When my then-husband and I moved our son from graduate housing at the University of Maryland to a small home in Silver Spring, we adopted a miniature Australian terrier we named Cleopatra, but called “Cleo” for short. For the second time I found myself pregnant. Fully expecting as uncomplicated a delivery as we’d experienced the first time around, we labored in “the birthing room” at Washington Hospital Center—a room furnished and decorated to look like an everyday living room, except for the blood-stained, six-foot tall wooden board propped against the wall, next to a watercolor of gaping lilies in pastel tones. We even took pictures of ourselves reflected in the large stainless steel fixture overhead.
The details of Matthew’s birth will never leave me, despite over forty intervening years. December second. Infantile polycystic kidney disease. He wouldn’t live out the day. They told us he lived only an hour, although the autopsy report stated he lived for
11 ½ hours—enough time for me to have gathered all nine pounds of him wrapped in tubes and wires, pressed him to my heart, and comforted him with the familiar rush and pulse of my blood. I could have combed my fingertips through that shock of black hair, softly repeating his name. If nothing else, I could have touched him. I should have touched him, demanded to touch him and hold him, inhaling his scent, infusing his scent into my body. I should have rocked him, sung him to sleep.

***

For almost two decades, I let guilt make a permanent home inside me. Despite the birth of my daughter—fairly routine, except for the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck in the birth canal—the marriage slowly eroded. We separated and divorced.
Perhaps as a way to atone for not having comforted Matthew as he died, I felt a growing need to help others come to terms with challenging circumstances, including death. I went back to school to be trained as a school counselor, and later, a licensed clinical professional counselor. I think I was able to be of help to several of my students who were experiencing the loss or death of a parent. In one case, the student’s mother contacted me to be sure I would help keep her daughter on track after she was gone. While in hospice, she invited me to visit, which I accepted. She asked if she was dying, saying no one would give her a straight answer. I panicked, not knowing what to say. The hospice staff provided me with some guidance in articulating as truthful a response as I could muster: “All of us are dying, and none of us know when.” She momentarily closed her morphine-filled eyes to ponder my words, then satisfied, changed the subject. I provided her fiancé with a stack of birthday cards I thought she could sign for the next ten birthdays for her daughter, ensuring some kind of after-the-grave presence, but I don’t think anyone had the heart to ask her to sign them. I attended the funeral, and stayed in contact with her daughter, with whom I share a birthday, for many years. I’d like to be able to say here that I have kept up with her all these years, but except for that one time I almost ran her over on the University of Maryland campus, we have completely lost touch.
I have tried to provide comfort to those I love who are facing death. I made it a point to visit my bedridden, eighty-eight-year-old aunt who was slowly dying in a nursing home. My hand holding and hair brushing seemed to somehow help her, as well as me. The last time I saw my father, afflicted with dementia and bladder cancer, just shy of his ninety-third birthday, I patted his still-thick hair as I played him a CD of his favorite Grieg piano concerto. He was still aware enough to recognize me, as well as the music.
My efforts to provide comfort to the dying have extended to the dogs who’ve lived with me, though looking back, my novice attempts were clumsy. Although I carried a blanket-wrapped Cleo to her final visit to the vet, I allowed them to carry her off to a back room, where they administered the lethal injections. Ten years later, when Barkley, my sixty-five-pound lab-shepherd developed a terminal case of lymphoma, my children and I sang to him as he cowered in a corner of the burnt orange-tiled room, trying to avoid the needles filled with chartreuse and hot pink drugs to stop his heart. Actually, it was my son who sang Barkley to sleep, as my daughter and I were too overcome with emotion to sing.

