Seven years is a very long time to spend with The Departed, but not nearly long enough to spend with The Dog.

The night before The Dog’s death, The Child stays up very late, baking red velvet cake from a mix, and then cleaning the kitchen to a near-pristine state. She sleeps on the sofa so that she can be near him, but sleeps so soundly that when he collapses on the kitchen floor, she doesn’t hear him fall and thrash on the floor, struggling but unable to get up until I hear him and come downstairs to help. Eventually, he goes to sleep on the carpet, and I sit next to him and watch him. When the vet comes, we cry, missing him before he is gone, but then in a moment, he is gone, and we are overwhelmed with peaceful sadness.

The vet leaves after a brief discussion of cremation arrangements.

The Child says, we should scatter his ashes in the college. We used to explore there, and he liked it there.

Maybe we could scatter his ashes in the ocean at Cannon Beach, I suggest. He loved exploring the beach.

We remember the first time we took him to Cannon Beach: He saw the rented minivan in the driveway and claimed his seat before we had finished packing. We had planned to take him, of course, but he just wanted to be sure. He loved walking on the beach as much as we did, but not quite as long, and simply stopped and laid down in the sand when he’d had too much, not defiant, but joyfully tired – happy to be there, and to be with us, but too exhausted to go any further.

I find pictures of him on the beach, and The Child finds her favorite picture: Him sleeping on the sofa when he thought no one was home. He slept peacefully there, but other times he barked and ran in his sleep, and we always wondered why: It was not a joyful bark, and it was definitely a fearful run.

The memories exhaust me, and I stare at the tv, or read the news, or scroll through Facebook, not liking anything, just scrolling. The Child spends some time watching tv with me, munching on the cake she made the night before. After a while, she gets up, and takes up all the mats from the floor, the ones put there in an effort to help the The Dog not to slip on the wood.  She vacuums the floor, and then the carpet, and then washes the floor. In the evening, I hear her doing laundry, and cleaning the laundry room: rearranging the cat dishes and moving the dog dish to the garage. She makes a neat pile of all the towels and blankets we’ve saved for dog use, and announces we will take it to The Humane Society, along with the Costco bag of dog food that I bought for him last week.

The Dog had lovely manners when we got him: Someone had taken the time to train him, and teach him some rules. No Begging At The Table was one of them, and that ended quickly enough at our house. I put a deliberate stop to No Dogs On The Furniture – what is the point of having furniture if you can’t snuggle on it with your friends? –  and invited The Dog to join me on the sofa. He hesitated, clearly conflicted, but then I started catching him sleeping on the sofa when I came in the room, and sometimes on my bed, too.

Time passed, and he stopped, contenting himself with sleeping on the floor next to me in my office, during the day, and after The Departed left, on the floor in my bedroom at night. It was a good arrangement for both of us, until he started falling when he wanted to go downstairs. Eventually, he simply paced at the top of the stairs until I took the hint and carried him down.

Sometimes he’d forget, and go crashing down the stairs, or fight me as I tried to carry him, and I thought we’d both go down the stairs, and then I realized, that, too, would have to stop. I only had to block the stairs off for about a week, and he never came upstairs again – sleeping alone in the family room, during the day, and also at night. We visited when I came down in the morning, and usually had to clean up an accident and pat him on the head and say, it’s okay, Buddy, it’s not your fault.

We still took our walks together, when we could, but sometimes I was too busy, and sometimes it was just too hard for him. His hearing was almost gone, and I started to realize that his eyes were, too: He would try to climb the front porch several steps before we reached it. He knew it was there, that it was coming, or maybe could see it and just wasn’t sure how far away it was. I moved slowly and guided him gently and lavished him with praise he couldn’t hear, each time.

He never complained, and you’d have to have known him in the days when he excitedly wiggled at the sight of his leash to realize he was simply getting through the day, these days.

