goodbye max pants, unabridged

warning: this is a pretty long post and it's about how max died and how we buried him. i figure if i tell you up front, it's your own fault if you wade through it.

we spent so many hours of max’s last few months staring over him, nudging him, watching for the rise and fall of his stark ribs, i honestly thought i knew what to expect of his death. after all, we’d seen it a hundred times- small dog flattened out on his side, limp, eyes half open and body still. He’d done it over and over, as if practicing, until i thought maybe when it really happened we wouldn’t know. but our vet promised us his body would keep going long after what we knew as max had vacated the premises. we would have to name a time. he would not sneak up on us with his leaving.

there are few things as unsettling as deciding when another creature should die. we have an appointment to kill our dog. there was no bright sharp moment when we knew max should stop.

when we arrived for the appointment people spoke in low tones and kept their eyes soft and on pages and clipboards and computer screens. we were shown into a room downstairs with a shade pulled over the door. we spent some time alone in there with max who didn’t seem to care about much except being touched, being held. and we held him and we cried and we talked to him a while. he seemed to be soaking it in, just us, our skin and our sounds. he was too weak to do much else. so were we.

max’s vet came in, the same woman who, months earlier, stood with us while ruby’s angry body softened and stilled. and this woman has been the person max has come to every time he’s slipped or broken open. she looked at his skeletal self, failing so much more aggressively than a few weeks ago. she sighed and said his name and touched the spine of him, standing well above the rest of his body.

she told us it was time, that we hadn’t rushed him or left him to suffer, that we’d chosen a good time. a good time. she whispered to him, you’re a good boy, max and she explained that the anesthesia she was preparing would take between five and ten minutes to kick in, that it would relax him. she said he wouldn’t feel anything. she meant he wouldn't feel the dying. that would be for us to feel, i suppose. she left us with him. max lay on the table and we had our arms around him. in just over a minute we felt his always shaking, ever-vigilant head droop. he was heavy against my arm and the sweetie and i held him until his whole body slid into softness. we let him rest on his little towel and stroked his ears. his stripey sweater billowed around him and we watched the stripes rise and fall.

he lay there a bit with us talking to him some more, patting him and crying. he did not use this time for crying and instead he let me kiss him on the nose, which i took advantage of because generally he’s offended by such directness. when i looked down at his face i wasn’t expecting to see him the way he used to be. but there he was. his face, soft and still, looked like it did years ago. the pinched, shrunken edginess was gone and he looked more real than he had in quite a while. he was the dog we brought home on the staten island ferry.

when the vet came back she had trouble finding a vein in max’s leg that didn't fall apart when she touched it. when she finally found what she needed i glanced up to see a bright, candy-pink liquid in the syringe. i don’t know what I’d expected. an angrier color, i suppose. the sweetie and i both stood with her, with max, holding him gently while the pink fluid started. he was gone before the syringe was half empty.the sweetie watched his ribcage stop under those stripes. the thing we always feared we were seeing was somehow not what we expected when it actually happened. i watched his shiny eyes flatten and we both knew before the vet said anything. and usually this is when the person with the syringe leaves the room quickly and quietly. but she didn’t seem able to leave and she held his stubby paw in her hands and whispered to him that it was okay now, that he had been valiant. she stayed a bit and i was glad max had been so strong, that he’d been able to somehow just overwhelm folks with his strange little self and it was so hard to leave him, hard for anybody.

it is difficult to explain how a ten pound pile of bones held together by patchy brown and white fur with the skin showing through most places could be so absolutely beautiful to look at, but we stayed there a long while after the vet left, just looking at our quiet little dog, trying to get things straight in our heads about how much we loved him and how we would have to rework our whole lives to be able to get along without him and how we didn't think we'd really be able to do that.

now, most folks in brooklyn ask for the ashes of pets, small containers they can put on a shelf in an apartment. but we have a yard and an apple tree upstate and max certainly liked both. so we asked about taking him up there altogether and whole and the vet said that would be fine. the sweetie went in to pick him up and he came out frozen, wrapped in a black plastic, sitting in a shopping bag. the sweetie asked if there wasn’t a coffin, since we’d been told there was, and someone was sent to get one. dog coffins are little cardboard boxes with domed lids. max’s coffin had someone else’s name written on it in sharpie. we put the little borrowed dog coffin in the back of the car, situated guthrie in the back seat and drove toward the apple tree.

we arrived to a cool, storm-threatening saturday afternoon and the sweetie started off with a shovel. i pulled out rocks as he shoveled and we had a pretty good hole dug in no time. we opened the coffin and pulled out the black plastic bag. it was taped all around several places and i couldn’t recognize what might be max in all that. i wanted to bury him all by himself, without the plastic. the sweetie asked me several times, but i was sure. he didn't want me to see max frozen but i didn’t want him in all that plastic. i wanted him to be part of the apple tree. so we snipped off the tape and pulled off the plastic and there was our strange, frozen dog. he was not like we had ever seen him in life, but his bent pose, wrapped up on himself, didn’t seem at all out of character. nor did the next thing that happened. we picked up his frozen body and my thumb rested against his ear. and it fell off. really. it snapped right next to his head from the frozenness and slid across his face. and you would think this would have made me fall apart but it didn’t. that dog came to us with disastrous ears and i’d been expecting them to just break off for seven years while he was alive. i was surprised they’d stayed on as long as they had. and it was heartbreaking to see but it was tough to do anything but laugh a little at max’s very last attempt to remind us there’s no way to anticipate what he'll do.

we put the dirt on him in handfuls, powdery, red. halfway up we put a layer of rocks, the rocks we’d pulled from the hole. then more dirt with a little compost mixed in. we covered the top of the hole with the big rocks we’d pulled out, one in the center larger and heavier than max had ever been. and we’re letting him rest. but in spring I’ll be watching that apple tree, waiting for it to do something unanticipated. something max.