My best friend died as I held her
My tears couldn’t drown out the happy, love-filled stories I whispered into her ear as she died.
Two weeks ago my best friend died. I held her in my arms as she took her final, shuddering and exhausted breath.
A fortnight later I’m still tearing up; Jedi is gone.
My dog, my best friend, died in my arms just after 5:30pm on Monday, 26 March 2018. She was lying on the examination table in the consulting room at our local vet, the same vet clinic where she had been treated for more than a decade.
We only recently discovered that Jedi had been suffering from kidney disease; she had been off her food for months. The younger vet who had recently taken over the clinic didn’t pick up on the warning signs; he suggested we change her diet, he didn’t check her bloods. When the older vet who had previously owned the clinic returned from a month long holiday, he immediately suggested checking Jedi’s kidney function; by then she had late stage kidney disease and she was dying. It was my choice; allow her to suffer and die slowly and painfully over days or weeks, or I could assist her to go sooner and to die with some dignity and some peace… My options were horrible.
I sound as though I’m writing a medical document or a coroner’s report. My writing up to this point is almost totally devoid of emotion; I feel like much of this post makes no sense. Over the last week I have started, edited and deleted this post over and over;
I’m a writer. Why can’t I write about the death of my best friend?
“Ti hotshish gulyatz?” I cried in Russian to Jedi, the words meaning “Do you want to go for a walk?”. I teared up as I called out the words; this was no invitation to go for a walk, an easy jaunt to the park around the corner. No, I was inviting my best friend to walk with me to her own death.
Days had passed since Jedi had last eaten, her kidneys were not functioning and she was throwing up most of what she consumed. Her eyes were glassy and flat, no longer vibrant and cheeky. Her steps, already pained and cramped by a decade of osteoarthritis, were even slower and less steady. To continue my emotionally wrenching charade, I grabbed her leash and fastened it to her collar.
Jedi dragged herself to the car; her steps slow and listless. We got to the car and I lifted her into the backseat for the last time; it had been at least a decade since she had been able to jump.
The drive to the veterinary clinic lasted less than 5 minutes; I don’t even remember how I got there. My eyes were drowning in tears. Jedi was breathing heavily on the backseat; I tilted my rear view mirror to watch her; she was spent.
We arrived at the vet and I parked right outside. I opened the back door and eased my old friend out of the car; for the final time. She strode slowly, achingly towards the entrance to the clinic. We walked through the door. The receptionist’s typically cheerful “Hi Jedi!” was instead muted, sombre and hollow.
Jedi took a few stumbling steps towards the dog scale in the corner, but there was no need to weigh her today. She wasn’t here to be treated or cared for; she wasn’t walking back out the front door today. This was her final journey.
Jedi collapsed to the floor; the tiny effort of walking metres from the car to the clinic’s reception sapped her. She lay on her side panting. I was patting her, singing to her, telling her that I loved her. Another lady was in the waiting room with her poodle; she smiled at me and I ignored her.
“It’s OK, Jedi,” I lied over and over as I patted my friend while her body shook, partly from fear and mostly with exhaustion. “I love you my girl,” I mumbled over and over as tears streaked down my face.
“Jedi!” came the call from the nurse in the consulting room. I stood up and lifted Jedi’s exhausted frame until she managed to be up on all four paws. I gently tugged on my dog’s leash as I led her towards her death.
The vet wasn’t there; Jedi’s life would be taken by a veterinary nurse, a woman we had never met before.
Jedi lay on a table, resting on her left side and panting weakly; her eyes were blurred and distant, she hadn’t yet taken any medication.
The nurse was droning on and on about options for what I could do with Jedi’s body after my best friend was dead. I didn’t understand a word she was saying, I just kept on patting my dog. I knew there were only minutes left in her life.
I heard the nurse ask me, again, if I wanted my dog’s body after she had died. I declined. She then asked me if I wanted Jedi to be cremated. I shrugged. I didn’t want my dog to die; I wanted her to live, but after surviving three knee reconstructions, cancer and a decade of arthritic pain and limited mobility, her time was up. My girl, my True Love From The Animal Kingdom, was taking her final breaths.
“Remember the plage?” I whispered into Jedi’s ear as I patted her beautiful fur, feeling her ragged breaths beneath my touch.
“Remember all our walks?”
“Remember your favourite spot in the garden?”
I don’t know how clearly dogs can understand human language. I don’t know how they form or access memories. I don’t know whether Jedi’s life flashed before her eyes in those final moments; I do know that I wanted her to know how much I loved her, how much I appreciated her, how wonderful our lives had been together.
The nurse tightened a touriniquet around Jedi’s right front leg.
She jabbed a needle into an unseen vein.
“The first injection will calm her down, relieve her pain…”
“Remember when you lay in the park with me, when I came out of hospital? Thank you Jedi,” I whispered.
“This next injection will stop her heart; she will inhale sharply and then…”
“Please wait for me, beautiful girl. Jedi; I love you…”
The sound was horrific; Jedi inhaled sharply, quickly and it sounded as though she struggled through terrible fright to take that final breath.
I sobbed horribly, my body was racked as I too struggled to breathe through tears and an earthquake of grief.
“She’s gone now,” the nurse spoke, the words stabbing through my pain. “She has no more pain. She’s gone.”
This afternoon it will be one week since my best friend died; I have cried every day since. I’m crying now. I doubted my ability to write about losing her; not because I wasn’t certain that I could get my words onto the screen, but because I didn’t believe, and still don’t believe, that my words could adequately convey the emotions I shared in the final moments of my best friend’s life.
“Please Jedi, give me one more gift; please wait for me so that one day we can walk together across the stars.
“I hope you have found peace, and an enormous, juicy steak in the sky.
“I love you Jedi, my gorgeous girl, my best friend.
“I will miss you for the rest of my life.”
