Smokey didn’t show up for breakfast this morning, which was a very bad sign. Early this afternoon we found his remains in the woods in front of our house. All that was left was a handful of fur and some blood. It appears that a coyote caught him.
Smokey has been with us for a long time. We can’t remember when he first appeared, but we think it might have been as long as 12 or 13 years ago. He and Sylvester showed up at about the same time.
Of all of our cats, he was the most affectionate. He was the only one that really sought affection. He would jump up on the sofa beside us and lie down right next to one of us. He usually was halfway on our legs. Sometimes he sat next to our legs, looking at us. If we didn’t pet him, he would reach out and pat us with his foot.
He loved being petted.
He also loved food. He would sit beside our dining room table, staring up at us as we ate. When we fed one of the other cats, he would lie down facing their food bowl. Waiting. Waiting. Somehow he knew when we put out food for Chloe and Dusty on the front porch, and he would appear from nowhere.
He was a reliably playful cat. He played with Mollie, and tried to play with Sylvester, who was not always a willing participant. Here he is staring down a hedgehog toy we got for the dogs.
Smokey was pretty much a homebody. In the last few years he didn’t stay inside much, but we never saw him walking casually up the street towards a neighbor’s house like Sylvester.
If he wanted in, he didn’t wait to be invited, he just shoved his way around whoever happened to open the door. But when he was finished eating, he usually went straight to the door to be let back outside.
In the past we had let him and Sylvester stay inside at night, especially in cold weather, but when we moved into our new house we put little cat houses with heated pads in the garage. That was where Smokey could usually be found once it got dark.
But of course, in warm weather he usually stayed outside, we knew not where. It wasn’t obvious where he was, but we could usually find him lying under our rainwater collection tank, or under my truck, or under our little Mule utility vehicle.
He might not have been immediately visible, but he didn’t disappear for hours like Sylvester. That’s why Leah was so worried when Smokey wasn’t waiting at the door Sunday morning. I tried to reassure her that he would show up, and that it was too early to start worrying. But secretly I was a little worried, myself, because it was so unlike him.
So when I took Sam for his walk Sunday morning, I looked along the side of the road for a little furry, gray body. When Sam stopped with his nose up in the air, I let him sniff. If he wanted to check out something at the side of the road, I let him. We checked out a few places on the road in front of the house, but I never saw anything.
After lunch, I usually take Sam out and let him run free around the yard. On this occasion, he was suspicious of something on the far side of the driveway, but I couldn’t find anything. So I went down into the front of our yard and started pulling weeds. After a few minutes Sam came over and went into the woods beside the yard. He sniffed around for a while, and then seemed to find something. When I went into the woods, I found what he had found. It was a big mass of gray fur with a few leaves spotted with blood. The ground was scuffed around where the fur was. This was almost certainly the scene of the crime.
One of our neighbors had stopped on Friday when I took Sam down to the mailbox and told me her young kids had seen a coyote in their yard. Their big dog had chased it away. We talked about when and where we had seen coyotes. One night shortly after we moved into our current house we had seen two coyotes running around in the front yard, just into the woods. I went out with a flashlight and Zeke (on a leash, naturally), and eventually the coyotes left. We haven’t seen any in the yard since then, although they are often more active at night.
But Smokey was almost certainly taken by a coyote. There really isn’t any other predator that could have done this. We have (or have had) foxes, but they typically mind their own business around the cats. I don’t think any of our birds of prey could take a cat the size of Smokey. So there really isn’t anything else.
Now we have to worry about Chloe, Dusty and Sylvester. We know Sylvester is a wanderer. That may be a problem. We also know that for some reason Chloe has taken to sleeping in the woods. Her favorite spot is about 20 feet from where we found Smokey’s remains. We would bring her inside at night, but she absolutely hates it. She runs from Leah if she tried to get her to bring her in. And Chloe and Mollie do not get along. So there isn’t much we can do for her. Fortunately, Dusty stays on the porch almost all the time, usually only going down to the yard for bathroom breaks.
Of course we knew that coyotes were at least a theoretical threat for the cats. Now we know they are a real threat, and they are in our yard.
