We adopted you in 2006. It was one of those February days when the raw winter wind falls dormant and the birds, hungry for the warmer days that signal new life, gaily chirrup the sun’s reawakening. And although we knew this day—the unspoken today day—would come, that it would sneak up on us and shock us in the way age often does, we didn’t think about that then.

We found you outside a pet store in a two-tiered row of metal cages bathed in a wash of pale-yellow light, dew glistening from the bars as the sun followed its long path through the lofty mid-morning sky. Your siblings slept huddled, exhausted from a morning of chattering humans and yapping dogs, unfamiliar smells and unfamiliar sounds. But not you. No, you were alive:  pouncing on your sister, biting her ear, grunting and growling, growling and grunting, oblivious to the commotion of the outside world. Despite your tendency to torment, or rather because of it, we chose you: Rasputin, a fitting name.

From that pet store we bought the essentials and nonessentials—food, collar and leash, bowls, plush toys, and a royal blue fleece blankie with white polka dot bones—before paying your charge, and saving your sister from further trauma. What we were getting ourselves into, we didn’t know. But your new mom carried you to a new car swaddled in your new blankie as your new dad packed the new possessions signaling a new addition to our new relationship. And so began your long journey home, the long arc between that day and the today day.

For sixteen years, our lives would trace forward along that arc, one formed through spontaneity and existing nowhere else but with you. Lining that arc were the cobblestones of memories overlooked and marginalized later remember and exaggerated:  crying until your mom caved and released you from crate training; inadvertently dipping your outsize paw in my coffee and tasting its bite; destuffing every new toy within minutes; snatching a bird from midair and needing held back while I ended its suffering; screaming a heart-skipping scream when your mom accidentally shut your tail in the car door; sprinting from your sister and dodging her charges at the last second; injuring your paw and limping around on the wrong leg in search of further sympathy; sitting on your pappy’s lap as he succumbed to Alzheimer’s; tearing wrapping paper from new toys into red, green, gold confetti; displaying small man syndrome by barking at horses from a distance yet cowering up close; balancing like prairie dog so you could better observe the world around you; chasing balls, going for hikes, gazing at your mom through upturned eyes during baths, and routinely humping her leg. And, as we walked together along that arc, our lives altered almost imperceptibly.

Then today jumped out at us from behind the bushes of routine.

We knew she lurked in the shadow as you anxiously paced the house, or barked at some ghost, or sank on your frail hind legs. Even so, your end still seemed somehow impossible, as though you were unlike any other dog, your mortality in doubt.

The following Monday we took you for a euphemism. That ‘end-of-life assessment’ confirmed our worst fear:  it was time.

The decision to say goodbye to you wasn’t easy. Our therapist attempted to exculpate us, to nudge us from the paralysis of rose-tinted irrationality that had us pushing the today day into the tomorrow day.

“You’ve given him a good life, but I can hear him crying. It sounds like he’s in pain,” she said with knitted brows, the twang of her accent seeming to draw out the pain. 

We sat in silence. I looked down. Your mom looked away. Our eyes glazed over with fear and denial as our thoughts sprinted from the obvious end to her comments.

“What’s holding you back?” she asked, in the nonchalant way therapists attack the heart.

Besides love? Besides not wanting to let him go? I thought. “I think it’s . . . he’s been around for our entire relationship, our entire marriage,” I responded, before pausing a pause filled with the future echoes of an emptier home. “I think we’re afraid about what will happen to us when he’s gone . . . about whether he’s the only thing holding us together . . . about whether this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, so to speak.” Truth be told, it was a lot of weight for your 18-pound frame to bear.

The following Monday we took you for a euphemism. That “end-of-life assessment” confirmed our worst fear:  it was time.

And that’s how we chose today as the today day.

Six in the morning comes early when the hour of death approaches. I lay still, frozen in the knowledge that the countdown will begin the moment I peel back the sheets, roll onto my side, touch my feet to the floor. There are no smells, no sounds; just a heaviness hanging like a fog. I repulse all thoughts, as though if I’m not conscious, then we’re not living, and you’re not dying. And when the soupy gray memories inevitably descend, I crawl out of bed ahead of sorrow.

