Around noon the entire family piled into the minivan, and we drove to the hospital. Even Maddy, who normally shied away from intense emotion, seemed to realize that this might be the last time she was going to see Lyra and agreed to come. Her face was twisted up as she tried to contain her feelings.

At the hospital, Lyra was in the same pen as the previous night. She was still sleeping and appeared comfortable. Helen curled up with her, and Lyra sensed her presence. She raised her head and sniffed Helen. The corner of Lyra’s mouth turned up ever so slightly in a smile of recognition, and she went back to sleep. Helen covered her up with a blanket that the two of them slept with.

We each took our turns. Watching the girls hug her, knowing in the back of my mind that this could be the last time with Lyra, was the most awful pain. I grieved for Lyra, and I grieved for the girls.

After thirty minutes, Lyra seemed to perk up a bit. She stood up and looked around. Helen’s face brightened. But then Lyra shifted position, revealing a bright red stain where her butt had been.

Helen rushed to me, sobbing. I started to cry too.

The vet tech cleaned her up quickly. But since our presence wasn’t helping Lyra, we all agreed that it was time to leave.

We tried to have a semblance of normal life at home. Callie seemed out of sorts, wandering the house looking for her big, fluffy pillow. I took to walking her around the block. Usually we walked in the morning and evening, but neither of us could get enough walking while Lyra was in the hospital. By the afternoon, we had been around the neighborhood four times.

I waited until the evening shift at the hospital to call again. Dr. Martin was coming back on duty, and I wanted her opinion of Lyra’s condition over the last twenty-four hours.

“She’s having runs of v-tach,” she said.

Ventricular tachycardia, or v-tach, was a heart arrhythmia. Her heart was racing out of control.

“We just gave her an injection of lidocaine,” Dr. Martin explained. “It stopped the v-tach for now.”

There was no denying it. Lyra was slipping away. Her heart was racing because her blood pressure was dropping. But when the heart beats that fast there is no time for it to fill with blood, and blood pressure will continue to drop. Maybe she would go on like this for another day or so, but we had to confront the reality that her body was shutting down. Trying to save her would mean multiple drugs, transfusions, and being hooked up to a ventilator. Both Kat and I had seen this happen with people in the ICU, holding off the inevitable while the family held on to unreasonable expectations of recovery.

It was time.

I told Kat what the vet had said. Then we called the girls to the kitchen table and explained Lyra’s condition.

“Girls,” I began, stifling tears, “Lyra is not doing well, and her heart is struggling to keep beating. It would be wrong to let her go on suffering, just for us.”

There was nothing more to say.

It is a heavy burden for an eleven- and twelve-year-old to make a choice between having their beloved dog come home or setting her free from her suffering. To spare them that guilt, Kat and I made the decision for them and simply framed it as the right thing to do. Even if I wasn’t sure myself.

I called Dr. Martin and told her that we didn’t want Lyra to continue treatment when the prognosis was so poor. She understood and assured me that we were making the right choice.

At the hospital, Lyra looked the same. I was relieved that she still appeared to be sleeping, even though mentally she was probably out of it, bordering on being comatose. Her heart monitor told the story. She was in v-tach, and her heart was beating two hundred times a minute, too fast to maintain blood pressure.

While Kat signed the forms, Dr. Martin explained what would happen next. Helen absorbed the information without expression. We all sat on the floor around Lyra, each of us laying a hand on her. The first injection was an anesthetic. There was no discernible change, confirming that Lyra was already, in effect, asleep, and this knowledge lessened my guilt a little bit. The second injection, a cocktail of chemicals, was just as unremarkable. No shuddering, no movement. Just a cessation of Lyra’s shallow breathing. The slight upturn of her mouth—her doggy smile—remained permanently in place.

For the last time, I whispered in her ear so that only she could hear: “Lyra, I’m sorry I let you down. I’m sorry I was deaf to what you were saying. And I’m sorry I didn’t understand what Callie was trying to tell me. If only I had taught you to go into the scanner too, maybe I would have known there was something wrong. I will miss you, always.”

By the time we got home, it was dark and it had started to rain. There was no question that Lyra would receive a proper funeral. But I would have preferred to wait until the morning.

Helen summed up the situation: “Dad, I can’t sleep knowing that her body is just lying here.”

So, with headlamps in place, Kat and I set to the task of digging Lyra’s grave in the dark. Despite the rain, the red Georgian clay did not yield easily to our shovels. Neither of us cared. After two hours of digging and prying rocks, we were staring at a hole so deep that we had to stand in it to dig any farther. We both took some comfort in the blisters that had formed on our hands. A tearing of the skin that symbolized the tearing in our hearts.

We lowered Lyra into the hole and called the girls outside.

They each placed a stuffed animal next to her, and we covered her in a favorite blanket. In turn, each of us placed a shovelful of earth in the grave.

The grief was too overwhelming for anyone to speak, so I spoke for all of us.

“Lyra, you were the gentlest, kindest dog we have ever known. You will be in our hearts forever.”

Choking back tears, and as I had upon Newton’s death two years before, I recited “The Rainbow Bridge”:

Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge…

24

What Dogs Are Really Thinking

DIA DE LOS MUERTOS 2012

IT HAD BEEN TWO years since the inception of the Dog Project, and our shrine to the dead was now one soul larger. I thought back to the weeks following Lyra’s death. Nobody in the house had been the same. Maddy missed cuddling with the big teddy bear, and Kat longed for Lyra’s happy, vacant face staring up at her from the foot of the kitchen table. Even Callie had lost a little bit of her spark and had taken to following me around the house. Helen was morose and cried herself to sleep with Lyra’s collar in her grip.

After all we had accomplished, I wondered whether Lyra had been trying to tell me something. I supposed it had been possible, but I also knew that her personality was such that even if something had been bothering her, she wouldn’t have given any indication. It was the way of the golden retriever. Unflappable and perennially friendly, these are the reasons why goldens are so popular.

But the traits that make goldens so lovable also make it harder to know what they are thinking. I had learned to read Callie but I had taken Lyra for granted. For some time after Lyra’s death I faulted myself for this oversight. But gazing at Lyra’s picture, I realized just how different our dogs had been. Callie was a hunter. Lyra wasn’t. Although Lyra had come from a line of dogs bred for hunting and retrieving, she had never displayed any of those traits. She had never even taken to swimming.