The first time Zeus, my last doberman, and I saw Zeke, he was lying in our across-the-street neighbor’s front yard. Our neighbor had brought him home for the kids, but the dog stayed outside and I never saw anyone interact with him. I guess they fed him, since he didn’t seem to be losing weight. On weekends when I took Zeus for a walk, Zeke always watched us hopefully. I was a little uncertain about this dog with what seemed like such a big head, so I usually ignored him, and Zeus and I went on our way. One day I gave in and said, “OK, come on.” It was all he needed.
After that, Zeke went with us on our walks. He eventually gravitated towards our house. The neighbors apparently thought we stole their dog, but Zeke made his own decision. But we already had a dog. I had adopted Zeus from a doberman rescue group in 2003 after my previous doberman died. We all got along well, and everyone was happy with the way things were.
So we did what we always do with the abandoned dogs up here, we took Zeke to the vet for vaccinations and then advertised for someone to adopt him.
Someone did adopt him. As they left, I warned them not to let Zeke out of their van off leash because he would run away. Even that long ago he always took off if given an opportunity. So they assured us they would keep him on leash, and they drove off.
Shortly after Zeke’s adoption Leah and I drove out to Yellowstone for a two-week vacation. When we got home, we had a message from our vet. Someone had found “our” dog, checked the rabies tag and called the vet. “Our” dog was being boarded on the other side of town. We decided it was fate telling us that Zeke really was our dog, so we brought him home. That was in the fall of 2006.
Zeus was familiar with Zeke by that time, and Zeus was a good-natured dog, so they got along well. Zeke naturally assumed the position of second dog. Zeus had a bed beside our living room sofa, and Zeke had one against a wall. When we went to bed, Zeus came into our room to a bed beside our bed. Then Zeke got up and went to Zeus’s bed beside the sofa.
Sometimes they shared the bed.
Zeke loved Zeus.
Back in those days I sometimes took both dogs on walks into the woods off leash. Zeus stayed pretty close, but Zeke immediately disappeared into the woods. Sometimes he came back out with us, and sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes Zeus and I would get a couple of hundred yards up the road before Zeke followed us up. Zeus seemed worried about that, because he kept looking back over his shoulder for Zeke.
I sometimes took both dogs outside if I happened to have work to do in the yard. Zeus would stay near, but not Zeke. Unfortunately, Zeus followed Zeke if he decided to go exploring. Once he led Zeus about two miles down the mountain, where one of our neighbors recognized them and called us. They were covered in mud.
The two dogs were pretty much inseparable for the next three years, except for when I had to drive somewhere in my truck. I could put Zeus in the back seat of the truck and leave the windows down if the weather was warm, and he would never try to get out of the truck. But Zeke would always try to get out of the truck if the windows were low enough. That meant Zeke couldn’t go if the weather was warm and I had to get out of the truck without the dogs.
So it was that I drove over to my mother’s house one Sunday with Zeus but not Zeke. When we got out of the truck, Zeus began to stagger. He had never done that before, so I had no idea what was happening. I called our vet to have someone come in to the office, then I rushed over. The vet hooked up an ECG machine to check his heart. The trace looked like a bug had crawled through ink and then across the ECG printout. Zeus was suffering from cardiomyopathy, a heart condition that is not uncommon in doberman pinschers.
The vet prescribed some medication, but there is really no effective treatment for the condition. Zeus seemed OK for a while. Then one day in late December he was lying in his bed beside the sofa as we watched television. I would usually have one hand on him as we sat there, but not this time. I got up for something and looked at Zeus. He was twisted backwards as if he were trying to look over his back, and he was not moving. He had died right there beside us. That was December 29, 2009.
So Zeke became our only dog. Who knows whether dogs understand what death means. He seemed OK, but we knew he missed Zeus.
In any event, we continued to live our lives and so did Zeke. He was one of the good ones. Other than running away if a door was left open, he was an almost ideal dog. He knew what we wanted him to do, and he did it. If we took him to the vet, he almost automatically walked over to the scales and climbed up to be weighed. He remained calm while the vet poked him, and he stood stoically when he got his temperature taken or had vaccinations.
