Is This How It Is Now?

Is This How It Is Now?

by J.M. Ferguson

Dilsey

Whenever I was feeling lost and low, I learned somewhere late in the middle of my life to look to the birds of the field, or better yet, when I happened to come across it, to heed the counsel of our own native poet when he wrote “I loaf and invite my soul.” Such counsel I may have taken to heart, unconsciously, when I formed the habit of rising early in the small mountain city of Flagstaff, in northern Arizona, and walking the mile downtown to the Station House for my morning coffee and back, refusing all the while to give a concentrated thought to anything, and instead allowing my mind to loaf for at least this hour and entertain me as it would. I have been grateful for this habit which persisted with the years, enabling me to glimpse from time to time the gift of life apart from the demands of mere survival.
           On one such morning in early spring, near the beginning of my seventy-third year, I puffed my way up the hill on Beaver Street toward my now empty home—my wife had passed away the year before and my two surviving sons were now well settled in Seattle. I don’t recall my reverie on that particular morning, only that I was experiencing a growing need to look behind me, a premonition that I was being dogged by someone or something. I paused to catch my breath, and turned my head slowly to survey the street below me. Nothing, at first, but then, about to resume my climb, I discovered that behind a clump of newly sprung daffodils in a yard just two houses back there was indeed a dog, apparently keeping an eye on me. A beagle, or some sort of mix, it may have been, for although her coloring was right and her ears were hanging down, her legs seemed a little too long. “Her,” I’ve said, because yes, I was also able to discern her gender as she relieved herself beyond the flower bed, still watching me all the while.
           A gift of fate, I suddenly realized—a gift I had done nothing to earn, mind you—was now presenting itself to me, following me home from the Station House, it may have been, that coffee house downtown where almost two years before I had inadvertently ditched a dog who followed me in the opposite direction. He’d been distracted by some pigeons just as I dodged into the shop, and as I sat behind the window sipping my coffee, I had to watch him looking for me again, but without success.
          Out of a sense of guilt I searched for him later at the shelter on the edge of town, and though I never found him, what I found instead was a calling that began that same day, as a volunteer to walk the lost, the strayed, and the abandoned impounded in that same shelter. My year-long tenure ended badly, however, the fault of my own hesitation to adopt a dog who, unknown to me, was about to be euthanized. And so I left off on my good karma, it may have been, an adventure which was healing a nagging depression, a sharpened awareness of aging and loneliness which had beset me with the passing of my wife.
           Now, I saw, I was being offered this second chance, coming from the opposite direction, a reprieve I hardly deserved, but which I at once sought not to squander. She detoured often to sniff the grass and foliage, whatever was handy, and yet she was careful to pull up close behind me, as if to pass herself off as a long-lost friend—a canine tactic with which I was by then familiar. When I stopped of a sudden, bent to stroke her and speak to her softly—trying this time, I admit, to put my best foot forward—she seemed to welcome my attentions and even licked me lightly on the hand.
           Thus was born a lifetime of close companionship between us. “Lifetime,” I say, which indeed it was for her, though for me, to be more accurate, it was sixteen and one-half years. Thus she was young and I was old as our paths first crossed, and I had, at that time early on, to decide upon a name for her. Because her feet were small and rabbit-like, the name of “Lucky” crossed my mind, yet this was just too common and frivolous, I considered at once, for this uncommon dog. I had to think again, and I recalled from my time with the shelter one or two dogs whom she resembled just a little, and who were referred to as Southern Hounds. And thus it was that I decided at last to consult a southern novel, and there in the first I turned to, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, I came across a character named “Dilsey.” I had never known anyone named Dilsey, yet it seemed simple and easy, neither too common nor too pretentious, and so came about the name we abided by for the rest of her years.
           I was wrong, however, to think the name “simple and easy,” for those who inquired were invariably baffled by it. “What, Guilty?” or “What, Dulce?” they would attempt, almost annoyed, until finally along came a stranger who, in his own way, reassured me once and for all.
        He was a pleasant, well dressed young man with dark curly hair who paused outside the Station House to exchange a few words with me and Dilsey, settled at our outside table. We spoke of the welcome warmth for early February, our first Chinook, it may have been, promising spring. Having expressed his liking for my dog, he then moved to the question I was anticipating.
           “Dilsey,” I offered. To my great relief, he smiled knowingly, repeating the name deliberately and lovingly, it seemed.
          “Oh, are you from Virginia?” he wanted to know.
          “I spent my first five years in West Virginia,” I allowed, “but I’m in debt to William Faulkner, of Mississippi—a place I’ve never been, I confess—for the name. I consider myself a Southwesterner at heart,” I added, “where I’ve lived most of my life.”
           He smiled knowingly again, with perhaps a touch of nostalgia for his own Virginia. He spoke again to Dilsey softly by her name, then stepped inside for his morning coffee.
           I took it he was on his way to an office job somewhere in the downtown area in which we lingered, but I never saw him again. Yet I never worried again, either, about the name I had bestowed on my dog, which seemed always right thereafter.
                                                                

