In the days before my father-in-law’s funeral, my wife and I drove to his country cottage with our dogs. Our schedule—torn apart and hastily rearranged around funeral arrangements—had just enough time for us to visit, check on the place, trim the front hedge, and do some weeding. It felt important, even if it likely wasn’t.
Soon after we arrived, someone commented on how much our elderly dog had declined.
“Really?” my wife said. “I suppose we don’t notice.”
Since our last visit, our old dog—now nearly sixteen—had grown more unsteady, more incontinent, and more prone to sudden naps in odd places. But her decline hadn’t been steady. She still had bursts of energy where she’d leap and prance like a puppy, though even those moments were a little unsettling.
“Is she having fun?” I asked as she circled our feet. “Does this look like fun?”
Still, she loved it here. She’d been coming to this cottage since she was a pup and knew her way around better than our own house, where we’d only lived for eight years. The stone floors were forgiving when it came to accidents. And the weather was beautiful.
The next morning, my wife went out to run errands while I sat at the table with my laptop, trying to start a eulogy. The younger dog lounged on the sofa, while the old one slept on the floor beside her bed, as if she’d collapsed on the way there and decided it was close enough.
It struck me that this time last year, I’d been writing my own father’s eulogy. It reinforced my superstition that death has a season—and for me, that season is summer. My mother had died in June; I still remember the sound of lawnmowers when I called my wife with the news.
Later that afternoon, under a warm sun, I pulled bindweed from a raised bed—a satisfyingly endless task that required no thought and no risk of finishing. My wife hung laundry by the back door while, a few feet away, the old dog had one of her rare energetic spells, darting through the tall grass in joyful figure eights, snorting with excitement.
She had loved this place since she was a puppy. The stone floors were forgiving when it came to accidents.
My wife turned away for a moment, and when she looked back, the old dog was gone. She came to ask if I’d seen her. I hadn’t.
The old dog never wandered off, so we assumed she was inside, asleep somewhere odd. But she wasn’t. After checking everywhere obvious, we split up to search in silence—you can’t call a deaf dog.
I took the path leading away from the house, quietly hopeful that if she’d gone this way, I’d find her safe. But I walked a long way without seeing anything. From a distance, I could just hear my wife calling my name. Even faint, I knew it was bad news.
In the end, the younger dog found her, burrowing through brambles toward the nearly dry stream bed where she lay. She hadn’t gone far—just thirty feet from where my wife last saw her. We’d looked everywhere but the right place.
“Oh dear,” my wife said, kneeling in the grass. “I feel so guilty.”
“Me too,” I said.
She called our sons to tell them, and they took it hard. When the old dog was new, our youngest had been just ten—he’d been given the honor of naming her. He’d taken my suggestion and called her Nellie.
Later, I texted them all to check on the tortoise. As far as I was concerned, death’s season wasn’t over yet.
In the days that followed, more than one person offered the hopeful thought that animals sometimes go off alone when—To die. I’m not sure how likely I think this is, or how comforting it would be. Other friends say it’s better for a dog to pass away in a place where it’s been happy, living fully as a dog, rather than on the cold floor of a vet’s office.
I’ve sat on the floor, holding a dog, tears dripping from my nose into its fur, while a vet gave that final injection. And now I’ve fought through thorns to pull a dead dog from a stream. Honestly, I wouldn’t know which to choose.
