At, 11:29 Dr. S placed the stethescope to his chest and whispered, “he’s gone.” The syringe lay on the floor, and his head lay lifeless in my hands. I couldn’t breathe, as if the air had been sucked from my chest. I sat on the couch in my living room and cried tears of confusion, sadness and anguish.
More than an hour later I sit here and write this, the day a blur in my memory, the day that my dog, Broc, my baby boy, had been put to sleep. He was old, he was deaf, and he had been suffering, to the point where I would wake up in the mornings and hope to find that he had gone to sleep by himself, that he would have gone peacefully. But it happened in a much different way. We sat with him in my family room, saying tearful goodbyes and last “I love yous.” When the vet came in, holding two syringes I held him, I told him that I would always love him. As Dr. S struggled to find a vein to inject the life ending fluid into my teddy bear, I tried to calm him when he looked pleadingly at me with his big brown eyes I had grown to love, and I fed him bacon and chocolate. My dad had hoped that the Chocolate would have the pop eye effect on him, since chocolate is notoriously bad for dogs, but their favourite food. I wanted to believe with all my heart that he would shoot up and walk around again, but the reality pulled me back in, to my final seconds with him.
I hope the last thing he remembers, was me, trying to make him happy in his last moments. I can’t help but wonder where he is right this very minute. I believe he is happy. He is in a warm place, he’s no longer in pain, and he can hear again. I believe his life is not over. There really isn’t an end to life. Maybe his life as a dog named Broc is over, but I recall a line from a movie I watched many times as a kid, The Iron Giant, “a soul never dies.” I don’t know the extent to this saying, whether it’s reincarnation, rebirth or heaven, that all depends on religion. What I’m speaking of has nothing to do with religion, it has to do with what his life has now become.
I may have left his body on an examination table somewhere in a vet’s office, but I didn’t leave him. Yes, I left the shell of him, but not him. Without life in his warm furry body it isn’t him, without his personality and wet sloppy kisses it isn’t my Brocky-boy. He lives on in our hearts and memories. His soul lives on. And nothing can take that away. This I believe.