When I took her for her first check-up to our new vet, I introduced her by her name and he smiled. But after this introduction, I explained that I could go no further, on the matter of her age. He deduced that she was somewhere in her second year, “but not a day over two,” he declared.
        “And already spayed,” he observed. “I’d say at about six months. Well-muscled, too, at an even thirty pounds—decidedly middle-sized. You sure can pick ’em.”
         “But it was she who salvaged me,” I intervened. “A gift of fate, I think of it. And she arrived house-broken, too. Even if without a collar.”
        As we speculated on her breed, he agreed that she was at least half beagle. Tri-colored, tan and black on white, she had the right coloring down to her tail’s white tip, which she never lost, although her tail was always a bit bushier than that of the usual beagle. She had also a beagle’s floppy ears, but only about half the normal length, and coming to a point instead of rounding off. Yet in her youth, her eyes, brown and inquisitive, seemed almond-shaped and beagle-like whenever she looked at me as she often did in those early days, as if to comprehend or sometimes question me.
        But there was something else in her as well. Her legs were too long for those of a beagle, for one thing. She loved to go bounding like a deer when she was off the leash and the occasion permitted. If we came to a grassy field that was vacant—or even a vacant parking lot on a Sunday would do—I’d let her go bounding, and then I’d crouch down like an ogre and advance on her just to watch her start circling hard around me. As I pivoted to face her, the circles got faster and closer, until finally she dared to brush past me with such swiftness that I did well to tag her as she went by.
        Off leash, she always looked at me when I called, then waited patiently for me to come to her and attach it again. I came to see, and sometimes had to explain to others, that she had always had “her own agenda.” I did not mind this trait in her, and I came to prefer it just as she did. There was no “master” in our relationship.
        Once on a weekend we went to a nearby schoolyard that was deserted except for a youth just leaving with a football tucked under his arm. I had just unleashed her when he approached and asked to pet her. He did, and then watched in breathless wonder while she performed her circling feat, wild and passionate, until she finally tired and halted at a little distance to see what we thought.
         “Wow,” the boy stammered. “Where do you get a dog like that?”
         I had to consider, but then tried to explain.
         “You just have to be lucky. Sometimes it’s just a matter of fate, you know.”
                                                                

When she was six we sold our home and moved from the Southwest, where I had lived for six decades, to the Northwest, where my sons were residing, along with their families. It was a relocation they had urged since I had become a widower, and as I aged I had begun to see the wisdom of it, though I wondered how Dilsey would take it. I was ready to “downsize,” and simplify, if possible. I was retired, after all, and I sold our home. A year later, after arriving, I also sold our car, aware of my incompetence in the vast and often congested traffic of the big city, but also to counter the steep cost of living and consequent hardship which Seattle exacted on its middle class-—not to mention its poor who survived under its bridges and in substandard housing, including tents strewn among the trees around certain freeway interchanges.
        Yet I cannot say that we ever regretted the move. This was a land of mountains and forests and waterways to which my remaining family introduced us. It was here that Dilsey experienced what must have been her first encounter with an ocean. On an Oregon beach she sniffed to her heart’s content, and at the water’s edge stared seaward, thinking it over, one could tell. Here, too, she bounded like her old self after the yellow tennis ball we tossed for her along the packed wet sand where the waves came in, carefully dodging the waves as they crashed nearby. At the end of our excursion we snapped a photo of her, a portrait of a fatigued yet nonetheless exhilarated canine, with footprints of both man and dog in the sand beside her, with her ears laid slightly back, her mouth slightly open, and her eyes rolled slightly left and upward. I’ll call here upon a poet whom I read long ago, and borrow the better part of a line of his which Dilsey brought to mind:

