My dog died today.

They shaved a portion of his leg, stuck in a needle, and he was dead in fifteen, thirty seconds.

I was ten, maybe nine when we got him. In grade school. A little pup myself.

He had a name: Charlemagne.

The dog before him was named Tiberius. I loved him. The rest of the family found him hard to understand. But he was my dog. I felt that because I bonded with him, took him in my room and let him run around, unrestricted, as I played with him. He was so cute, so little.

One night, Tiberius acted strangely, even for him. I still remember him, in the basement of my parents’ house, standing on the fireplace, all of us gathered around, and each time we touched him he winced and growled. It was his stomach, it seemed. My parents said that they would take him to the vet the next day.

I went to school as normal. When my brother and I returned, our parents took us into the living room, upstairs from the foyer. They sat us down and told us: Tiberius was dead. It was the suddenness of it. This could not be. Had there been a car accident on the way to the vet? No, it was genetic. He’d been made wrong. There was nothing they could do. My puppy, my Tiberius, was gone. And there was no way to do things over, to get him back, to ever achieve any recompense.

Charlemagne came next. Plato had been there before Tiberius, who had as a puppy defended me from Aristotle the Airedale when he went to sniff me after I’d been brought home from my mother’s womb, emptied onto the hospital floor. I remember Charlemagne as so cute, so loveable. I never bonded with him the way I had with Tiberius, but I loved him. He was the most human dog I have ever known, all while very much knowing he was a dog in a way some dogs, like Aristotle, never grasped. Charlemagne was a moral dog, intensely concerned with pleasing humans. He was a good dog, and he died today.

Once, my mother stood at the kitchen door and saw Charlemagne helping himself to some cereal. The cereal was kept under the microwave, beside the refrigerator, in cabinets at floor level, on rolling trays. Charlemagne had opened the doors and pulled the tray out with his paws and snout. He’d manipulated the cereal box, pulling it onto the floor. At this moment, about to enjoy his prize, Charlemagne realized that he was being watched. Sensing my mother at the door but smart enough not to turn to her, he pushed the cereal box back onto the rolling tray, pushed it back inside the cabinet, shut the door, and turned to face my mother, wagging his tail as if to say “look, I’m a good doggie.”

True story.

When my parents took Plato to be put to sleep, they returned home with Plato’s empty collar. Charlemagne recognized what had happened instantly. He wagged his tail, clearly celebrating.

You have to understand Charlemagne’s personality. He could not be kinder to humans. When we saw the dogs on chairs at the table, Charlemagne sat like a prince. He was a picky eater. He did not like lettuce, and would chew it, consistently letting it fall out of his mouth in such a way as to keep you from noticing or think he was simply incompetent if you did. He might disobey, but he would never think of letting you think that he would disobey.

As children, my brother and I put Charlemagne in a duffel bag and rigged a pulley system to lift Charlemagne into the air. He would passively resist this treatment, moving his feet out of the duffel bag while he could, but he would never growl or think of threatening us. One time, my father came home and found us with one such pulley system, this time over the basement stairs rather than over a door. We had the door to the top of the stair open, and tried to act perfectly normal, with this dog suspended in the air, as my father walked past. Father looked down at us, said hello, and walked off. We were amazed and thought we’d gotten off. After hearing my father walking back to the kitchen, he returned to ask us what the hell we were doing. There was no point feigning innocence, though we explained that we were just playing with the dog. He told us to get the dog down from there, and we complied.

To understand Charlemagne, you have to see him as a Roman. Tatiana, the bitch we got after Charlemagne and who, as of today, is the sole dog of the family, is French. She does what she wants. If you object, she doesn’t see this as a crisis. The most you’ll get out of her is a look of fear until you show some sign of affection, after which all returns to normal as if nothing had happened. No so with Charlemagne. Charlemagne was a stoic. The humans were the State. He trusted them to care for him, but ultimately he was going to do what they wanted, even if it involved pulleys.