I start to walk him midday, when there’s more light, and it helps a little, until the day he doesn’t want to go at all. I manage to persuade him, but once outside, he’s not walking in a straight line. His head cocks slightly to the side and he either veers off slightly or leans against me. We walk slowly, and I let him lean as much as he wants. Back inside, I watch him circle and stumble and finally lies down, ears perked, head cocked to one side, trying to make sense of the world as it sways and spins around him.

He is having another stroke, and I am powerless to stop it, or to ease the suffering that he will not complain about.

Every story has the same ending. We are never ready for it, but still we have no choice but to say goodbye.

I’ve been waiting and preparing myself for what I know is coming with The Dog. He recovered more than I expected from his stroke last year, but he’s still very slow. I miss our long morning walks, I miss his excited wiggling when I walk in the door. I miss my happy boy.

He struggles up the stairs, more and more. He wants to be with me, so he won’t just stay downstairs, but often he only makes it about halfway up, and then I hear him, sliding back down. When I hear it in time, I rush out and help him with a little extra support from behind – just enough to make it to the top. Other times I just carry him up. He’s grateful either way.

Grateful isn’t quite the same as happy, though.

He starts having accidents in the house. The Child and I try to be more attentive about letting him out more often, but sometimes even that doesn’t help.

I can see it bothers him. He knows what he’s supposed to do, and seems a bit confused when it happens.

I mention this idly to the Vet when I take one of the cats in for a checkup.

We haven’t seen him since just after his stroke, she says. Maybe you should bring him in?

I think his heart is going; he has a funny cough that only happens when he’s lying down, and according to the internet, it’s a sign of congestive heart failure.

No, I say. There’s not really much to be done. Old age comes to us all.

That’s true, she says. But maybe we can make it a little easier for him?

I bring him in a few days later. It is as I feared: they want to run all sorts of tests, hundreds of dollars I don’t have. They want to check his blood and do an x-ray to check his heart. I panic a bit, and hesitate.

The Vet sees my worry. Maybe, she says, we can do it this way. Let’s do the blood work on him and see if anything pops up. She’s worried about his heart – the internet is correct about this thing, at least – but rather than do those tests, she says, I should just wait until he falls asleep and then time his breathing.

That night, I have lineage society ladies over for a meeting. The Dog walks into the middle of the room and pees on the carpet as they watch.

The Vet calls the next day. His blood tests are fine – absolutely nothing strange on them. I tell her about the timed breathing test and she says, Well, that’s really excellent. That’s … well, that’s just really, really good.

He is still peeing on the carpet, I say.

She tells me it probably hurts too much for him to move, so he doesn’t get up when he should and then it’s too late. Since we know he can tolerate it, she wants to get him on some medication. This will help a lot with the arthritis, she says.

They’re big horse pills, but The Dog eats them happily enough when I put them on a cracker with peanut butter.

I don’t give it a lot of thought. I guess it can’t hurt him, I think.

The next evening, I go to the butcher to buy a leg of lamb for a pre-Easter dinner, and I pick up a meaty bone for The Dog, who is very pleased to get it. He spends the evening lying next to the fireplace, gnawing contentedly.

The evening after that, The Child and I come home a bit late, loaded up with groceries. We hear The Dog barking as the garage door opens.

When we get into the house, he is bouncing around. He cannot contain his excitement. He races around the kitchen island, back and forth across the living room, then rushes up and looks at me gleefully.

He wiggles.

He doesn’t have a tail, so he has nothing to wag; my dog wiggles where other dogs wag.

He wiggles, and he doesn’t stop. He waits eagerly for me to take him for a walk, and so great is his excitement that I forget about the possibility that frozen peas will melt in the grocery bag and ruin the crackers they are surely packed next to. He wants to walk, he wants to romp, and I want to take him.

His pace is brisk for a few minutes, and then he slows down, but his enthusiasm is undimmed.

Things are never what I think they are, and though this usually causes me no end of difficulties, this time, I am pleased.