She's gone, my God, she's gone...

Cali is gone.  She was euthanized today at 1400.  She told me she was done.  She needed me to be her champion, her hero, her savior.  I did the best I could, aching and resisting all the way.  It came down to a choice between her suffering and my needs.  She won, using a desperate combination of obvious fatigue, tenting skin turgor, and painful sighs.  My needs are pitifully inadequate in comparison.  Dear sweet girl, you deserve a better level of existence.  I believe it awaits you.  

You will be sorely and constantly and truly missed.  You are my heart, you know my soul.  Your velvet ears have absorbed a million kisses and a million and one secrets of my soul.  I kissed them over and over as your tiny body cooled.  Emily said, 'Mom, kiss her ears while she's warm,' and I did.  These wise words from the girl, now doing woman's duty, who lost her sweet doggy less than two years ago.

It reminded me of when my ninety-three year old father-in-law died.  He was a DNR, Do Not Resuscitate. But, when the time came, my husband and mother-in-law were frozen, looking at me for answers.  I was not yet a nurse, but I had traversed the previous three years with him as an end-stage Alzheimer's patient caregiver, and I knew what he wanted and I knew what he would return to, if resuscitated.  I said, "He is a DNR."  The relief in the eyes staring desperately was palpable, measurable from a distance.   The hospital team and I arranged him on a bed, removed the ECG electrodes and cables.  As he lay in the hospital bed, I said, "Hold him while he's warm".  The words seemed harsh, but galvanized my husband to approach the body of his father and take it into his embrace, a hug that he says he will never forget.

I felt today like, if I held onto my puppy's body, some of her life force or energy would find it's way into me, through heat or smell or osmosis, and I would be a better person because of it.  I drank her doggy fragrance in, and poured my tears onto her soft fur.  She felt and smelled like ten years of love and tolerance and humor and laughter and forgiveness and virtue and purity.  She smelled like my Cali-girl.  I will so miss her and all she represents.  She embodies goodness in a crazy world full of badness.  She has been my antidote.

More later, I don't know when...