Li’l Taterhead

I wonder if a dog can come to terms with their own mortality.  I mean, when they’re about to die, do they know it?  Is this something they’re capable of being aware of?  I don’t mean something like their life flashing before their eyes as they’re about to be plowed over by a car (although, that does raise another semi-interesting point, though not relevant to this entry), but when they’re just getting old and decrepit.  Do they know?

I think Tater may have.

I can’t remember what life was like at my mom’s house before Tater.  Not too well, anyway.  There was JD (Just Dog) before him (whom I found mauled to death in the back yard when I was eight), but Tater just seems like he’s always been there.  I was only nine years old when my stepdad brought Tater home on Halloween night in 1989.  It was so funny watching a short little weiner dog run around with the energy of a thousand kittens.  And even though he was like that for a third of his life, I don’t remember it too well, either.  The middle third…that I remember.  That’s when Tater got fat.  A miniature dachshund never grows much taller than they are as puppies.  So when Tater got fat, his stomach would literally drag on the ground.  Didn’t really like to run too much anymore, mostly because of his girth.  During this time, he also developed several minor illnesses (miniature dachshunds are notoriously sickly), one of which was a skin condition he got because he was allergic to beef.  That’s right….allergic to beef.  So he had to start taking pills for that.  Then he had to start eating a special dietetic dog food to help him lose weight because his obesity would kill him.  For a few years, after he got to a more normal size, he had energy again.  He would run and play and all that stuff.  Once he hit age ten, he slowed down.  He’d still want to play occasionally, but it wouldn’t be for long.  He became the venerable old man, complete with grey whiskers under his bottom lip.  He’d already outlived his expected life span (miniature dachshunds usually only live about seven to eight years), so we were just glad to have him around.  He was spoiled, too.  It was his house.  We were there to do as he beckoned.  And we did.  All the time.

The last couple of years have been hard.  He had to eat an even more specialized food (which was so damn nasty…it was like opaque brown jello), which he didn’t like.  He got increasingly skinnier.  He started to go blind and deaf.  He started to get incontinent.  He would wander aimlessly at times.  Mostly, though, he just slept.  Pretty much all the time.  The last few months, he became a walking skeleton.  We suspected he was cancer-ridden, because he got to the point where he would go days without eating, despite acting very hungry.  He didn’t have much strength, barely even able to climb in and out of his bed…which he cared to climb out of less and less.  Two weeks ago, I was shocked when I saw how skinny he was.  It looked like there was nothing to him besides skin and bones.  And he wouldn’t eat a thing.  In fact, that night, I said what I thought would be my last words to him as I left.  He managed to make it a little while longer, but today, just a little after noon, I got the call that he finally had to be put down.

My mom and stepdad always board him up at the vet’s office when they’re out of town, which they have been since the middle of last week.  They had to make the decision to put him down while in Chicago on business.  His body temperature was thirty degrees below normal, and he didn’t even have the strength to raise his head up anymore.  My stepdad asked the vet if she thought he was suffering, and she told him she was sure of it.  So they gave her the okay to put him down.

So just 25 days shy of his 16th birthday, Tater is gone.

He was family.  That’s the best compliment I can give an animal.  Not that he was like family.  He was family.  The fourth brother, the fifth child.  And he’ll be mourned that way when everybody is home on Friday.

Sayonara.