good night, arthur

We took Arthur to the vet on his last car ride today. It was a beautiful sunny day, so rare in Seattle in the winter, and Arthur hopped into the car with his favorite ball in his mouth, little knowing that he wasn't going to be returning with us. I played Chopin's Waltz in A-flat Major, Op. 69 No. 1, dubbed Valse de l'adieu, before we set off. Since Arthur's diagnosis, I had determined not to play the piece until the time was right. I don't know if it registered with Arthur, but Arthur had always shown an unusual affinity, for a dog, to my piano playing and to the television. Neither Axterix nor Archie ever so much acknowledged the existence of the TV or the piano, but Arthur was unusual that way. When we took him in in 2010, he was terrified of the sounds the piano produced, as he was of everything; as he grew older, he seemed to enjoy the music, inasmuch as he would sometimes hop onto the piano stool with his front paws and attempt to strike the keys. After we moved back to Seattle, I would play the piano with the door to the piano room slightly ajar, and Arthur would sometimes push the door open with his nose and come and sit next to me.

 

The days since the new year began have felt like a novel where the author lost interest and rushed the ending. My dad took Arthur to the animal ER on New Year's Day (the only place that was open on a holiday) for what we thought was a benign urinary infection and came back with the ominous news that the doctors suspected cancer and an X-ray had revealed a mass in his abdomen. A few days later, further tests and ultrasounds revealed that what the doctor had initially taken to be a mass was in fact one of Arthur's kidneys. A sigh of relief, perhaps? Perhaps Arthur had been given a new lease on life? But an elusive bruising on his hind leg that left his regular vet stumped and took us on trips to various veterinary hospitals and specialists around Seattle over the following days ultimately revealed that the ER doctor's hunch about a cancerous process being at play, which at the time had seemed based on an incompetent reading of the X-rays, had in fact been on the mark. The only surgical option - to wit, amputating his entire leg - was out of the question, since the tumor was high up in his hip. Regardless, we probably would not have countenanced such a violent intervention. Two out of three golden retrievers in America die of cancer; a quarter of all golden retrievers die of hemangiosarcoma - the kind of cancer Arthur had been diagnosed with. Most humans, faced with these odds, would happily choose to check out on their own while still in possession of all their limbs. While doctors never rush to put grandma out of her misery (except in Belgium), they are more than happy to recommend humane euthanasia "when the time seems right" for your pet.

No time could ever seem right. It was the wrong time for Arthur. He was eight years old, but to us he was a puppy right to the end. He ran and jumped and played and chased squirrels and rabbits and wagged his tail so vigorously that his tail appeared to wag him and curled up with all his toys in his bed every night, looking very much like a stuffed animal himself. I thought we would have several more years together; but 'twas not to be.

We adopted Arthur in October 2010. He was not yet two months old. We had given Archie away a little over a month before, and I was not ready to accept a new dog so soon. 7 AM. The doorbell rings. We open the door to find a little white ball of fur on the doormat, smiling widely like one who knew he had found his family. He had arrived by road from Bangalore that morning, and the dog trainer from whom we had adopted Archie and who took him back in three years later was Arthur's escort. I had been determined not to let Arthur replace Archie, but I was completely won over when he climbed into my lap. When Asterix and Archie were puppies, I had become used to their aloof somnolence and imagined that all puppies took a while to warm to you and that you were invisible to them until such a time as they did. Arthur's playful energy destroyed those conceptions.

My Common App essay (which got me admitted to a grand total of zero colleges) featured the end of Archie's chapter and the start of Arthur's, though it focused on Archie and my feelings about giving him away and ended on rather an optimistic note with the realization that "I had room for all three dogs in my heart". I deprecate now as I did then excessive sentimentality, but admissions officers love a good strong tug on their heart strings, and I obliged them grudgingly. To say that that essay was loosely inspired by real-life events would be generous: My attitude toward facts was rather akin to Picasso's attitude toward human lineaments. (For a true account of that episode, read "For A".) Which is why I have always been embarrassed to show that essay to anyone. Fortunately, my hard disk crashed the summer before college, so I had an excellent excuse for turning down people who asked to read it. However, I won't deny the truth of the concluding sentence, because by then Archie had already become something of a dream - a star in the evening sky with a name someone had bestowed on it once upon a time. Arthur was real and in the present.

But now, as Arthur joins Archie in the realm of dreams and memories, I shall try to remember the little things that made these eight years seem like a lifetime that nevertheless passed far too quickly. He gave us many happy memories, and I know that his time with us was as happy for him as it has been for us. I used to think the following lines from Tennyson's "In Memoriam" were trite, especially in the way they have tended to be employed by teenagers on the Internet who have been rejected by their first crush, but I now see that they are most true:

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

At the same time I can't help being reminded of another of Tennyson's great poems, and that is "Break, Break, Break". The bark that used to boom over the lawn in the backyard early in the morning, now stilled - the warm fur gone, the soft eyes extinguished. There will be no more whimpering outside my bedroom door at 6 in the morning, no tail beating against the hardwood floor in the dark, no sound of paws running up the passageway to greet me when I return from work. One imagines that those paws are chasing rabbits somewhere.

Good night, Arthur. You were a good boy - a spectacular boy.