My dog is dying.

My dog is dying.  My dog is dying.  My dog is dying. 

I practiced saying it yesterday morning as I lay in bed, shortly after turning off my alarm.  A few hours later I was to meet my friend for lunch- a grad-school friend who'd visited me while I was dog-sitting for my parents about two years ago.  It was autumn when he visited and we took my dog to the beach.  No lifeguards, no umbrellas, no crowds.  Just the three of us.  My dog was so excited, he ran ahead on a long leash, looking back at us as we tried to keep up with him.  The wet, salty air pushed back, what I call his "doggie eyebrows" that usually hang in front of his eyes.  He sniffed eagerly the slippery pebbles that lined the reaches of the frothy tide, and the recently-inhabited crab shells that were decorated with strands of seaweed.  "I love taking him here," I told my friend that day.

I knew I'd have to tell this friend at lunch, "My dog is dying."  I didn't want my voice to crack when I said it, so I practiced it.  I whispered it from my bed, out the open window and into the chilly, damp courtyard outside my apartment.

I call him "my" dog, but really he was a gift bought by my grandparents for my little brother.  I remember the fall sun that was shining in 2000 when my mother, grandfather and eight-year-old brother pulled up in front of my college dorm in New York City, on their way back from the breeder.  A cardboard box in the back of the station wagon held a tiny, whimpering, black and tan, furry-faced puppy.  I had come out to greet them in my dorm uniform (sweats) and reached into the box and pulled out the boy pup.  He trembled in my palms.  I held him closer, but still he was unsteady, trying to perch on my arms.  I turned him over, gently in my hands, as if looking for the wind-up key.  I mean, he couldn't be real... could he?  My grandfather shuffled into a nearby Chinese restaurant without explanation and emerged with a takeout tin full of water and he laid it sweetly in front of the baby, who stuck his tiny pink tongue into the water.  My mother and I looked at each other- I mean, I doubt we'd seen a cuter sight.

My mother explained that this type of dog (Wheaten Terrier) doesn't stay tiny forever.  They grow fast, into medium-sized dogs.  She recommended I come home frequently to make the most of his puppy years.  And I did.  I couldn't get enough of his miniature square ears, his black button nose- really, the size of a button- and the padding underneath his paws that looked like leather pillows.

He yelped the first few weeks.  He didn't like sleeping alone in his crate, but my parents were bent on disciplining him.  My sister and I agonized over those tinny cries, that we had strict instructions to ignore.  We also had to teach him to go to the bathroom outside, so we'd put him on the back deck, say "outside, hurry up!" and quickly close the sliding glass door.  He was enrolled in doggie day school, so he knew what this instruction meant, but still he stared at us from the other side of the glass, motionless.  My entire family stared back at him.  He cocked his head, quizzically.

"Nobody... open... the door," my mom said in monotone without parting her lips.  Not one of us moved a muscle.  We stared back at him, waiting.  Each of our days brought to a grinding halt so that the dog would finally pee on his own.  Nothing about this seemed strange to us- five human beings standing silently in the kitchen, so that this animal wouldn't interpret even a flinch as a glimmer of hope that we might surrender.

But we always lost that face-off.

Then my father built a tarp tent right outside that same glass door so that the dog could go to the bathroom while it rained.  He was terrified of the rain, even more terrified of thunder.  When we pushed him out onto the soggy deck (he locked his joints and his tiny claws scraped the tiles as we did this) the scene was the same.  Only this time there was a blue tarp over his head.  The rain pounded around him as he looked in at us.

While he appeared to have something against the rain, the snow was an entirely different story.  Everything you might imagine of children playing in the snow- euphorically, uninhibited- is true for my dog.  He dives into fresh snow, armpit deep, he leaps out of snowy trenches, rolls on his back in packed snow, slides down icy slopes, collects snowflakes on his tongue.

One snowed-in New Year's Eve my mother and I decided not to dig out the car, but instead to walk to the liquor store for champagne.  And we decided to take the dog.  Our quaint street glowed faintly with the mild light of a snowstorm dusk and the Cold-War era street lights that line the avenue.  No one was out.  We started our trek-- each step involved pushing our feet into the snow and then pulling them out.  At first it seemed manageable, but by the time we got up the block to the liquor store, our dog was up to his neck in snow and we couldn't get him to move.  He stared at us.  We stared at him.  By this time he was that medium-sized dog my mother promised he would become and so digging and lifting him out of the snow turned out to be pretty challenging.  It took us a long time to carry him to more firm ground and by the time we got home everyone was milling around, worried and wondering about where we'd gone.

