All Good Things: Our Labrador Retriever's Final Days

One of the hardest lessons in life, I think, is having to accept that everything in our lives, even our own existence, has no real permanence, no matter how hard we try to tell ourselves otherwise. Everything in the Universe, from the smallest bit of an atom to a solar system, has a shelf life that has a beginning, middle, and an end. Some things exist only for microseconds, while others last for billions of years, but even stars die.

Still, on a mild April morning nearly four years ago, these hard truths were no comfort to either me or my mom as we drove Mary Joe, our beloved eight-year-old yellow Labrador retriever, to Gomara Animal Clinic for what we know, deep down, was going to be the last time. We didn't have the guts to admit it to ourselves even as we were placing the leash around Mary Joe's neck...or as we watched with stunned horror as she scratched the front door in a "I don't want to go to the vet!" frenzy....or as we got Jose, the condo's super, to manhandle her into Mom's 1997 Mitsubishi Mirage because she couldn't (or wouldn't) board the car like she normally did.

As Mary Joe sat reluctantly on the back seat of the car next to me, Mom kept an uneasy silence as she drove south along SW 97^th Avenue toward the animal clinic where Mary Joe had been a regular "client" since she was a six-week-old puppy. It was there that she had gotten all her "baby" inoculations since my cousin Ignacio had sent her from Bogotá, Colombia as a gift to me, and it was there where she had been spayed at the age of five months.

Until the fall of 2002, Mary Joe had not needed to go to the vet except for her annual checkup and rabies shots. Oh, okay...she did go a few times when she, like all young and curious puppies, went through her "oral" stage and ingested a couple of snails which, predictably, gave her a bad case of indigestion, but otherwise, Mary Joe had been a strong and energetic Labrador retriever.

Then, out of the blue, sometime in September of 2001, not long after the Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. occurred, Mary Joe's health began a strange and drawn out decline.