My dad was supposed to have an in-house vet coming today to send our sweet little boy across the rainbow bridge.
As it turned out, he ended up canceling the appointment, because yesterday Simon decided it was time to take that trip by himself.
Simon was a second-life dog. My mom described finding him on the street “with ticks hanging off of ticks hanging off of ticks,” skinny and sad. My dad’s dad was sure he’d seen Simon somewhere before with some elderly guy, but couldn’t remember the fellow’s name or how close he lived.
So Mom brought him home. She brushed out as many of the ticks as she could at the front door, then brought him inside, intending to plunk him in a bath with some dish detergent to deal with both the remainder and the many fleas alongside them. Instead he jumped out of her arms, directly onto the oldest and rattiest chair in the house, curled up nose-to-tail, and slept for 18 hours.
The chair was thrown out. Simon was not. And so he stayed, for the next thirteen years.
Simon was…a little weird in the head. Sometimes he showed flashes of great intelligence, but he never figured out that gravity was a thing that existed and we literally had to teach him how to play. After the results of his microchip scan came back, we came to the conclusion his previous owner was deceased, and that Simon had gotten out of the house seeking food. He was a social little soul, and my mom and I both suspected he developed the same kind of mental oddities as a homeless person during his time on the street. These lessened over the years as he settled into our family and learned he was truly home, but they never fully went away, and in this our fourteen pounds of love and nonsense provided a sobering lesson about the people we leave behind when we fail to provide for their needs.
In the last year, Simon developed a tumor on his front leg. The vet determined three things: 1) it was benign but still growing, but 2) removal would require taking his entire leg, and 3) at an estimated age of 17 years, he simply wasn’t healthy enough to risk anesthesia for any but the most necessary of surgeries. My dad agreed, and also pointed out that asking the equivalent of an 80-year-old man to learn to walk with only three legs would be a form of cruelty. We decided to monitor the tumor, and as long as it wasn’t interfering with his quality of life, leave it be. If it came to the point where it did, well….we’re both country folk. Neither of us relished the idea even a little bit, but we both know dogs rarely outlive their humans.
At that point, the tumor on his leg was roughly akin in size to an adult woman having a baseball-sized growth on her wrist.
Simon carried on this way for another year. The tumor slowly grew until I had to physically pick him up and turn him on his back in order to give him the tummy rubs he so dearly loved. He learned to use a set of doggy stairs to get up and down from my dad’s bed after I suggested that perhaps it would be more helpful to give him stairs than to wake up three times a night to let him outside (old man bladder, you know how it is) and put him back on the bed. Simon was thrilled with the discovery that he could get down, let himself out through the doggy door, have a bit of a nibble on his way back to bed, and get back up and back to sleep with no fuss or barking for help.
A couple of weeks ago, it became clear it was time. The tumor was now akin to a head on the side of a human’s wrist, and growing so rapidly it was beginning to crack. Simon still seemed to be in no pain, but he was struggling to walk because the weight of the tumor was throwing him off-kilter and he really needed doggy trifocals to start with.
My dad is an over-the-road trucker, and spent his off-hours on his next trip finding a vet who could come to the house and euthanize Simon in the comfort of my dad’s bed, or his favorite spot on the sofa. We’ve done the in-the-clinic thing before and it went fine, but for a special needs pupper—and make no mistake, at probably-18-or-so Simon was in many ways very much still a puppy—we knew it was going to be frightening and disorienting and nowhere near the sendoff he deserved. Better to have a new friend come over, give him some treats and ear-scratches (and belly rubs, of course—always the belly rubs), and say goodbye.
But my dad got home from that trip, and very shortly after, Simon was gone. He waited for Daddy to get home, and then said goodbye himself.
I could go on for hours about Simon, and what he meant to me—not just as a pet, but as an unofficial ESA when I first moved to Arizona and suffered from a severe depressive break—and to my mom as she slowly went blind. I could tell you about how there are two groups of people, those who loved Simon and those who never met him.
But mostly I want to ask you all to remember that before he was even fully free of fleas and ticks, when he had to still be in pain from bites, what he wanted and needed more than flealessness or food or water was to be able to sleep in safety, and I want you to carry that with you when you’re asked to consider the plight of the unhomed. More than food. More than water. More than a lack of pain. Eighteen hours of “at last, I’m safe.”
He was my little boy, and I loved him. I learned a lot from him.
I hope you do, too.