Just the Shadows

One of the first tells that autumn is approaching for me is the changing of the light and shadows. As summer draws to its end, the sun sits lower in the sky casting longer shadows throughout the day.

When I decided to return to college to pursue the exercise science degree, and after I completed that degree and worked part time at the community college, I always knew the time for my return to campus was near as those shadows fell longer on the green grass.

With that knowledge came an increasing desire to spend as much time enjoying both my relative freedom and the outdoors as possible. On those late summer days, I would always be accompanied on my ventures outdoors by Mitzi. I would often look and see the black and white border collie, wearing her classic red bandana, lying in the grass made darker green by those shadows.

On August 6, we said goodbye to Mitzi, but I haven’t been able to write her tribute.

When my Cali cat passed away, nearly six years ago now, I had her tribute completely composed in my mind. With Cali, I had known in October 2016, when the vet diagnosed her with breast cancer, that she would likely have just a few more months. We chose to make her comfortable and to enjoy our remaining time together.

I had promised her that I would not let her suffer, and I made the call to the vet in late December to keep that promise. I had a couple of days between my phone call and her appointment December 29, 2016, the last appointment of the day. I spent those days with her as much as she would allow, and I spent the final hour giving her a little milk and petting her caramel color fur.

After she passed, the post “One Dark December Night” poured out of me as my tears fell on the keyboard while I typed., but a fitting tribute to Mitzi has eluded me to this point.

Mitzi had been with us for 15 years. When my husband Pete and I adopted her, we had been told that she was about a year old or so. Since she was a rescue, they didn’t have a birth date for her. Regardless, Mitzi was an ol’ girl. Her passing should have come as no surprise to us, and though it didn’t – it did.

After a tough Friday night in early August, we knew it was time. We agreed that we would call our vet on Monday morning. I went to yoga class that Saturday morning, and I had talked with my instructor about our poor border collie, and Pete, and about how hard it is to make the decision. She had agreed that it is so difficult with dogs because “they don’t always show us how much they’re suffering because they want so much to please,” and she said she would pray for peace about the decision.

By mid-afternoon, both Pete and I knew that we could not wait until Monday. Mitzi seemed to be declining by the hour. He called an emergency vet about 30 minutes away. He put Mitzi into the car, and we made what seemed like an extra long drive.

I felt unsettled. It was almost as if it had become a trauma situation, except we knew the outcome. We knew she was old. We knew she had a few health issues; she had been seen for those issues both in our former hometown and in our new one. We knew it wouldn’t be long, but somehow, she had kept surprising us, had kept wagging that black tail with its white tip whenever Pete got anywhere near her leash, had kept on walking even though the distances kept decreasing. Though we had been expecting it for literally a couple of years, it had come suddenly.

My emotions became dominated by anger once we arrived at the emergency vet. They made everyone wait outside. It was 93 degrees by time we arrived at 4:00 pm. They had a bright, spacious, air conditioned waiting room. Even if they couldn’t relieve everyone’s stress and sadness, they could have at least given us a break from the heat. They required masks for the people they did allow in; it just didn’t make sense to me to keep everyone out.

Finally, the time had come. A tech approached our Prius. Pete stood Mitzi on the blacktop. He coaxed her to walk with him one more time. She tried, but she couldn’t. He picked her up and carried her into the vet. We had been assured that we would be able to be with her in her final moments, and we were. Ours were the last voices she heard.

The tears were already falling as I reached for the door to leave. The stifling August air hit me as I walked through the door. I pulled at the cheap paper mask so hard it tore, its strap flying off somewhere in front of me. I was crying; I couldn’t breathe. A man was sitting on a bench just outside the door. The woman who had been sitting with him when we had gone in wasn’t there. He was crying too. I heard my husband say, “It never gets easier.” I heard the man respond, something like, “No, it doesn’t.” We got into our car, and I reached for the temperature controls as soon as it was running. I needed cool air.

I couldn’t write with all of that emotion: that strange disbelief that it was over – she was gone forever; that anger that had arisen at the way things were handled at the vet; and that guilt. Yes, as I thought more about everything later, I felt guilty.

Knowing that her time was short, even though she had kept on going, I had wanted her passing to be more like Cali’s, a scheduled date and time, time to spend those last few moments and to do those things “one more time.” I had wanted her to be able to go to our local vet, five minutes away. I had wanted it to be peaceful. Instead, the last mornings outside together and last walks just happened without us knowing they would be the lasts. The peaceful experience I had enjoyed with my cat, as our vet had done the best they could in making it easier for us, had been replaced by a long drive and 45 minutes waiting in a car, or outside trying to catch what little breeze there was that day.

I felt like maybe I could have prevented her life ending like that. I could maybe have prevented her suffering, if she was, or if she had that day. I thought maybe we had waited too long. I had seen the tiredness in her eyes before that day.

Though I couldn’t write for her, the Sunday after she passed, I changed my clothes after church and went into the garage, fought with the zip ties that held her house (the wire crate for a medium-sized dog) in the folded position, and set the crate up enough to retrieve her blanket, deep red with black paw prints. For some reason it had become important to me to wash and keep her blanket. I also washed all of her bandanas, 28 in total, each with a different memory of purchasing it for her, or with her.

At some point during that week, I also started to work on her memorial collage. I had done the same for Cali. As I started to look for favorite pictures of Mitzi, I started to remember not just the old border collie she had been, but the energetic, sometimes neurotic, young dog she had been.

She could run. Perhaps surprisingly, she did not enjoy running distances. When I was still a runner, I would run a mile or two with her, then drop her off at home and finish my mileage for the day. I’m not the fastest person either, but she really didn’t enjoy that kind of running too much. As a sprinter, she was stunning. When either Pete or I would throw the frisbee for her, much like a quarterback leads a receiver with a pass, she would run, but when she’d catch sight of the frisbee, she would get low, and she would fly on a straight line, dialed in to run under it, and jump to catch it. It was something to behold.

She was a loyal walking partner as well. She walked all over Michigan, and several other states, mainly with Pete, but sometimes with both of us. She escaped several times in her youth as well, in our hometowns, in northern Michigan, and in Canaan Valley, West Virginia. She was not a fan of the water, but her strong legs made her a good swimmer. She walked or swam in all five Great Lakes during her life.

She caused anger to arise within me on so many occasions, and yet she made me laugh – often at the exact same time. She was afraid of storms and fireworks, and she did some memorable damage during those events. She was athletic. She was smart. She was particular. She was picky. She was a homebody. And she was loyal, more than I ever realized, until her dying day.

The other day I had been working on a project, sitting in front of the computer for a couple of hours. I decided that I needed to take a break and get some fresh air. I stepped out the back door, barefoot as I often am, on to the grey paving stone steps that match our patio. I gazed at the blue sky, listened to the wind in the trees, and felt the sun’s warmth still in September. I walked down the two steps to the patio and surveyed the yard, a rectangle defined by the wood privacy fence. I noticed the long shadows cast by our tall trees. I didn’t see the black and white border collie in her classic red bandana. It was just the shadows. In that moment, it all felt so empty.