It is one of those February days. I take my coffee outside. There, in the pre-dawn darkness, I stare into oblivion at life passing in the silence just beyond, forgetting about it—the unambiguous it—if only momentarily. But then the courthouse bells announce the hour, the immovable force of time, and in their metallic peals I taste the bitter reminder of our impending goodbye.

The appointed hour approaches.

7:00 a.m. You wake, pressed against your mother’s side and draped in cream-colored cotton sheets irredeemably soiled with smudges from years of dirty paws. Those smudges come off as an epitaph, as if the sheets will remember you forever.

7:30 a.m. You’re served scrambled eggs, this last meal a first. Novel, enticing:  gone is the fastidiousness we came to expect from you.

10:30 a.m. You wander the yard in circles looking for something you’d lost:  a ball, a stick, a familiar recollection. When you see me, you tramp hunchbacked over the frozen earth before climbing, step-by-agonizing-step, into the last home you’ll ever know.

11:30 a.m. You pace the house, the tap-tap-tap of your nails on the hardwood floor sounding like the seconds of a ticking clock.

1:30 p.m. You fall asleep on your mother’s chest in a rare tranquil moment for your tiny heart. In your resting face I glimpse an unstoppable future, a future which unleashes in me a torrent of torment.

2:30 p.m. Outside again, you stand on the porch as the warm white rays caress your hoary face. You close your eyes and raise your whiskered chin, as though you wish to experience the sun’s kiss one final time.

3:30 p.m. We drag ourselves to the car; one foot rooted comfortably in the past, the other hovering uneasily above the future, our bodies weighted down by agony and aversion. Your mother carries you swaddled in a shabby, sea foam green fleece blankie. It seems befitting, this end.

3:45 p.m., 3:50 p.m., 3:55 p.m. . . . 3:56 p.m. . . . 3:57 p.m. . . . 3:58 p.m. . . . 3:59 p.m.

“It will happen quickly,” the vet whispers, almost promising. “He will just go to sleep—a deep, peaceful sleep.”

I nod as I struggle to dislodge the terrible lump growing high in my throat. It’s happening quickly.

And just as you begin to go to sleep your deep, peaceful sleep, you look up at me with something like fear, something like reassurance, something like a yearning for eternity. Sliding by on the mirror of your eyes, somewhere between the insomnia of the “could haves” and “should haves,” the missed opportunities and lingering regrets, I see the reflections of the “did haves” and “did dos,” the memories spread across sixteen years:  the times when you cried for release or the time when you dipped your paw in coffee or the times when you destuffed new toys or the time when you snatched the bird or the time when you screamed a heart-skipping scream or the times when you evaded your sister or the time you forgot which paw you injured or the times when you sat on your pappy’s lap or the times when you tore open presents or the times when you tried to intimidate or the times when you stood tall or the times when you chased a ball or hiked or bathed or humped or cried or arfed or barked or sighed—when time stops. And in that minute of fugitive seconds, you were gone.

The appointed hour passes.

In the room where we said our final goodbye, a wooden farmhouse style sign hung on the wall across an empty space that seemed to stretch forever:  “Dogs leave paw prints on your heart.”

But what happens when you take my heart with you? What happens when the 18-pound hole where my heart once sat never stops panging? Because I hurt, in an indescribable way. It’s not the sharp, localized pain felt in a sting, a strike, a stab—though it is those things too—but a dull, full-body ache tarrying just below the skin; an incommensurable sensation of emptiness, and loss, imprinted on my body like an unwelcome tattoo. I don’t know what to call it, this feeling born of the awareness that love carries a steep price, except to know it can only be called “pain.”

I can’t help feeling like I’ve betrayed you, as if it was my hand that took your life. Nor can I expiate the redounding guilt. You gave me every ounce of your tiny frame, asking only for love and protection in return. Still, I failed you. I couldn’t protect you from today.

If there’s any consolation, though, it’s this:  I know the anxiety, disorientation, pain can no longer touch you; I know you’re at peace. And when the raw winter wind returns, carrying what sounds like your bark echoing from this now emptier home, I know you’re out there, somewhere, once again proving the truth of your eponym.