Eleanor's lymphoma hadn't much affected her behavior until recently. But in the last week, she's been more and more reluctant to eat or go on walks (though she also hates walking in the rain, and it's been rainy for at least a week). She had a rough night last night, spending long periods engaged in increasingly-labored panting, and the only thing we could think to do was give her 5 milligrams of hydrocodone, which had been prescribed for a possibly-unrelated cough.
Eleanor's apparent misery continued today. There was more labored panting, and the only food she would willingly eat was cat wetfood. So gradually Gretchen and I came to the sad conclusion that the end had finally come. There was no reason to keep Eleanor alive if this was the way her life would be. So Gretchen called the Hurley vet and eventually arranged for a housecall. Gretchen prefers the main guy there, but he's not as available as he used to be, so we settled for one of the other vets, the one who had diagnosed Eleanor's lymphoma initially. She and an assistant showed up at around 2:30 this afternoon. Eleanor was walking around in her usual agitated way when she got her first shot. This made her increasingly sleepy, though a little before lying down for the last time, she started heading off towards the kitchen. We caught her, returned her to the big dog bed (covered with the big fake fur she loves), and gave her lots of love as she fell into a sleep. A little after that, the vet set up a big port in her arm and then delivered the pink fluid that stopped her heart. Gretchen and I were sobbing through that part, but it had to be. The experience was terribly sad, of course, but the vet and her assistant were great.
At about the precise moment of Eleanor's death, Neville, who was lying on the couch, quit staring at us and reached over to grab a DECT 6.0 phone to chew on. "No, Neville!" I shouted. It looks like he's going through a phase of electronics destruction.
I immediately went out into the yard and began digging a hole in the three feet of space between Sally's grave and the old dog house just to its east. But the soil there was full of roots and rocks, and I soon abandoned it. I consulted with Gretchen for other possible grave sites, some near the road and house, but eventually we decided to try digging a hole a couple feet south of the grave belonging to Marie the Cat (aka "the [original] the Baby"), which itself lies nine feet south of Sally's grave. The ground there proved much easier to dig; it contained no large roots and the rocks were all easily dislodged. The site was the edge of the place where the original inhabitants of the house had burned their trash, so the soil was full of ashes, bits of metal, and I even dug up a ceramic angel, complete with wings. It didn't take much effort to dig all the way down to water (the water table is high due to abundant recent rains). This was a about two feet down, good enough for a pet's grave. Gretchen and I put down a thick layer of pine needles, and then I got Eleanor. She was still warm, though she was amazingly relaxed, feeling more like a sack of fluid than a creature. I put her gently in the hole, which was a bit cramped, but Gretchen and I were able to get Eleanor into a "comfortable" position in the ground. Ramona and Neville came over during all this and got a chance to see the horror of their sister lying at the bottom of a hole. It seemed best for them to know what had happened to her. We covered her with more pine needles, then flat rocks, then rounded rocks, then soil, then topsoil containing plants, all encircled by a ring of fist-sized stones. For some reason, Ramona and Neville started digging into the grave soon after we'd finished it, but they didn't get far.
Mind you, all of this happened in the course of a normal workday. I had a rather complicated cron job I'd been building for gathering and displaying statistics, and eventually I handed it off to Meerkat for code review. I'd mentioned in passing that I had a dog who would probably be "on her way out" today, and perhaps for that reason he was remarkably gentle in his critique of what I'd done.
When the day ended, I used Google Image Search to compile a photographic tribute to Eleanor on Facebook.
Jul 22, 2003: Eleanor's first day with us. She's about a year old. That's the late Sally in the foreground.
Jul 29, 2003: Eleanor at Fording Place on Esopus Creek.
April 2, 2016 (Dropping Gretchen off at the airport)
April 9, 2016: in the laboratory behind my computer.
April 9, 2016: a video tour of the laboratory featuring Neville, Julius (aka "Stripey") and Eleanor, the last-ever video of Eleanor.
Later still, I came up with a Harper's-Index-style celebration of her life:
number of bears wrestled with: 2
number of times hit by a car: 1
number of porcupines quilled by: 1
number of bicyclists bit: 3
number of resulting lawsuits: 0 (thanks Gretchen Pr!mack!)
number of skunks fragrantly interacted with: 1
number of dogs who gave her injuries requiring repair: 2
number of dogs who gave her injuries requiring emergency hospitalization: 1
number of botfly larvae extracted: 3 (or more)
number of ticks bitten by: thousands
number of ticks eaten: hundreds
number of raccoon interactions requiring a visit to the emergency vet: 1
number of times superglued back together: at least 2
number of empty cat wetfood cans licked: hundreds
number of canines broken off and endured without any apparent suffering: 1
number of knees requiring surgery: 2
number of states visited: 6 (7 if you include DC; she's also ridden through WV and DE)
number of distinct hotels slept in: 4 (some more than once)
number of Adirondack cabins slept in: 5
number of Adirondack yurts slept in: 2
number of walks across the Hudson River: 2
offleash visits to the Hurley Transfer Station: about 20
number of known animal kills: 0
The house was definitely quieter and emptier without Eleanor in it. Gone were her sadly-anxious eyes always following me around, or her deliberately non-imposing presence back behind my computer. I kept returning to the Facebook posts Gretchen and I had made about her and breaking into sobs. I hadn't known I would miss her this much. The song I kept wanting to hear over and over was "Memorabilia" by Mimicking Birds, a song I'd forgotten about but that I'd been reminded of last night by Bagel Radio, my go-to source for streaming music.