        “… the seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.”
        (Hart Crane, “Voyages”)

And surely, for all the world, her gaze seemed to be inquiring, “Is this how it is now? Is this how it’s going to be?”
        Could I have answered yes, then heaven, it may have been, was all around us even then.
                                                                

By the time Dilsey was twelve she passed me up for the first time, in terms of dog years, that is. Without our car, I’d have to run errands alone sometimes, so that I’d begin to worry if gone too long, but upon my return I’d most often find her rising from her nap to look at me with love in her eyes. There were just a few times, however, when I opened the door in time to catch her making rapidly toward her bed. I had to deduce that she had been waiting for me just inside the door, but also that she preferred I didn’t know this. Just another aspect of her independence, I had to infer. It was an attitude she bore until the end.
        Without the car, we had taken to walking even more. From the time we landed on Southwest Morgan Street in West Seattle, we would trek down and then back up the steep incline which that street provided, this time to the nearest Starbuck’s instead of the Station House, but nonetheless for another round trip of two miles. It was always good to have a destination such as that, and we would sit together at an outside table year around, bundled up in the winter—Dilsey in a coat of rough blue flannel with a Velcro hitch and I in my big blue parka. People, and sometimes people with their dogs, would begin to see us as regulars, and Dilsey made us a number of friends—because yes, it was Dilsey, I noticed, that they were first attracted to. Her face had turned from mostly tan to mostly white by then, and the almond shape of her eyes had disappeared, and yet she was still a beauty, I’m inclined to add.
        Often the question would arise, “How old is she?”
        ”I think about thirteen,” I’d reply at the time I speak of, offering my opinion based on that of our vet back in Flagstaff. Whenever this brought surprise, I liked to proceed with my usual response.
        “It’s just a question of time,” I’d say, “as to who’s going to outlast who,” explaining how she had just in the last year passed by me in her dog years.
         Politely, they might feign surprise again.
         “It must be all the walking,” they would offer.
         As for the whiteness of Dilsey’s face, I had hardly noticed the gradual change.
         It was for our new vet to point it out, in her thoughtful way. On our first visit we briefly discussed her possible parentage, and a week later she sent me a newspaper clipping containing a photograph of a mature Red Heeler, an Australian Cattle Dog who, given up for lost, had made the news with one of those miraculous journeys to return home again. The Red Heeler, she added in her note, was bred from the Blue Heeler and the wild dingo, and she left it at that. But I saw her intention, for immediately I recognized the likeness of Dilsey, as she had aged, to the dog pictured in the article. It took me by surprise, but there was the whitening face, the longer legs, even the ears, for Dilsey’s were always pointed, and on occasion now stood straight up when she was lying or sleeping on her side. Moreover, the wild dingo in her background could provide me with some explanations I was glad to ponder—her instinct for independence, or “her own agenda,” as I liked to express it, and a certain reluctance to appear too demonstrative. I came to appreciate these revelations.

