I had made the call to the vet the day before.
Her last night, she didn’t come to me like the previous nights. She couldn’t walk anymore or maybe she wanted to spare me the pain. She spent the last night with my brother and her daughter Eistla.
We spent the morning in bed. I made a bracelet as a memorial and Catsy said good-bye, too.
Her last hour at home, I carried her outside. The sun was peeking out behind some clouds, the birds were singing. We took some blankets out onto the grass in front of the horses’ field. The horses came to say good-bye. They knew what was going on. When I took her inside the paddock, they gave her one last good-bye nuzzle.
Eistla was also there, my family too. Catsy watching us from a distance. Even the chickens almost joined. It was very emotional. I don’t think I have ever seen that many emotions from my family.
Then it was time, and I carried her to the car. I wanted her to get in of her own account – as a sign, that it was okay for her to go…but I didn’t put her down. I’m not sure, how conscious she was at that time, or physically able to show signs like that.
We had the window down when we were driving and she stuck her head out. For that moment she looked normal again, alert and aware of her surroundings. She never liked driving much and would hide in the back under the seats, but this last week she enjoyed every drive, holding her head out the window, letting her ears fly in the wind and sniffing the air. She knew.
I remember automatically checking the gas prices. 1,90€. How ridiculously expensive. I couldn’t help it, but I thought how inappropriate of a reflex that was.
The drive wasn’t long. As we entered the parking space, she lifted her head, sniffed the air, was awake. I’m not sure what it meant. I think she knew, but I couldn’t tell if she agreed with the decision. I felt so guilty and weird. We were driving her to a place for her to die.
I carried her inside to the vet’s. No one was there, but we heard some voices from one of the rooms. We sat on the chairs in the waiting room. Flower on my lap, her head in my mum’s arms.
It felt weird, sitting there, waiting for her death. I wondered if it was the right thing to do. What if there were options after all? And how would the procedure go? Do we go in and ask questions? Do we just get it over with? Nothing seemed appropriate. It all felt weird.
Eventually, they were done with the other patient. We were asked into Room 2, where we were to put her on the table. The same table she was on with her puppies when she had her c-section, and the same table my rabbit died on from castration complications.
The vet had seen her x-rays, checked that she had gotten slow-release cortisone, which should have lasted longer than the week that it did, and said that there was recommendable to go through with putting her down.
I was squatting down, hugging her side. He said, he could also move up the table to save our knees, and did so. He asked us to hold her head to the side, took a long time to get sorted and get the needle into her leg. I remember thinking, he should hurry up, be more precise and how strange it all felt.
Flower was calm all the way. She showed indifference and didnity more than anything else. She didn’t fight or struggle or back away or flinch, but she also didn’t show obvious signs of agreement. I wished there was a clear answer.
My mum held her head, my brother held Eistla. She was very unusually quiet, but couldn’t take a part in the good-bye or see what was going on. I hesitated to ask. To not bother the vet in his work, but I knew how much I would regret it, if I didn’t. So I asked him to lower the table again so Eistla and Flower could see each other. My brother went to hold her head and my mum held Eistla now.
“Gute Reise”, my mum said. Safe travels. The vet injected the first dose – the tranquilizer. Within seconds, Flower’s head sank down into my brother’s arms, as she went unconscious. The vet left the room to get some papers or something. And we were there for a couple of minutes. Flower’s breathing went very bad, and I got really worried. What if something bad happened now? But how ridiculous, since this dog was being put down. Thoughts and feelings were very confusing.
Eistla worriedly sniffed Flower. Her breathing scared her. My mum and had already been crying for most of the process.
My mum got a tissue from the counter with the vet’s meds and supplies. She handed me one, too.
The vet came back. He injected the last dose. Her body went limp. Her breathing stopped. My head was still on her side. I heard her heart beat stop.
It was over.
I can’t even begin to describe the feelings, the pain, the thoughts in that moment. I literally can’t access them right now. To do that would open up this huge deep wound again that is just beginning to heal.
Shortly after Flower was gone, her nose started dripping blood. I put the tissue I was clutching under her nose.
“This can happen”, the vet said, “there might so be some urine leaking out.”
He asked us if we would take her home, and then left the room.
The blood stopped dripping and started running. Soon there was a whole pile of tissues on the blood-smeared table. The urine also started coming out. My mum and brother started to lift her body up, to shake the blood out. It was almost comical.
For a moment, I worried there wouldn’t be a way to take her home with us, but the blood had to stop eventually.