When my mother died in 2013 and we inherited her little dog Lucy, Zeke was perfectly OK with it. They didn’t have much to do with each other, not a surprise given the size difference. But Zeke never tried to eat her dinner or take her treats. He respected her.
Zeke got out of the house pretty often. At least it seemed that way. He would roam all over the top of the mountain and sometimes far down towards the bottom. One time someone who lived in Texas Valley found him running loose in the rain and brought him back to our house in her backseat. He was soaked, and so was her back seat. Another time a county police officer brought him back.
That was essentially Zeke’s only fault.
I knew that after 13 years Zeke’s days were numbered. He had been turning gray and slowing down. But when I took him in for his annual shots last week, I told them to give him a three-year rabies vaccination. On Monday, he started acting like he was in pain. We assumed it was his arthritic back, which occasionally causes him some pain. I gave him one of his pain pills and we waited. It has always taken a couple of days for him to get any relief, so we weren’t surprised that he was restless Monday night. Then on Tuesday, he threw up everything he ate. On Wednesday he didn’t. But Wednesday night he became restless again. I noticed that his breathing was shallow and quick. I considered taking him to the emergency vet clinic that recently opened in Rome, but I decided to wait till Thursday to take him back to our vet.
She palpated him abdomen, and he yelped. She decided he had some kind of stomach upset, so she prescribed an anti-nausea pill and some antibiotics.
Late Thursday night, Zeke was in distress. He was obviously in pain, and although he politely ate his dinner around 4 in the afternoon, he refused anything later, no matter how tempting it would normally be. I wanted to give him another pain pill, but I couldn’t get him to eat a marshmallow with a pill hidden inside. Or even a little bit of ice cream.
By 11 pm he was so bad I decided to take him to the emergency vet clinic. I had to carry him to the truck. Along the way his rear end fell off the back seat and got wedged between the back seat and the back of the front seat. That would never have happened to him before.
At the clinic they did blood work. His liver and kidneys were not functioning, and his white blood cells, red blood cells and platelets were all off. His abdomen was very painful to the touch. Then they did an ultrasound. That’s when they found the big mass on his spleen.
He was in such pain and discomfort that I decided to leave him at the vet’s so they could give him some strong pain medication. There was no way he could possibly have gone home and not been in unacceptable pain. I got in bed around 2 am, with the intention of getting up around 6:45 to pick him up and take him to our regular vet.
The clinic called around 6 am to tell me he was still having pain despite the strong medications they were giving him.
I picked him up around 7:30. The vet at the clinic had been talking about going to Atlanta or Chattanooga to a specialist for a more extensive ultrasound, or possibly a biopsy. Since it was Friday I figured there was no way I could get him to a specialist until after the weekend. Zeke needed some kind of immediate attention, so I took him to a different vet we had used before, one that I thought probably had an ultrasound at the clinic. The emergency clinic sent all Zeke’s test results so they could look at it before I got there.
I took him into the clinic and waited in an exam room for a while. Zeke was still in obvious pain. As we waited for the vet, he was shivering and every breath turned into a moan.
When the vet came in, she had looked at the test results and said there was so much going on with Zeke that trying to resolve anything at that point would be useless. His organs were just giving up. She said the only realistic course of action was euthanasia. It was not a surprise to me. I had already told Leah that I did not expect Zeke to come back home.
I took Zeke home and buried him in the yard next to Lucy’s grave. Back in 2009 I had Zeus cremated. I put his ashes in the grave with Zeke, along with Zeke’s collar and his peanut butter bong.
Zeke seemed to crash suddenly. One day he was feeling OK, and four days later he was in such bad condition that it was intolerable. As we look back, though, we think we see signs of problems going back weeks if not months. For one thing, he had been drinking abnormally large amounts of water for a long time. The trouble he had making the climb back to the house on our regular walk down the mountain, which I had attributed to age, might have been the result of his cancer. Dogs, like most animals, hide their pain and worsening health as long as they can. I hate to think he might have been having pain for weeks before we realized it. I also have to wonder whether something might have been done if we had know about the tumor earlier.
