Ask For What You Need

We all got dressed and went to the animal hospital Monday night. Valentine’s Day. A day of love.

Our pets are family. We love them so much, each with their own personality. When Finn, our deaf Australian shepherd stopped eating this past weekend and then sat down every few feet on her walk, we knew something was wrong, even though she had been to the vet just last month and had gotten a clean bill of health. John took her back to the animal hospital to get her checked out. We were expecting something simple, easy to fix.

When we rescued Finn six years ago, she spent the first weekend leaping on and over furniture and racing through the house and yard like no dog I had ever witnessed. Both Feliks and John cast dagger eyes my way that whole weekend as if to say, “what on earth have you done?” All I knew is that she was deaf and her owner needed to either rehome her or return her to the shelter. I couldn’t bear the thought of her going back to a shelter, so offered to adopt her. I imagined she would be great at agility courses since she could leap over any furniture in her path.

She settled in. She protected us from delivery people. She loved the lake and the stream that led to it. She was in charge, though we would soon have two other dogs, both male and larger than her. She ruled the roost. She was also, simply put, Feliks’ favorite.

John texted from the animal hospital that night: “this is bad.” Her blood test results were completely whacked. Her red blood cell count was “falling off a cliff,” the vet said. They admitted her to the ICU and started trying to fix what was wrong. Her immune system was attacking her body. The next day, we waited for a sign that she was better. She rallied briefly, then her red blood cell count fell even more. We asked them to do a transfusion. They did.

It didn’t help. Her numbers kept falling and she was struggling. The vet gently suggested that this was not survivable. We struggled with the implications of that—had we done everything we could?—and Monday night, after 3 days of trying, we agreed that letting her go was the humane thing to do. John, Feliks, and I bundled up and drove to the animal hospital at 7:30pm. We spent an hour on the floor with her, hugging and petting her and talking to her; her deafness had never stopped us from talking to her. Then Feliks and I left to go home while John stayed with Finney for the end.

As we drove off, Feliks said, crying, “I really wish Eeb was at our house.” Eeb is his horse, and I understood this need. “We’ll go to the barn to see him right now,” I answered. I texted the barn owner to tell her, lest she think we were horse-stealing strangers showing up at the barn at 9pm, and we went. “Do you want me to go up to the barn with you, or do you need to go alone?” I asked when we got there. “You stay here,” he said. And so I sat in the car while he went to Eeb’s stall to have a good cry while hanging onto his horse’s neck. 20 minutes later, he reappeared and we drove home.

John had lain down with Finn on the floor as we left, spooning her. He stayed there while the vet, also crying, gave Finn the shot that would stop her heart. “You’re doing a great thing,” the vet said to John. “Most people don’t even come in when we have to do this.”

As hard as it is, that absence is simply unthinkable to us. The trust our dogs have in us is too deep to let that happen. So John had lain on the floor with her as she turned into stardust, safe in his arms. “She expelled so much blood,” he said. “So much. There’s no way she could have lived.” He cleaned her up and cleaned the floor around her, unwilling to have her lay there in her own blood, unwilling to have the other people there see her like that.

He knew what he most needed to do, and he did it for Finn and for himself. Feliks knew what he most needed—to see Eeb and bury himself in Eeb’s mane and neck for a good, uninhibited cry. I’m proud of both of them for intuiting what they needed—and asking for it.

What do you believe you most need at this moment? How can you ask for that or create it for yourself? Can you trust your intuition.