***

It probably takes multiple exposures to watching others die for us to learn how to comfort them, and even longer for us, ourselves, to learn how to die. Our eventual acceptance of death may mirror the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, as we ping-pong among the initial stages of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression until we can truly find our way into the last and final stage of acceptance.
Two years ago, we lost Gigi, the schnoodle who’d lived with me since she was a puppy. She’d inherited the high intelligence of her miniature poodle father, and the extraverted temperament of her schnauzer mother. She survived a difficult childhood with my third ex-husband’s son, who alternately terrified her by banging wooden spoons on cast iron frying pans, then enticing her with strips of just-fried bacon. Despite this less-than-auspicious puppyhood, she was one of the most loving, loyal, and sociable creatures I’ve ever known. She survived an operation to remove a surgical sponge that had been left inside her after she’d been spayed, extractions of over seventeen teeth at a clip, and surgery to remove bladder stones, barely complaining about the Victorian collar she’d had to wear after each of these procedures to keep her from worrying her incisions. She was in excellent health for almost fourteen years, filling her days with lounging in the sun, long walks, and leading the neighborhood watch while standing on her hind legs, front paws supported by a table under the dining room window. No deer, squirrel, chipmunk or mailperson escaped her notice.
Almost ten months after her thirteenth birthday, Gigi underwent emergency bowel surgery, which she survived, as well as the post-operative pancreatitis she developed, which necessitated the placement of a feeding tube that she eventually dislodged, while rubbing the length of her body along the lower portion of our mattress—another one of her favorite activities. No one in the house was a fan of these painstakingly slow tube feedings, which required us to force sixty grams of canned dog food (liquified in a blender) through a syringe at a rate of four grams each minute, lest her stomach should fill too rapidly and cause her to vomit. By then, she fortunately was willing to eat some of her meals without the feeding tube, due to our “finger feeding” sessions that made up for any missed calories. At thirteen pounds, she couldn’t afford to miss a meal. Our veterinarian nicknamed her the “miracle girl.” We nicknamed her “Frankenweenie,” due to her collection of scars. We almost believed she would last another couple of years, but in July we learned that her creatinine levels were rising, indicating deteriorating kidney function, probably due to all the anesthesia she’d recently received. She also was experiencing a gradual inability to keep her legs from sliding out from under her on our wooden floors, though Dycem non-slip gripping aids and doggie socks seemed to help. Subcutaneous fluids were recommended to keep her kidneys functioning for as long as possible. Andrea, the vet tech, came by each day to pinch and prick Gigi’s skin to administer the fluids—an activity that earned her the only growls I’d ever heard Gigi produce. We were told she could die the next day, or in a month, so we began to call this bonus time “joyful hospice,” showering Gigi with all the joy our love could muster, which included enhancing her renal diet dog food with barbecued chicken strips, turkey burger with chutney and sage from Clyde’s, and stir-fried lobster tail. Even after a seizure that temporarily paralyzed her right side, and after my children had come by to say their goodbyes, she rallied, and later that day, managed to do “the short walk”—1900 steps for us two-legged creatures—though had to be carried for the last several blocks. I knew we were losing her. I could see it in her eyes and in the way she could barely balance herself when standing, though she never stopped navigating the stairs to relieve herself in the backyard.
Dean Koontz, in his A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie, disputes those who say dogs lack the capacity for higher order thinking beyond satisfying their basic needs. He believes dogs are even capable of recognizing their own deaths. He writes that Trixie, his beloved golden retriever, was more than a dog, and was like a child, but other than a child. She helped him tap a tenderness within himself of which he hadn’t realized himself capable. She brought a sense of wonder into his life. I felt this way about Gigi and believed she had held on for all these months to please me, until she somehow knew I was ready to let her go.
On what turned out to be Gigi’s last day on this earth, three days after her seizure, she slept most of the day in her bed beside my desk. In an uncharacteristic gesture, she’d even managed to push her bed closer to my chair. Earlier in the day, Andrea had administered fluids, and Gigi had let me finger feed her breakfast, though the feeding was more drawn out than usual, and she ate much less than normal. This particular week was filled with special occasions. The day before, we’d celebrated my partner’s birthday, and the next day, Wednesday, September 18, was not only the anniversary of when my partner and I met but was Gigi’s half-birthday. At 4:30 p.m., when it was clear to me that she was shaking from pain, and not from needing a blanket, I let her out into the backyard one last time. She could barely stand, but stood there, quietly inhaling the scents carried on the wind. She accepted the cheerio treat I held out in my hand before I gathered her up in my arms for the short drive to the veterinary hospital. She rested in my lap, reassured by my heartbeat. Even on the black cloth-covered examining table, she remained calm, as Andrea and I held her. I stroked her fur and told her how much we loved her. My partner kept rewinding the little music box that played Pachelbel’s Canon—the same music box I’d played each night in recent months to get her used to associating this music with going to sleep. In Gigi’s eyes, I saw calm, relief, and gratefulness. Her eyes started to close, but not before she licked Andrea on her arm. When her heart stopped, her eyes opened, as we’d been warned, and I continued to hold her and whisper to her. It had been a beautiful day in terms of weather on this day her life came to a close. One of the most beautiful days ever.