Diesel was sixteen. The cancer was throughout his body — not in one place anybody could cut out, but everywhere. So we chose not to treat it.
People don't say that part out loud. I'm saying it because somebody reading this is sitting in an exam room right now being handed a number and a schedule, and wondering whether choosing not to makes them a monster.
It doesn't. But you do have to decide what you're going to do instead.
What we did was take him to the beach.
I'm his aunt. He wasn't my dog. In his last year I took him along with my own three — a week at the ocean, and then again down to San Diego. Sixteen years old with cancer everywhere, and he romped in the surf. I want to be plain about that. He didn't endure the trip. He played.
He slept a lot. He always wagged his tail.
I called him Papa Bear. He was an alpha, but not the kind that has to prove anything. Every time we were on the beach, big dogs would come running up to him the way they do — at speed, no manners — and they would get within a few feet of him and settle. All of them. Big dogs and little dogs both. He commanded respect without doing a single thing to ask for it. I watched it happen over and over that week and I never got tired of it.
At home he was less philosophical about it. My chihuahuas would get brave and start something, and this sixteen-year-old dog with cancer through his whole body would come off the couch and pin them. Then he would go back to sleep.
That is what the year looked like. Not a decline we managed. A dog being entirely himself, for as long as he had.
The hardest part is that he very rarely showed pain. Dogs don't. They are built to hide it, and the stoic ones are the best at it, so the ones you most want to protect are the ones who tell you the least. You end up watching for something that isn't there and second-guessing every quiet afternoon. I don't have advice about that. I only know I watched him closely, and what I saw, almost all of the time, was a dog who was still glad to be here.
This is his portrait, made from a photograph of him on the sofa in the window light.
He hangs over my bed now, with three others.