Zeke is the fifth dog I have had euthanized, and it doesn’t get any easier with practice. In every case I have known that the only alternative was pain, and a painful death in a short time. But I still feel guilty about doing it. I feel like it’s a betrayal of my dog’s trust. I’m supposed to help them, and they trust me to do that. In the end, I can’t help.
We let Sam see Zeke’s body before I buried him. We don’t know whether he realized what he was seeing, but we think Sam is going to miss Zeke terribly.
I wrote this Friday night, after picking Zeke up, taking him the vet, deciding to have him put down, digging a hole in the ground, putting Zeke in it and filling it back up.
We did our usual Friday night stuff. We went out for chicken, and I thought now we only need to bring home two french fries, not four as usual. We had just gotten used to not having to bring home a tiny extra piece for Lucy.
We watched Secret Life of Pets 2, and went to bed. I thought I would sleep soundly Friday since I had only about four hours of sleep Thursday night. But I didn’t.
This morning Zeke was still gone.
This was too sudden. We really didn’t have any warning that it was coming.
How can a dog fill a house? Even a dog of Zeke’s size? As I went about my morning routine this morning, every time I turned around there was a hole that Zeke used to fill. When Zeke slept by the bed, I had to pet him a little every time I passed by, getting into bed, getting out of bed to go to the bathroom, going back to bed, getting up in the morning. He needed a scratch on his back, or on his belly or on the top of his head.
I put on my socks this morning, and I didn’t have to give Zeke a little pat on the head between socks. He didn’t stick his head between my legs as I tried to put on my shorts. I took Sam out, and I didn’t have to wait while Zeke stared off down the driveway, thinking whatever doggy thoughts he did in the mornings.
I ran our battery vacuum around the house to pick up the dog hair, and I didn’t have to let Zeke skirt around me to get away from the sound. I wondered whether the vacuum would have half as much hair from now on, because there wouldn’t be that snow-shower of dog hair every time he shook. We won’t need that hand towel by the water bowl that we used to wipe his mouth after drinking — sometimes he forgot to swallow that last mouthful of water.
He won’t be watching hopefully when I pick up the keys to my truck. He always wanted to go for a ride.
He was only a dog, but he left a hole in our lives that was bigger than a dog.
One hundred and two years ago today, August 2, 2019, my father was born in Cave Spring, Ga. He died early in March 2000. It’s hard for me to believe that he was born 102 years ago, and that he has been gone for 19 years. I’m sure it would make him sad to know that most of his family is gone now, from his parents to his brother and sisters, to his wife and his older son. But that’s the way it goes. We are here for a while, and then we’re gone. Some of the people who were close to us remember, but eventually everyone who knew us will be gone as well, and then we won’t exist even in memories.
At least for now, there are a few people who remember him, even aside from me. He has twograndsons, who will probably think more about him as they get older. He has nephews and nieces who remember him. And I remember him.
This was my father’s high school picture. In those days high school went only through the 11th grade.
This was him ten years or so later. This was early in his Army times, before he was assigned to the infantry. He still wore his crossed cannons of the artillery.
And this was him about sixty years after he was born, when he and my mother visited me at Lake Tahoe.
My little yellow Fiat is behind us. That’s Ivy, my dalmation. They stopped for a while at Tahoe and then went down to Yosemite. I followed on my motorcycle. We camped in their Airstream trailer up above the Yosemite Valley in a campground that had been officially closed for the winter but was still open for people to camp without any amenities. And this was my father and me when we went up to an overlook.
We got a call on Sunday from my cousin telling us that my Uncle Tommy had died.
It was a surprise, like death often is, even though we knew it was coming. Leah and I had seen him at his gun shop just a few weeks ago. He was tired and weak, but seemed like he was going to keep plugging along for a while yet. He had been slowly declining for several years with same condition that was partially responsible for my father’s death, pulmonary fibrosis.
Pulmonary fibrosis reduces the ability of the lungs to oxygenate the blood. In my father’s case, acid reflux had caused scarring in his lungs. I don’t think the cause of Uncle Tommys’ condition was ever identified. He had worked for a number of years as an electrician at a power plant construction site, and in the past, industrial construction sites were a prime source of lung irritants.
