Crossing the Rainbow Bridge: Grief on Four Legs (ft. Brian Moritz)

It hits hard when pets die. The first in our series on grieving the loss of your four-legged companion.

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Oct 25, 2024

If you’ve experienced the loss of a pet and would like to share a memory of them, email me at jaredpaventi@gmail.com with Pet in the subject line. Be sure to attach a photo or two.

On the wall over my desk there is a shelf with two Funko Pop dolls — Miles Davis and Freddie Mercury — and two rubber bouncy balls. The red ball lost its bell decades ago, while the blue one’s bell is still in the middle and makes noise.

These were the toy balls that I used to throw to our shih-tzu, Nikki, when I was a kid.

I was in sixth grade when we got her. My parents left my sister and me at our after-school babysitter later than normal. When they picked us up, we got in the car to find a little black puppy in a tall brown box. Turns out, she was a jumper.

Instead of heading home, we went to the pet store next to Wegmans and stocked up: dog food and bowls, a crate, leash, collar, and two rubber bouncy balls.

Nikki was an indoor dog, for sure. We tried letting her off the leash as a puppy to go outside to pee and wound up chasing her down the street1. My father or I would toss the bouncy ball from our family room into the kitchen and dining room, or down the main hallway in our house, for her to chase and get tired out.

She had her favorite spots in the house — under the coffee table, behind my father’s chair and on the arm of the loveseat. When my mother was entering her final days, she camped out underneath the hospital bed in the living room, growling at anyone that tried moving her2.

Her failing started while I was in college and it was slow. Nikki wasn’t blind but she couldn’t see well. I don’t think her hearing was very good either. She had a fondness for using a patch of carpet between the living and dining room in my parent’s house to poop and vomit. Eventually, she lost the ability to spring herself up from our front porch into the house.

It was right after I got married3 when my father said that he took her to the vet4 and they put her down. He buried by the flagpole in the backyard.

This didn’t break me, but I think that I was a simmering pot of anxiety, panic attacks, misplaced grief, and unemployment; still way too much of mess to care about anything outside of myself. It was sort of a blip in my world.

One day, my father left me a Ziploc bag with the two bouncy balls.

As a result, I didn’t grieve Nikki’s death much. Sad? Sure. I remember her fondly, but no stages of grief here. My attitude towards pets, at the time, was sort of like George Carlin’s…

People’s attachment to their pets in 2024 America runs somewhere between My dog is a part of my family and Wook at my wittle furbaby. I don’t understand the furbaby people, but I get how dogs5 have been elevated to the family tier.

It’s most evident by you all. Multiple people have suggested that I do something on the passing of pets and the associated grief. Thanks to everyone who responded. I’ll start with a contribution from our friend Brian Moritz, who grieves his buddy Zoey.

We got Zoey, our basenji-terrier-purebred mutt mix, back in 2006.

Zoey was part of a litter of eight puppies. When we went to see them, seven bounded out on their own toward us. One skittishly hid under a lawn mower. My girlfriend, now wife, pointed at the lawn mower and said, "That's my dog."

She had the best ears. When she was a puppy, they popped up one at a time, going from the floppy Labrador-like ears we expected to ears that stood straight up like a terrier. Her first vet played with them at every appointment. Her ears were undefeated.

Zoey was in the room when I proposed to my girlfriend. She was with us through the birth of our daughter, two cats, two hamsters, a fish, grad school, several jobs, and a second younger dog, from a crappy townhouse in Binghamton to a delightful old house in Binghamton to a temporary townhouse in Farmington to our home in Fairport.

The irony is that despite being tagged as my wife’s dog on day one, Zoey very quickly became my dog, the way that pets (and, let’s be honest, kids) connect more with one parent than the other.

Because of my then-sportswriter and then-grad school schedule, I spent more time with Zoey than anyone else. We walked, played frisbee, and sat on our deck together. I called her my pal, because that’s what Mickey always called Pluto, and because she was my best friend.

There comes a point in every pet owner’s life where you’re faced with that question. Is it worth going on? It’s unique to pet owners. We don’t do this with people. But with pets, you’ve got to make that decision, and it’s always agonizing.

