by ceasing to eat, we were able to help her end it peacefully and painlessly.

The euphemism "put to sleep" is not completely euphemistic, as it turns out. The end is brought on by what is essentially an overdose of sleeping pills- phenobarbital to be exact. In a marvelous bit of truth in advertising, the medication used is called Euthanal. It's hard to argue with that, and none of us did.

We chose not to stay and watch, so we also bid her goodbye and then left, very sad. I think I'll miss her most in the mornings, when she was usually the only one up aside from me. And it'll probably take some time for me to get used to answering the doorbell by myself. She was a gentle and friendly companion, smart and dumb and cute and soft and silly. And in what I consider to be the ultimate compliment, she was a good dog.