It was a beautiful Monday morning, Jack walked outside, urinated & passed a nice stool. We walked around together, had a sniff & we sat out in the sun. He walked himself in & as I took a phone call, he went back to bed. He complained a few hours later with difficulty about not being able to pick himself up. So I carried him to his day bed & made him comfortable & I worked from the couch next to him. He stayed awake all afternoon watching me without any complaint. He hadn’t had anything to drink or eat for the entire day except for a tablespoon of honey I fingered into his mouth. When The Lady came home from work, there was no way to coax him up, but his tail as usual, was beating like a drum. I proceeded to try to stand him up, he couldn’t do it & got scared.
So in the evening we took Jack to the emergency hospital. We put him on an IV & ensured that he was fully hydrated & in no pain for when the time came for him to tell us when.
There was no improvement by Tuesday morning. He had diarrhoea & was very upset with himself for the uncontrolled defecation. He told the nurse in no uncertain terms to clean him up. It became evident that he now had complete renal failure & the blood work showed no improvement given the IV flush. He wasn’t making enough urine & now his body wasn’t keeping up with the IV. He was given a dose of morphine & urinary catheter to help relieve himself.
The morphine shot brought The Lady & I a few hours to hire a post digger, dig his grave & build a coffin.
We returned just in time as the morphine began to wear off. Being an English Staffordshire, he was emotionally intelligent enough to tell us by vocalising the word “Nah” with a sharp turn of his head. After whispering a little chortle into my ear, we administered the aesthetic & he was gone in 2 seconds. Even the vet cried.
They cleaned him up & wrapped him in a new white cotton sheet & placed him into the plywood coffin I made. We took him back home & buried him in the backyard under a 100 year old English elm tree facing the house before dusk. A spot he chose that Monday morning. We covered his grave with large pebbles & placed a solar night light.
At 1am, the winter barren elm tree was visited by magpies for the first time since I could remember. They chanted their song repetitively for 1 hour. I lit a Cohiba Madura 5 Genios, my first in 12 months & listened.
RIP.