In April 2018, I took her to the vet for her semiannual checkup. They asked if I wanted to do the complete senior blood work. I usually say no (those tests are not cheap), but for some reason — to this, I'm still not really sure why — I said yes.

At the time, everything was fine, except that she came out with a bandage on her foot. They had trouble stopping the bleeding after drawing blood. We all agreed that was weird but probably nothing. I was more taken back by the sticker shock of the tests than anything else.

That night, the vet's office called. Zoey's bloodwork showed a few oddities. Her platelet count was really low but that could have been just bad luck. They wanted to bring her back in to do another test.

Now, complicating things was the fact that I was leaving town two days later for a conference in Indiana. I tried to put off the tests until I came back, but they were quietly insistent that we bring her in soon.

So while I was at the conference at Indiana University, my wife took Zoey to our vet in Canandaigua, a good 40 minutes from our house in Fairport for another blood draw.

That night, the vet called me at the conference. They needed Zoey in the office the next day.

Her platelet count was dangerously low. It was supposed to be in the hundred-thousands, hers was in the hundreds. She was dangerously close to hemorrhaging. Anything — even something as innocuous as a sharp corner on a piece of food, could have caused her to bleed out and die. They needed to find out what was happening.

"We're on a cancer hunt," my vet told me bluntly.

The next morning, I was presenting one of my papers at the conference when my wife called. I did what I never do — I excused myself and took the call. I was sitting in a random stairwell in the Indiana University Media School when my wife said, “It’s not good.”

Zoey had cancer, a mass on her lung and near her liver.

I excused myself from the conference, found my car in the parking lot at IU and sat for a long time, crying and trying to breathe.

Zoey was put on three drugs: an antibiotic, prednisone, and a drug whose name I can’t remember but cost several hundred dollars a month. There was nothing to be done about the cancer, but we needed to suppress her immune system so we could get her platelet count back up.

For two weeks, she was gated in our tiny kitchen, eating soft food and taking six pills a day. A week later, her platelet numbers were up. But there was a long road ahead.

Prednisone is a hell of a drug. It made her put on weight (a predni-belly, one of the techs called it). It sapped her energy. She didn’t want to walk, panted constantly, fell down the stairs, ate and drank like a fiend. We began to wonder if this was worth it, if her quality of life was too diminished.

What you hear all the time is, “When it’s time, you’ll know.”

At that point, we didn’t. We were uncertain. That uncertainty, and our vet’s great guidance, helped us stay the course.

All along, every test was promising. We finished the antibiotic. We finished the expensive drug. We slowly weaned her off the prednisone, and as we did, her personality slowly came back. She lost the predni-belly and was able to do her usual walk around the block again.

By the end of August, we took her back for a final blood test. Her numbers were off-the-charts fantastic. Absolutely perfect. Even the vet called her a miracle dog.

In May, a month after her first diagnosis, we had a big blowout birthday party for her. We invited friends, had a ton of food, let her eat anything she wanted. The subtext was obvious — this was her last birthday, so let’s celebrate it big. We weren’t sure she’d even make it to that birthday. It was a bittersweet day, because it felt like we were saying goodbye.

We weren’t. Not quite yet.

Now, the point of the previous 800 words is that, by the time we got to December 2019 and Zoey’s back legs started to give out on her, we were ready.

Making the appointment, taking her on one last drive to the vet, sitting with her in the room, was still hard but less hard than it would have been a year earlier.

We knew.

I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but Zoey getting sick in 2018 had given me a crash course in anticipatory grief. Like my mom a few months later, I had already grieved her loss to some extent. The past year, that big birthday party, all of it had been a blessing. Bonus time with my pal.

A gift.

I sat with Zoey on the floor, feeling sad but OK. The doctor gave her two injections. It was quicker than falling asleep. I stayed with her for a while, hugging her, scratching her favorite spot between her ears.

Those ears. That even now stood tall. Undefeated until the very end.

We had Zoey cremated. As it happens, the pet crematory is near our house. The Monday after she passed, I got a call that I could come pick up her ashes.

I assumed it would feel very heavy.

It was the opposite. I came home with the dark brown box and felt happy, relieved, light. It was like our house was whole again.

I took a picture of the box and texted it to my wife at work.

“Zoey is home.”

We’ll have more stories of pet grief next week.