I found that it was Dilsey who often earned us new friends, an attribute which I myself had always seemed to lack. It may have been I tried too hard when young, and then, enjoying little success, I failed to try much at all. I thus had much to learn from Dilsey, who seemed so able to befriend without really trying, but just by being herself. I suspected there was much in which we complemented one another, and that she sensed this as well as I did. Could it be, as has been suggested well over a century ago by our greatest man of letters, that our dogs comprehend us “better than the philosophers”? And yes, I tend to believe that the best of them do, if only in ways of their own—about which we seem to know little.
        We often walked a two-mile loop to our favorite coffee shop (the Café Osita), but there was another, shorter alternative of about a mile that we liked to take, especially on rare sunny days. We could head in the opposite direction and after a couple of blocks connect with a path which led to and circled a wide duck pond and offered a view of the Seattle skyline and the Cascades beyond. The pond was fed by a natural source called Longfellow Creek, which emerged from a hillside and rushed among landscaped boulders and flora beside steps with a sturdy railing, and I recall some fine spring days when, having completed this short descent, we rested on a sunny bench, watching the returning swallows circling above and skimming the pond while the unconcerned ducks paddled around with their young in tow. As spring turned to summer and the swallows moved on, there were always the airliners overhead. Out of earshot so as not to disturb us unless we cared to watch them, they slowly descended at carefully planned intervals like great silver birds reflecting the light in the sky, seeking the earth again—but back beyond our range of vision, at SeaTac Terminal.
        In such golden hours I counted life good for both of us, and the years slipped by as we kept, by and large, to these three favored walks. And yet one morning before we began, feeling stiff and a little sore, I heard a complaint escape my lips before I thought about it. “Oh, Dilsey,” I sighed, “we’re both getting old.”
        She looked at me without surprise.
        Inevitably, of course, changes were beginning to show. I was made ever more wary of a tender and swollen right knee, the result of an old injury, I suspected, and, more telling, my voice was beginning to fade, so that I had often to clear my throat or even cough in trying to right it.
        Worse yet, near the middle of her fifteenth year, Dilsey suffered what I took to be a stroke. Returning from a walk on a late summer day, she seemed to be losing her balance, listing to her left, even falling on her side, and looking at me with both wonder and desperation in her eyes. I gathered her into my arms and rushed her to our nearby vet. Diagnosing at once, she administered an anti-inflammatory injection that, coupled with a relaxant, brought immediate relief. She suspected that a tumor on the left side of Dilsey’s brain had acted up in the heat and her exertion. She must have been right because the problem never recurred.
        Dilsey, I am certain, understood the emergency and offered no objection to our unplanned visit, nor even to being carried on this occasion. I, for my part, tapered off on the length of our walks thereafter.
                                                                

She lived for three more years. Although it was a position she had almost never assumed before, she now chose to sit whenever she could. The tail she used to hoist straight up behind her, white tip at the top, was now sadly drooping, though the white tip remained. Her hearing seemed to decline, which could have been the effect, in part, of my own flagging voice, but even when I was able to whistle, she invariably looked in the wrong direction. Her eyesight, too, caused me concern, reminding me of the cataract surgery I myself had required. For the first time she began bumping into objects in our small apartment and hiding in corners and under tables. Then too, whenever I bent over the kitchen sink or counter while preparing my meals, I’d feel her wedging herself between me and the counter, not to get by, apparently, but as if to remind me of her presence. I’d reach to scratch her head or behind her ears, which she might tolerate briefly, but only to retreat, shake herself thoroughly, and amble away.
        The gesture called to mind a curious habit she maintained for as long as I knew her: Whenever we found ourselves in a group of several persons, as at the home of one son or the other, I’d feel her nose bump suddenly against my leg, but only to see her retreating before I could acknowledge her presence—or rather, assure her of my own presence in the crowd, for that, I came to understand, was what she was checking on, trusting her nose with that quick but unmistakable bump.
         On one such occasion I was obliged to take a ferry across the Sound to Port Townsend and back, an appointment which would necessitate my absence for the better part of the day. My son and his wife kindly drove us to the ferry dock that Saturday morning, then took Dilsey with them to their home, with its large, fenced back yard, for the rest of the day. There, later on, I should add, other family and friends were to join us for dinner that evening. By the time I returned, the guests had all arrived, and Lee, coming forward, was quick to tell me that Dilsey had been looking for me all day, going from room to room and into the yard and back. Yet when she summoned her, Dilsey merely stood looking, and I had to wonder whether there wasn’t a bit of resentment in her holding back. But I recognized that warmth in her eyes, and as I advanced she decided to meet me half way. She greeted me with that terse but decided bump of the nose on my leg, then turned away, trying to seem casual, I could see. But I was by then familiar with that bump of the nose, and though it was her means of making sure it was me, I came in time to think it was also, in her own reserved and undemonstrative way, a gesture of affection, as if to say, “I’m glad you’re here,” and perhaps even more.
                                                                