If Charlemagne was kind to humans, he could still be vicious to other dogs. Sometimes he would attack Plato while Plato ate, occasionally ripping Plato’s ear open so badly that the shaken old dog would have to be moved to my grandmother’s for recuperation. My grandmother took care of Plato all too well. She would call us and tell us things like “you wouldn’t believe how much this dog eats!” What she meant was that she assumed that he wouldn’t ask for food unless he was hungry, and he was eating half of everything she ate. If she made a sandwich, he would bark and growl a bit, causing her to throw him half. When she finished a box of ice cream, she would unfold the package and place it on the floor for him to trample and lick clean. She would say, “you wouldn’t believe how often he has to go to the bathroom!” This meaning, of course, that Plato demanded to go out a dozen times a day, for as long as an hour, mostly just walking and walking around the block. He would climb on top of her and snarl, waking her up in the middle of the night, demanding to go out. He tyrannized this woman.

My grandmother moved in with us not long after, and she died of cancer in a hospital a few years after that.

Charlemagne had been vicious to Tatiana as well, though Tatiana had increasingly returned the favor. Charlemagne seemed intent on trouncing the puppy, putting her in her place, often for no reason perceptible to humans. She would throw herself on her back and he would stand over her, snarling viciously, appalling us. Charlemagne was not a large dog, but Tatiana was even smaller, and we had been seriously concerned that he might kill her.

Charlemagne was a cute puppy, a loyal Roman to humans, and a tyrant to other dogs. He came to me when I was depressed, as I often was in those teenage years, and he would sit with me. He did not like Christmas, or any break in the norm: the idea of us stopping out normal life, to sit around together in the living room to unwrap and open presents, was paralyzing for this dog. After a few years, we learned to tranquilize him, and even then he would still tremble. As we unwrapped gifts, some amusingly haphazardly wrapped and labeled by the dogs, we would pet and reassure Charlemagne, who shook until it was all over.

There was a lot of shaking in his later years. Charlemagne died at sixteen and a half, and for years he’d had arthritis. He would wander around the tile floors of the kitchen, sliding around with his nails, sometimes falling on his stomach, unable to right himself without help. He would limp, one leg stuck in place. Pain-killers became part of his nightly food, wrapped in the horrible cheese he preferred. He became blind over the course of a year or so, and we realized that his increasing disobedience was partially caused by the fact that he couldn’t hear us. Trapped in the sensory deprivation tank his body had become, he stumbled into things, sometimes at a brisk pace. I recall him, absurdly, racing down the fall through the foyer and crashing into the refrigerator, sitting where it had always been. Unable to climb down stairs, he began falling off the deck when he went outside in the fenced-off yard we’d created for him. The sound of a dog falling down four wooden steps and the sight of him limping afterwards as if this pain were simply a part of the process is an experience that can only be humorous when its horror becomes a commonplace. No matter of constructing ramps and guards could keep him from the routine of this fall, until we encouraged him to stay on the deck to do his business.

For years, he’d gotten increasingly finicky about his food, until it had to be mixed with milk and bran. It would take him hours to eat at times, and he would pace, rounding the living room before returning, staring at the bowl, and deciding whether to take another bite or make another round. Charlemagne paced. Constantly. One time my parents had left him outside, only to return home hours later to find him exhausted in the yard, having worn a trail in the grass, unable to stop pacing.

He had always been a neurotic dog. For the last couple years, I became convinced that he no longer knew who I was. There was no glimmer of recognition, even when I was right in front of his eyes. Petting him elicited no response, at least when I did it; it could not quiet his uncertain, nervous glances. I felt that the Charlemagne I’d known and loved as a child was gone, and the worst part was that I could no longer remember that Charlemagne I’d known and loved, who’d known who I was, so strong was the size of this senile dog’s impression upon my consciousness.