He opened his gun shop as a sideline while he still worked as an electrician. After about five years of working out of a little building in his back yard, he opened a gun shop in a strip mall, and he kept the store there for more than 50 years. He tried for a couple of years to sell the shop, but couldn’t find a buyer. He wanted to avoid forcing his wife to inventory and close the shop. When we last saw him, he was doing some inventory work, but he still had a lot of guns left in the shop.
Uncle Tommy was my father’s half brother, born 19 years after my father, almost exactly the same time that separates their deaths.
Uncle Tommy was my father’s last surviving sibling.
That point in time is a discontinuity for me. There was my life before, when there seemed to be some kind of stability in the world, at least on a smaller scale. And then there is my life after that, when I found myself in a new position, the last living member of the Paris family.
Henry and I weren’t close in a lot of ways, but there was always a sense of belonging. The nuclear family was long gone, of course. Our father died in 2000, and our mother in 2013. But those are the kinds of deaths that any mature person has to expect. My father’s death made me into a different kind of person, one for whom the words, “My father is dead” had an actual, gut-level meaning. I joined a kind of club then, the club of people who have lost a parent. When I talked to other people who had lost a parent, there was a kind of unspoken understanding between us. My brother and I both looked to our mother then, not as a person to lean on, but as a person who needed someone to lean on. We could both count on the other to be there when necessary.
And then, when our mother died, there was a sense of finality. Now it was just me and my brother … forever? Well, that was in the back of my mind. I knew at some time both of us would die, but I aways thought it would be far in the distant future, and, for some reason, I always assumed I would die first, even though Henry was older by almost three years. I guess it was because I thought Henry was strong, competent and reliable. He would be there because he knew he should be there.
Then there came the call just before Thanksgiving, when he told me that his doctor had found suspicious spots on his liver. It wasn’t long before he found out that it was pancreatic cancer, and that the prognosis was dim at best. Not really dim — black.
I went into a period of, not denial, but intellectual distance. Henry and I were both pretty smart people, and we were both scientists. I went into disinterested scientist mode. Not uninterested, but standing off a little and looking at the situation unemotionally. I took in every little bit of new information and fitted it into my model of how things would go. I knew there was a very high probability of what would happen eventually, but I chose not to conclude anything until all the facts were in.
Maybe most people do what I did but call it something different. Probably denial.
At the end, even when I saw Henry lying in bed, barely conscious, wasting away, I didn’t accept that his death was a foregone conclusion. It was not until his son called and said he had died a day after my last visit to him that the reality hit me.
Only it never did really hit me. For me, it’s a perfect example of cognitive dissonance. A part of me is aware of and comprehends that Henry is dead, and there is another part of me that simply hasn’t acknowledged that. I can still feel his presence in my life. I’m sure that’s a characteristic of the human brain.
I have spent a lot of time over this last year trying to figure out just what the reality is, at least for me. Among other things, the reality is a new awareness of death, the end of things. I never really believed Henry would die. But he did. And I guess that means I will, too.
But I’m not sure that’s what really bothers me. I’m not just sad because Henry is dead, although he had a lot left to live for, and I’m not just depressed because I know I’ll die sometime. I think it’s more about the last link with my family being broken. I spent a lot of years feeling like part of my emotional foundation was my family. Now that’s gone.
We all spend our formative years growing up — that’s a tautology, of course. But in our formative years, we are the younger generation, and our parents are the older generation. Things will be different for us because … well, because we’re young. If you have children, you have to admit that there is another generation coming along behind you, but if you have no children, that realization might not quite occur.
Late last fall, before Henry got so sick he couldn’t walk, his two sons and his new daughter-in-law came to Chattanooga to visit. We decided to take a walk around the block. We all started off together, but the youngsters gradually pulled ahead of me and Henry, as the two of us talked and looked around.
That image, of three 30-somethings walking ahead and the two old guys walking and falling slowly further and further behind, seemed to me a perfect metaphor for life. That’s when I began to see myself and Henry as the last generation, fading away while the next generation takes its place. Only for me, there is no next generation.
I wish I could feel like there is something useful that could come out of the way I feel now, but, at least for the time, I can’t see it.
Copyright 2013 Mark V. Paris
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