Dilsey always slept well at night, and now she gradually took to sleeping more of the day. Her bed was a shallow wicker basket which I had found at a thrift shop. An old pillow served as the perfect mattress, and I covered it with a couple of fluffy but frayed old towels which I could launder easily, and for winters I had an old flannel blanket in which she like to snuggle, often with an audible sigh, or even adding a slight licking of her lips if I could cover her gently without disturbing her.
        I could never break my own habit of rising early, at first light, and often now when I hoped to rouse her, I could see that she was not up to making it that morning. I tried once or twice to place my hand beneath her belly, so warm and soft, and gently lift, but her eyes hardly opened and her body remained limp. I hadn’t the heart to force her, and so she took to “sleeping in,” as I explained to those who noticed her absence on my walks to Starbuck’s, now taken alone. There was always the Sound down below and the lights on Southworth Harbor across it, the Olympic Mountains just beginning to show behind them, and sometimes the moon might be up above me, westering through the clouds and lighting the waters of the Sound. It was all too beautiful to miss, and yet it was never the same without Dilsey.
        On one such morning, as I labored back up the hill after coffee just as the winter sun was about to clear the horizon, a car which I recognized pulled over to the curb beside me. The driver was a man of color and gentle manner who had stopped twice before.
        “Sir,” he addressed me, leaning over with his window down, “Sir, is your dog all right? I’ve seen you before with her, you remember. Is she doing all right?”
         I assured him that she was. “Just sleeping in a lot these days. Getting old, you know,” I tried to explain.
         “Oh, that’s good.” He seemed relieved, smiling now. “I’m glad to know she’s still with you,” he concluded, and he rejoined the flow of traffic.
         There are good souls to be discovered in this life, I couldn’t help thinking, perhaps all around us, and more than we realize.
        Although she was missing the early morning walks, Dilsey was still good for the second, as long as we took our time. We would walk along side streets lined by neatly kept homes, lawns, and flower beds behind the retaining wall along our sidewalk.
         Sometimes we would halt altogether and just observe—or sniff and observe, in Dilsey’s case—as when we reached the bottom of a hill, already close to home, and stood before a large vacant field on our right. “Vacant,” I say, and yet three stately oaks stood tall, each in its own corner and each enjoyed by crows and squirrels, and Dilsey had tall stems of grass and wildflowers to sniff and contemplate. She did her best, and I could see she was smiling, as dogs will sometimes smile. In spite of a life spent mostly on a leash, she never seemed to lose her sense of wonder. It was I, on the other end of the leash, who for much of my life had neglected to loaf and invite my soul, as the poet counseled, and who, once again, had much to learn from my dog.
         She was the same around the duck pond, where grass and flora were thriving and swallows were skimming the water again. We would seek our bench in the sunshine, where she would lie down at my feet, then ease into my shadow and pant lightly with her eyes partly closed. Yes, we would soon be retreating, but I could see she was smiling again. Such moments warmed my heart, and I resolved to stick to our routine as long as we could—for as long, that is, as she retained the capacity to enjoy what was left of her life.
        Dilsey’s last year may have been marred by pain I was slow in perceiving, for there were those who took issue with my judgment—friends, I thought, who told me I should be able to see that my dog was suffering, and it was time to end it. There was even a man in his car who honked his horn when we were slow to cross the street, and the woman beside him who yelled as they passed, “Put that dog away, you idiot!”
        I was relieved, under the circumstances, when I found in my mailbox a reminder from our vet that it was time for Dilsey’s rabies booster—a summons that would afford me a chance for a consultation.
        “Well,” she announced, following a cursory examination, “her heart’s still good, but I don’t see the need for the boosters any longer,” she added, her voice turning solemn. “She was limping a little when you came in, and her hind legs are stiffened and probably arthritic. She’s seventeen now, if I remember rightly, and probably suffering some pain.”
         She left her desk to search a cabinet and produced a bottle of pills for me. “You might try these. They sometimes help.”
         I hadn’t the presence of mind to say that she wouldn’t swallow pills and couldn’t be tricked, but as if remembering, she continued. “I wouldn’t make an issue of it,” she advised. “Just break a tablet in half and drop it in her food once a day.”
         I nodded, but moved to the topic most on my mind. “But doctor,” I asked. “How will I know when…and can I bring her here if her time comes?”
She smiled, but only slightly, it being a question doubtless familiar to her, but nevertheless not easily dealt with. “She’ll probably let you know about that.”
         “But she never moans or whimpers, not even in her sleep, as far as I know.”
         “Some dogs don’t,” she allowed. “Just make her comfortable when you can.”
         Hesitating, she produced a small card from a drawer in her desk.
        “And yes,” she added, “you can bring her in when it’s time. But there’s also an alternative.” She handed me the calling card she had located.
        “4 for Paws,” I read. I recalled that my son and his wife having endured the necessity of putting down their own dog had turned to this same alternative.
        “They’re four colleagues,” she explained. “All licensed vets. They come to your place,” she added. “Some feel it’s more humane, more compassionate that way.”
         I tried to study the card, but without much success. “Yes, I can see how it would be,” I finally thought to say.
                                                                

