About a Dog

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But then I look at Rosie again, my grizzled old dog rising creakily from one of her beds, and I lose my half-grip on whatever it is that Stevens means. Dogs' lives are microcosms of our own, held inside ours. Erin and I have watched Rosie progress from an earnest puppy to an excitable adolescent to a dignified, if high-strung, adult. But now she has moved on again, has become an aching geriatric who spends the better part of each day on her electric bed with her arthritic elbows pressed into the heat. In less than a decade, she has changed from one of the most vibrant life forces I've ever seen into a shrunken old lady: Erin and I monitor her closely, discussing how stiff she was when she got up, how much of her breakfast food she ate, how her bowel movements were, how long her run lasted.

Every time she slips going up the stairs, staggers up from her bed in the morning, stumbles when she's chasing the ball, we feel God's hand clenching our hearts. We are watching Rosie, my wife and I, with a calculating eye. Now that she can't walk up the stairs, how much longer will it be until she can't hop up them? What does it mean that last night she missed the bottom step going down and flopped face first on the floor, before righting herself awkwardly and looking around, hoping no one had seen her undignified fall? What did it mean when I pulled on her leg to clip her nails and the arthritis made her yelp as if I'd stuck a needle into the meat of her shoulder? How close is she to having to go? At what point do we have to say, 'Her life is no longer worth the pain she is suffering'?

This morning she ran for three minutes.

Excerpted from a longer essay in The American Scholar (Autumn 2003). Subscriptions: $30/yr. (4 issues) from 1606 New Hampshire Ave., Washington, DC 20009; www.pbk.org/pubs/amscholar.htm

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