   I've been crying for a week straight-- from the moment I found out, seven days ago, that he'd ben given the dire diagnosis (of certain death within an uncertain amount of time) until right now.  For seven days I've felt like a different girl going through the motions of my life and feeling strange about it.  As if for years I'd carved for myself a routine that no longer suits me.  Sleep seems less necessary.  Food, even less so.  My fall TV lineup... finding the perfect jeans... office drama... finding a better job.  None of this is as important and I'd rather not analyze any of it.  

I've been crying for a week straight, and since I don't like shedding tears in front of people, I've been crying in solace- wrapped in my blanket, in the shower, at the stove while stirring an uninspired pot of sauce.  I know he's "just a dog," but we always cared for him as if he were a child.  I suppose it takes some inhuman discipline not to do this-- to save oneself the devastation of losing a pet, so that it doesn't feel as though you were losing a person.

Years ago my father lined my dog's crate with carpet because he said the plastic wasn't comfortable for him.  We had no proof of this, but we went along with it anyway.  On lazy Sundays when my father watches TV and dozes off, my dog sits at his feet near the couch and also dozes off.  And when my father gets up, he picks up my dog and holds him like a baby and my dog puts his paws and rests his chin on my father's shoulder and my father pats his back as if burping him.

After work my mother pulls the dog into her bed for a nap.  She cooks him fresh chicken to spruce up his dry food and peels carrots for his treats.  She comes home from wherever she is, everyday at three o'clock to walk him, letting him sniff every mailbox, every fence post, every tree trunk he pulls towards.

In the mornings my sister cracks open her bedroom door and calls for him from her bed until she hears the jingle of the I.D. plates around his neck.  He pushes the door all the way open with his nose and studies her for a moment before hopping onto her comforter where he curls into a perfect ball.  She strokes his fur and falls back to sleep for a little while longer.

My brother, now a driving, high-schooling teenager, sits at his computer with one hand on his guitar and the other on one end of a stuffed squirrel doll, while my dog pulls the other end.  My dog thrashes his head around, never letting go of that squirrel baring a row of what I call "baby teeth."  But I bet he thinks those teeth are really intimidating, so I act scared when he does this and let him feel like a man of the house.

When I come home on weekends- out to the beach town from my city life- I am really coming home because I miss my dog.  I don't tell my family this.  But it's my dog, whose apparent appreciation for everything- all things small and mundane- that spark my senses; and his sense of security and comfort that makes me feel the same.

A noise amongst the pine trees in the backyard (that I rarely even hear) is the possibility of an adventure- an intruder, a friendly puppy that's wandered beyond the fence, a wayward turtle.  He rushes to the back door, jumps up, leaving a slimy signature of paw prints on the glass.  When I extend his usual walk all the way across the main road and down a new street, he's frantically jubilant.  Even just pulling into the driveway when I first arrive he rushes out, wagging his nubby tail looking as though it could propel him into flight.  And there's the way he jumps up, pushes the curtain out of the way, and with his front paws on the window sill, watches me pull out of the driveway when I leave.  I wave to him until he's out of my sight.

But it's those trips to the beach with my dog that bring me the most peace, and sharpness.  The way our two tiny beings fill the landscape- endless in both directions.  Just us and the sound of the wind and the water.  And then the millions of details:  the grainy red and black sand, the layer of soft, white sand, the receding dune grass, the shell fragments by the water's edge, and the creatures that wade in the shallow ocean before the sandbar...the Twinkies wrapper that my dog dwells upon with sleuth-like sniffing.

I suppose if it gets to a point where we must put him down to end his pain I hope this is where he believes he is going.  I know that everyone says that dogs don't have memory, they only have routine.  But I hope when he is drifting off that last time that he begins to feel the pull of the salty September air, and the cold pebbles under his paws, and the icy water that reaches for him and then disappears into the horizon.  And I will be telling him I love him until his very last breath.

My dog is dying.  My dog is dying.  My dog is dying.