Weeks passed as we approached the end of summer. I had our twenty-by-twenty-inch floor fan going much of the time, which Dilsey seemed to appreciate. She slept long and peacefully, ate a little now and then—and, oddly enough, swallowed the medicinal tablets mixed in her food without issue, just as the doctor had foreseen.
        Our walks were short, usually just over to the park next door, sometimes just around the parking lot. Yet one fine morning the day dawned bright and Dilsey was on her feet as soon as I was. It crossed my mind that there was something magical at work.
        Outside, she hesitated, lifted her head, and sniffed around awhile. Having decided, she gave me a look, then fell in behind me and followed with steady resignation. We were headed down to Starbuck’s for one last time, and together again.
        It was a Sunday, the morning remaining bright and beautiful, and the traffic was light. I had to help her over a curb or two, but all along the way I quietly rejoiced in her company. I admit to rehearsing to myself a “Look who’s with me this morning” greeting for those whom we knew and might encounter. But arriving at Starbuck’s, Dilsey got behind the chair I had chosen and stood facing the wall below the window, as though she would as soon go unnoticed in her condition. I should have understood, I reflected, and I had almost finished my coffee when it looked as though she might have her wish. It was early Sunday, after all, and like the traffic in the streets, pedestrians on the walks were few.
        We were about to depart when I spotted down the walk an elderly lady, whose name escaped me just then, in the company of her German shepherd, Ben. He was old and somewhat undersized for his breed, and his demeanor suggested he had somewhere endured a life which was not without hardship. He always stepped carefully with his head lowered, as though preferring to pass unnoticed—not unlike Dilsey on that particular morning.
        “Well, hello there,” sang Mary Ellen—her name coming back to me suddenly. “So nice to see you two together again!”
         “One more time, we decided,” but just then she saved me from anything more. “Well, will you look at that!” she exclaimed.
         I looked, and saw, remarkably, that Ben had not only stopped to stare, as if recognizing a long-lost friend, but was now wagging his tail. And no less wondrous, there was Dilsey, turned from the wall to face him, now lifting her tail from its droop to offer a token wag in return, as though in appreciation of this unexpected affection—and from one not unlike herself in ways both may have understood. We stared at one another, all four of us, speechless in that magic moment.
         Back home, and thoroughly spent, Dilsey slept soundly the rest of the morning while I had time to reflect. Could it be, after all, that life was never meant to be prolonged? Could it be love—be it only in a passing glance or a wag of the tail—after all, that was meant to prevail? Could it be, despite the pain, that Dilsey—and Ben—had taught me something again? I couldn’t help recalling the bumper stickers I’d been seeing on just a few cars: “Wag, don’t bark.”
        Dilsey lost all appetite after that day, a development I had been wary of. Try as I might, I could encourage only a nibble now and then. I started to call “4 for Paws,” changed my mind, but soon decided again to call, and set an appointment for the following week.
        With Dilsey asleep, I decided to shop at a convenience store close by. Upon my return I found her still sleeping, but now with her legs splayed out, just a couple of feet from her water bowl. I pushed the bowl closer, lifted her gently while she drank a little, then helped her back to her bed.
        I called “4 for Paws” again and asked them to move the appointment closer. I was put on hold, but the kindly secretary soon was back: a Dr. Allison could come tomorrow, she said.
        “Expect her about 11:00 a.m. She’ll call you first.”
                                                                