Awkwardly, my mum and I left the room to find someone to help with the mess. There were several new patients outside by now. I thought, how weird this was that they were there to get their pets better, and we were in this room with our dead dog. That they didn’t know what was going on behind that door. It all felt so normal, but at the same time not. I feel like the world should have felt different in these moments, but it just went on like normal.
We got a leak-proof mat from a nurse, but after she left quickly realised, we needed two. My mum had started taping balls of tissue to Flower’s behind, but that didn’t look promising. Again, it felt comically inappropriate. Very undignified.
We got a second mat, and we’re let out through the window door, so we wouldn’t have to go through the main entrance, and push past the waiting people. Lifting Flower’s body proved more difficult now that there was no life and muscular strength left in her. It took a few attempts, but eventually we managed to get to the car. As my mum opened the trunk, Flower was still dripping blood from her mouth onto the stones.
We placed her in the back of the car with the mats under her front and back. As we drove past a flower shop, my mum suggested to get flowers for her grave. We picked out some white Azaleas (I think I considered naming a puppy that), a Pachysandra terminalis/carpet box, which in German is very fittingly called “Dickmännchen” meaning fat little man, and some daffodils (also a potential puppy name).
The lady in the shop was happy and clumsy, she didn’t know what the flowers were for. An older lady tried to park her car next to ours. She misjudged the distance to the Rock wa and smashed right into it. The whole front of her yellow car was dented. My brother asked if she was alright and needed help. He tried to push a loose piece at the front back into it’s place, but it was too bent.
All that time, she was lying in the trunk of the car. How weird. We had a dead body in the back of our car.
Back home, we got Flower’s basket and carried her upstairs in it. We had planned to eat breakfast together, my mum, my brother and I.
I thought this was a very strange tradition, a Leichenschmaus, funeral feast. To eat when someone is dead. I didn’t even have an appetite. The way she was lying in her basket, one could easily mistake her for being asleep. It even looked like her stomach was still moving in and out, when you looked at it hard enough. I also still heard her rattling breath in my head. So did my mum.
After that, we started digging the hole. First we had to remove a little tree which was half dead from being in the shade. It turned out to be a lilac. The spot we picked was on the other side of the pond, next to the other animals we have had to bury. Krümel, my little rabbit, who died from castration complications, was the first, then some chickens, and the last was Elfi, Flower’s firstborn daughter who had too much fluid in her lungs.
When the hole was deep enough, I went upstairs to get a candle. My old birthday candle from a few years ago was the nicest. As I was walking through the building, I could feel Flower’s presence everywhere. In every room, every corner. The whole air was filled with her. She was everywhere.
When I was back, my brother lifted her up, and put her into her grave, onto a bed of green thuja and yellow forsythia branches.
I climbed into the hole after he placed her to feel her fur one last time. I wanted to give her one last hug and one last kiss, but I couldn’t position myself right.
We were going to wrap her in her red blanket, but because of the flowers my brother didn’t. So we covered her in all the spring flowers that were growing around the farm. We also put her favourite toys, her blue pegasus that she had since she came to us, and her recent new favourite, one of my socks that had a hole stuffed with hay (originally a rabbit toy), in with her.
But something was missing. “She needs to be tucked in”, my dad said and looked at me under tears.
I agreed. Flower couldn’t sleep without being covered by a blanket. Every time she woke up at night and shook her ears, she would wake the person up by nudging them until they covered her back up.
So we put her red blanket in, too. I cut out a little piece of its cloth as a keepsake to take with us.
“Does anyone want to say a few words?”, my mum asked as we stood there, looking at Flower in her grave.
No one answered. I couldn’t form any words that would even begin to do her justice, and that wouldn’t send me instantly to the ground, sobbing. I had so many words in my head, but I couldn’t verbalise them.
“Just…thank you… For the time we got to spend with you.”, my mum began. “Thank you for watching out over Tara and Finlay. You were a great mother to Eistla and your puppies.”
Eistla had become a tiny little bundle of sadness in her mum’s basket. She looked so small and lost in that space, Flower was in before.
We stood there for a while. Not ready to close the hole yet. But then my brother started to shovel sand in. “I love you”, I tried to whisper, the only sentence I could form, but even that didn’t come out.
So we put the sand back in. And soon she was gone.
My bbrother had the idea to put a pile of rocks on top, which he dug out from the side of the pond. We planted the flowers around the grave, and I put a little green glass rock on top, that I found when we were digging. It was from Krümel’s grave. I also placed and lit the red candle and we put some flowers and willow branches on top of the rocks. Willow was the dog that initially made me want to get a Vizsla.
The candle burned until the next morning, even though it rained. Once we lit it again, it burnt for another three days, through rain and wind.
In the evening, I still felt her. Curled up at my feet. Lying in my arms.