He whined, howling pitifully when alone, not seeing or hearing anyone sometimes when they were in the same room. He woke my mother up during the night, sometimes as many as a dozen times, trapped in the dark and wanting some attention in his sensory void. My mother would be tired in the mornings, traumatized by her lack of sleep as she went to work, leaving the dog to howl for hours and to pace in their absence.

He’d walked through his own excrement, like some senile man smearing his feces on the walls.

I’m told that, in recent months, Charlemagne at last began losing weight, getting as small as Tatiana. One day, about six weeks ago, mother had returned from work to find him in the bathroom. Having somehow gotten the hair dryer off the shelf, he’d tangled himself up in it. It was wrapped around his body and his neck, and he was struggling, out of breath, as he had been for some time. Worse, the dryer was on full blast. The room was like a sauna, and his tongue was drooping as if a foot long from his head, which sat baking in its own saliva. My parents had given him water through a turkey baster because he’d been too tired to drink, and it had taken him a day and a half to recover.

And the worst of it was: he had lived. He had a weak heart, and this hadn’t killed him. He was sixteen and a half, and he was in great physical health. But his mind, and everything I knew as Charlemagne, was gone.

My parents began contemplating having him put to sleep earlier this week. I’d been advocating it for about two years. I thought that he’d become intolerable. I thought that he was not well. I’d been the first to declare him senile, to suggest, and then to call, for him to be put to sleep. It took some time for others to recognize this and to see that love required not the loyalty to prolong a life but the loyalty to end it. There are different models of loving and of loyalty, and I cannot subscribe to one that would allow a loved one to live in such a state, no matter how blind our wishes it were otherwise might render us. To want someone to be other than they are, even if that is a suffering being, is a kind of selfishness based on wanting to see what one wants to see, and, however loving the motive, the inclination, I cannot call that love.

It is precisely because my family had trouble with this that what they have done is a brave act, however difficult and painful.

Just yesterday, I thought about how my family might put Charlemagne to sleep while I was away, studying and teaching in a tropical paradise, pursuing my dreams with all the emotional toil and denial of others that sometimes entails. And, earlier in the week, I’d had a memory come to me: a memory of Charlemagne as a young dog, an unprecedented thing since this senile being had replaced the dog I grew up loving. It was recalling this that made me break up on the phone as I heard the news. Most of an hour, while my friends waited, was what the dog I’d known and loved in grade school rated. It had been kindest on me, who had known it as a mercy killing for longer than anyone else, and who had anticipated the possibility, beyond this, of having my Charlemagne back. I’d cried briefly, then returned upstairs to my waiting friends, on the day before their departure for the full winter holiday. It was only when I’d said the words to them that the tears had really come, and then involuntarily in the bathroom as I saw myself in grief in the mirror, my Charlemagne dead. And then, at times on the phone to a friend. And then now.

Charlemagne is dead, and I’ve turned him into a fucking essay: I think this, head in hands.

Charlemagne was a good dog, and we’ve killed him. This is a fact. But we should have done it sooner, and he had, indisputably, a great life -- which should be what death is an occasion, as the Greeks knew, to appraise and, if possible, to celebrate. My parents bought him a doggie bed and, when he didn’t take to it, another. Tatiana had great fun pulling this cushion much larger than herself all the way across the room, but Charlemagne preferred, by that point, the floor and, perhaps, a cover. He was as spoiled as any dog I’ve ever known. Of all the dogs who have lived on the planet, his life ranked among the best. Such was -- and is -- my parents’ largess. But when the time came, when wanting him to live became a selfish act based on love for a being whose life had become confinement within an unwilling body, we had found the strength that love requires, the strength to release someone, to remove his pain even if it meant removing him from us.

I’d hope that someone would do the same for me.

YOUR WEEKLY ASSIGNMENT

A card game entitled "The Constitution of the Four Suits" has been added.

As morbid as it is, in more ways than one, I still owe you eight columns. Two series have been started as part of this column, one on France and one entitled The Matriarchy. Both will continue.

No assignment this week. Go home and enjoy your loved ones.

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