On her last day, toward the end of what was probably her eighteenth summer, the morning broke mostly clear, and thinking we had ample time, I led her slowly to the park across the street, where we settled on a bench in the sunshine. The park seemed peaceful, it being morning and the middle of the week, and we sat quietly for a while, with Dilsey relaxed at my feet.
        “The sun feels good,” I said to her as I had said many times before when we were situated just as we were that morning, but perhaps more slowly this time, and with a trifle more emphasis on my final syllable.
        She rolled her head around at that, and with bleary eyes gave me a look which I took for agreement. Yet she held the long look a moment longer as if wanting to say something more, and I was made aware somehow of the photograph I still cherished from her first day at the beach, which seemed long ago. The eyes were bleary now, but still they touched upon that old question, “Is this how it is now?” The youthful joy, the “wide spindrift gaze” conveyed in that old portrait was missing now, yet well- remembered, a part of both of us, and the answer to the question, which I am sure we both comprehended in that expanded moment, still held true: Yes, this was how it is now.

Slowly I led and coaxed her back toward home. My cell phone rang in the process—Dr. Allison, informing me she would be arriving at the appointed hour. Dilsey settled in her bed when we returned, and I tried to make everything ready.
        She was sleeping near the wall which held my bookcases, collapsed on her left side, when I heard the knock of Dr. Allison, a tall and comely woman with blond hair, though I cannot say much about her age or countenance, my own eyes perhaps a little bleary by then.
        She was gentle and efficient, setting down her kit and a blanket and presenting her card, headed “4 for Paws” again, but this time bearing her name only. We discussed several matters, deciding, among other things, that Dilsey’s ashes were to be scattered in an old apple orchard which their group had purchased on the edge of Yakima, Washington, just east of the Cascades, where sunlight prevailed.
        As she at last made ready the injections, she looked to me quietly, and only acted when I nodded. The first was intended only to relax her and induce a deep sleep. I watched as Dilsey eased open her eye—I could see only her right one—as though still asleep. I saw it gradually roll back in her head, her breathing still steady. Dr. Allison looked to me again, and I nodded.
        Deftly, she found the vein which she sought in Dilsey’s hind leg, eased in the needle, and secured it with gauze and white tape. We watched as the breathing gradually stopped. There was no pain that I could detect, nor any contraction.
        Dr. Allison placed Dilsey in the small velvet blanket she had brought and asked if I wanted to carry her. I told her I did.
        We made our way down the hallway toward our exit, and as she held the door and I stepped out I felt Dilsey’s head flop loosely from beneath her blanket. Quickly, I supported the neck gone limp with my upturned wrist, and as I held her head in my cupped hand I sensed, all at once, the pity of her death.
        I staggered slowly across the driveway to our parking lot, my bad right knee threatening to buckle, and as Dr. Allison opened the hatchback of the car we sought, I placed my dog carefully on the padded bedding there. I straightened up and blinked, and then, seizing my last chance, I bent over again and held my face firmly against Dilsey’s, our last space in time together, too late, I knew, to say goodbye, but nevertheless….
        Straightening myself again, I had nearly lost my balance when I felt the doctor’s arms enfold and brace me. I tried to say “thank you” a couple of times, but, given my unreliable voice, I am not sure that I made myself audible. In truth, I seemed both blinded and choked. Yet I made my way back to the curbing across the driveway, where I turned to wave goodbye. Dr. Allison also paused in her car, with Dilsey in the back, to wave a long goodbye, then slowly turned into the traffic on the street and disappeared.
        I won’t forget her kindness.