Our hearts are shattered. At half past noon on the last day of 2008 we whispered our final prayers for Milo and wrapped him in our last embrace as the overdose of anesthetic drug traveled through the tube that for five days had been his lifeline.
Nineteen days ago my wife Joanne and I drove him home from western New York where he had been in the care of a rescue organization, and three days later we were in an examining room at the Animal Emergency and Treatment Center in Grayslake, Illinois. He was losing weight and refusing to eat, no matter what we proffered—raw hamburger, tuna, chicken, and Gerbers augmented with chicken broth. At 35 pounds when we picked him up he was small for an American Eskimo and Samoyed mix, and getting smaller. Depression response, so we thought, and with fluids, Pepcid, and anti-nausea meds he might come around. But he didn’t, and back it was to Grayslake for a three-day stay with more fluids and monitoring. The day after Christmas he was back again, having still not eaten, and the next day an ultrasound revealed the problem: an obstruction in his stomach and small intestine. The surgeons found four perforations of the bowel along a critical stretch of the intestine between the pancreas and the bile duct. The culprit was a small towel or washcloth that had worked against its purpose, puncturing his intestinal tract and fouling his abdominal cavity. That section was removed and Milo seemed to be recovering better than anyone expected. But 36 hours later he had fluid build-up and a fever, and we faced the decision to authorize a second surgery that promised at best a 30 percent chance of success.
Be it a sliver of hope, or a prayer of a chance, we are not inclined to surrender a soul companion to dire odds or cost-benefit analysis. So we said yes, proceed with surgery. It went well, as before. Milo, for all he has been through, beginning with his first year of life in a puppy mill, does not give up. He showed us an enormous need to be companion and be companioned, but he could not defeat the odds or the infection. At the same point as before, the early hours of the second morning post surgery, the fever returned, he vomited, and the culture confirmed our fears, the repair was leaking into the cavity again. Not enough space was left of good tissue to give any chance for another surgery. So we made that ultimate decision to remove Milo from any more pain, any more invasions, and any more life. It was peaceful, and sacramental as we surrendered him to God’s boundless grace.
The night before, a dinner plate I was heating in the microwave popped, and a chunk was broken off the rim. A signal of what was coming that morning? All I know is life is fractured by the heat of our transactions with one another. We beckon, we bind, and sometimes despite our best efforts and intentions, we break apart, for what we have done or left undone, or we simply are undone by actions beyond our agency or authority. Solace proves elusive in the roundabout of grief and regret.
We scrape up the broken bits, and reassemble what we can of our confidence and convictions, much as we did a month before in the loss of our first rescue, Suki. Healing, we know, is at the threshold, and somewhere not too distant the breath of hope. As we heard last Sunday in John: “What has come into being in him was life; and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
