It’s not an appointment anyone wants to make.
1 pm: Put Ziggy to sleep.
We’d been delaying it for weeks.
It’s so easy to want one more day, one more week.
But Ziggy was falling apart. Approaching 15 in dog years. His back legs stopped working. He used to be able to bounce over curbs without even taking a running start. He had a spring to him you wouldn’t expect for such a big dog.
Not anymore.
For the past few months, he’d been sleeping downstairs — completely unheard of for a dog with serious co-dependency issues. Ziggy was always by our side. He just wanted to be on the scene, no matter what. So it was hard to hear him down there, trying to get up the steps and sliding back down. I carried him up sometimes. He’d lie limp in my arms, which was so weird. No squirming at all.
He stopped grooming himself. No more incessant licking on his mat. No more chewing on his nails or plucking out burrs from between his paw-fingers.
His appetite dwindled. His food would sit in the bowl. If we forgot to bring it inside, the raccoons would get it. I started leaving it inside, but that just gave me a constant reminder that shit was going downhill.
As a sort of admission of what was to come, I started feeding him raw salmon and beef, things that normally would make his skin break out and his ears get gunky. But those symptoms take a few weeks to show up. And we didn’t have to worry about that.
Time wasn’t on our side.
How do you prepare for something like this?
We gathered the family, Evaline on the phone all the way from Massachusetts, sobbing, Hazel wide-eyed at the stories about a time when she didn’t exist.
Remember when he ran from the water spicket?
Or when he ate my entire basket of Halloween candy?
Or your shoes. Didn’t he eat one of your shoes?
Just the leather part.
And let’s not forget my juggling balls.
He downed 4 or 5 of those.
Twice! I bought a new set and he ate those too. I still don’t know how he got them off the mantle.
Iron stomach, that dog.
Dare I mention the squishy ball?
The squishy ball!! We all chorused.
It was exactly what it was supposed to be — like a TV family on one of those shows trying so hard to be like real life: sharing the family lore, sitting on the floor in the dining room, laughing through tears. Quiet moments while we tried to think up more stories.
And then later, Ziggy’s aunties, Dre and Nikki, came by, and Uncle Alex, who lived with Ziggy for a minute while we were on vacation, piped in via FaceTime. More stories, more love, more laughter through tears. I heard Nikki crying in the kitchen later on. We all took our turn.
Everyone loved the Zig Man. His eyes seemed to be perpetually asking, “Is it cool if I hang out with you guys?” Such a gentleman, trying to figure out how to be in the mix in the most subtle of ways possible: plopping under the lemon tree while I shot hoops, taking cover beneath the pool table during karaoke parties, lying behind me in my office while the hours went by. (I don’t know if I’ll ever lose the reflex of looking over my shoulder when I back up my rolley chair.
It’s hard. I realize he’s gone, over and over again.
Every time I get up to change rooms, I find myself looking for him. Every time I come home, I expect to see him coming down the stairs. Every morning, I look over by the window. And he’s not there. We finally got rid of his bed-pillow.
It hurts, but I find myself smiling at the same time. It’s a beautiful thing to remember Ziggy. The ache tells me so much: that I’m alive, that I loved deeply without caution, that he meant something to us, that he lived.
The Zig Man. Always and forever leaning into me to get one more head scratch.
Here but not here.
Warming my heart in between this thing and that.
Deep red, gushing, intoxicating love, with no regard for time and space or life or death.
Love love love. So much love.
Both ways.