We had to euthanize our beloved Danny on Saturday. For those of you who worked with us in the Trenches, you knew him as the Office Dog. He was always on hand to request his belly rubbed just when you were about to lose it. He always knew when you needed a friend to cuddle, even if you weren't aware of it until just that moment. He was a brilliant medical diagnostician, and could often tell when someone had a physical ailment before they or the tests knew it. He was a friend magnet, with lots of dogs and their owners to call his buddies, and even some folks without dogs. He got you out of the house and office and moving every day, whether you liked it or not. Most of all, he was my best friend. Because he was my best friend, I had to be his today when he needed me. My heart is broken into a million pieces, but it was the right decision for him.
Danny would like to leave you with a learning moment here in the Trenches. (Of course he would - he's my dog, after all). When an animal is ill, sometimes it's hard to know what to do. How ill are they? They can't tell you unless they cry or scream in pain. Even then, it's hard to know if the pain is episodic, long-term or permanent. If they don't scream, are they in pain? Are they unhappy? You look for signs - are they breathing heavily, are they favoring a limb, are they not eating? Sometimes the signs are clear, like they were with my Danny, and sometimes they're just not, like with his girlfriend Sam. Making the decision to euthanize them is final, so you want to be sure. You try everything - you change their food, give them more love, change their walks, give them supplements, take them to specialists. Sometimes, you just can't know for sure, and you agonize, and maybe they suffer too long. Sometimes, when they suffer too long, it's not about them, it's about you not being ready for them to leave you.
That's kind of like marriages. Most people marry thinking marriage is forever. No one enters a marriage thinking it's going to end. For some people, it is forever. For others, it's not, and more importantly, it shouldn't be. When a marriage starts to go wrong, it feels wrong. For many marriages, when it starts to feel wrong, it's hard to tell if it's a bump in the road which most marriages go through or a serious derailment. You wait and observe. Maybe you try and do some things differently; add some date nights, go to counseling. Sometimes it's a malaise; sometimes it's an affair or domestic violence. Is this a one-time thing, or is it a pattern? For most of us, we wait too long, because divorce and dividing a family is permanent (usually), and we don't want to be premature. From Danny's point of view, you're looking at it wrong. Stop kidding yourself and do the hard work.
Most people who Danny saw come into the Trenches knew the marriage was over long before they walked in our door, sometimes decades before. They agonized over the marriage itself. They worried about the effect on the children. They were concerned about how their spouse would survive without them. What most of them didn't do was look deep inside themselves. They didn't look at how they added to the marital dynamic. They didn't examine what was acceptable to them. They didn't ponder what they needed to move on. They didn't formulate a realistic vision of what life would look like after divorce. Instead, they focused on keeping the marriage together as long as they could - because they weren't ready to leave, not because they made a decision to stay.
Even though we weren't ready for Danny to leave us so soon and so suddenly, we knew it wasn't about us. It was about him. We gathered the facts, did the emotional work and made the right decision. With Sam, we agonized, and I see now that was far more about us than her and in the end, it was worse for all of us. What Danny the Office Dog would want you to learn is that you can't make the hard decisions until you do your own internal work. Yes, it's hard. Yes, it may require working with a therapist. And it might require gathering information from multiple sources - a lawyer and/or an accountant. Do it anyway. For Danny, if not for yourself. Here in the Trenches.
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