Taking Care of Capucine
or, Three Years an Old Dog
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I sleep on the single mattress in the living room to let her go out in the night, in case the runs come back. It has been a difficult 48 hours. I have trouble sleeping, thinking about her a lot. Thinking about calling a hospice service, to be ready. Surely that’s still weeks away… The oncologist said it could be eight months. Before I fall asleep, I hear her claws scratch the floor in the spare bedroom above me.
Wake at 5 a.m. to the sound of the front door. I doze in the dawn light hearing while Karine is outside. She woke to find Cap in the spare, breathing too hard.
Capucine has trouble with the stairs, Karine isn’t sure she’ll get down them. But the mountain dog persists.
She has a long pee, shits in the cedar hedges, and then stands in the front lawn panting. Looking… at what?
Karine tries to get her back inside but she just lies down. I come out in the grey light to say, “Booboo!” Her tail does not wag. Her breath is ragged and her head seems thin.
All three of us sit in the grass together, watching the day come up.
Then I change, check the poop in the hedge, and decide to call the Animal Emergency Hospital in Vanier. They recommend she come in.
While Karine changes, Cap gets up on her own, pees to the left of the young maple, and walks to the edge of the lawn. I open the garage and she heads right for it, because she knows we have somewhere to go. I lift her in the car, the first of many lifts.
Aug. 2, 2016—A Unanswered Pitch
Dear Stacy,
I hope this finds you well. I had a story idea to pitch to Canadian Living in the Pets section about the family-friendly dogs known as Berners.
Gaining in popularity in North America in the last few years, this ancient breedwas used to draft carts during the Roman empire. Despite their striking looks, loyalty and love of pulling, the breed almost faded away until the start of the 20th century when they were rediscovered in a few Bernese mountains farms. Named after the Swiss capital (and often mispronounced as "Burmese") the tri-colour beauties are both strong and fragile from their resurgence from small numbers.
Known to have a life expectancy of about six years, the pups are unfortunately plagued by various diseases: heart, hip, and organ-related. Martin Kihn wrote in Bad Dog about his less-than-mild-mannered Berner Hola: "We were filling out all the forms that said basically this dog is incredibly special and deserves first-class treatment, and by the way, it’s so deeply flawed it must never be allowed to breed."
There is a Swiss expression that suggests the dogs can definitely grow old:
"Three years a young dog, three years a good dog, three years an old dog—anything else is a gift from God."
Veterinarian Kelly Ferguson, owner and operator of Cranberry Hill Animal Hospital in Kemptville, ON, has bred Berners all her professional life. She recommends joint supplements, a natural food diet, and monitoring the hips and knees for best quality of life. They are winter dogs who love to climb, and their chests are made for pulling and being massaged for their hard work. Shade and water are always necessary in these warmest months, as well as non-slippery floors all year-round to minimize the chance of injury.
Having owned a Berner for two years and being lucky enough to have Kelly as a vet, I have the experience and the professional perspective to craft a solid little piece that explains how these gentle giants that used to be drafting dogs 2,000 years ago are still wonderful family dogs. I would touch on diet, temperament, quirks, and problems that let prospective owners know what to expect.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Joseph
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She doesn’t want to eat on a Monday. Her blood work comes back weird. We find out she has cancer that Wednesday. We dry our tears and drive up immediately to Thomas’s cottage on a quiet corner of a quiet lake in Val-des-Monts.
Cap eats poutine, we pop a bottle of bubbly juice. She chases dragonflies on the dock. We all swim and she jumps into the lake to “save” Karine. She marauds through the underbrush, she begs for our snacks but still won't eat much, she cuddles each of us the next morning. We all swim together before breakfast.
That Friday, we decide to start chemo for acute lymphocytic leukemia and by Monday morning, after watching the dawn and stopping by the emerg, we bring her home to die. She’s feverish and likely has pneumonia. (It's rarely the actual cancer that kills you.)
We get back home around 10 a.m. She is quite sedated, with a yellow bandage holding an IV line to her forearm. She still breathes harshly and it doesn’t help that there is smoke in the air. I carry her outside and we put a fan on her face and touch every single inch of her.
The echo of childhood in death is real—even for dogs:
Unable to get up and down stairs well, lack of basic motor skills.
Breathing heavily, as when we drove a nine-week-old puppy home for 90 minutes in the dark.
Incontinent, unwilling to pee or poo on command.
Seemingly unaware of us, focused inward.
Lying in what looks like uncomfortable ways: both legs splayed out behind her; her front legs going one way, her back legs going another.
Karine makes her a bouquet of daisies and spirea, grasses and milkweed and coreopsis. She builds her a den under the dining room table, with pillows and toys. But first, we lie in the grass behind the garage and Karine, with a towel over her eyes, asks: “What happens in The Other Wind, Joe?”
I finished the novel a few nights before. I’d read her the ending, and then told her the start as she fell asleep. As we lie in the grass, I pet Cap and recount Chapter 1 again, going into more detail and with more flourish. A mender can’t sleep without being dragged into the land of the dead, so he goes to the Archmage Sparrowhawk, who is an old, magicless farmer. He keeps a hand on the mender all through the night, and that touch keeps him safe. The Archmage thinks a puppy might help, when he recalls something from his foolish youth—and we both tear up when I recount Ged getting stuck in the land of the dead because he went too far, and how his little compaion otak, a kind of fox-cat, washes him, licks him and returns his spirit to his body with a patient, dry tongue.
I read this part aloud, when we are in the dining room, in Cap’s den, in which Ged asks himself:
“What’s the difference between us and the animals? Speech? All the animals have some way of speaking, saying come and beware and much else; but they can’t tell stories, and they can’t tell lies…
“So maybe the difference isn’t language. Maybe it’s this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us…
“We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We’re yoked, and they’re free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom…”
To be outdoors with our tri-colour creature is to know, or at least to witness, this freedom. Unleashed, she sprints to the top of a snowy hill and keeps running. On and on, almost out of sight, definitely out of my control. So I have to run after her.
First you swear under your breath, then you watch your footing as your boots slide into the deep snow. You get used to the uneven pace. You start to sprint too. Double-check your pocket zippers are closed, and then forget them. Forget about the leash slung over one shoulder too. Forget your feet because you feel your face.
Where is Cap? She’s a roadrunner’s cloud of snow in the distance. Bigger strides then, keep looking down. You see her paw and claw marks. You laugh. She’s not running—she’s chugging the path. You huff and puff and try to catch up. And you laugh some more. How could you ever catch her?
Sept. 11, 2020—A Tone Poem
You'd think she was dead, that long, furry shape on the couch. She's facing away, into a pillow, and her greasy right ear is flipped open. The pink skin suggests a wound but there's nothing wrong with it. Her belly climbs and falls. Outside, the seagulls are cawing, the finches are calling, and the wren that hit the window and broke its neck is silent. It's buried by the Rideau where we put it this morning. Fisher Avenue is throbbing. Car doors are closing. There's a light breeze in the leaves that are blanching. They are losing their colour like the face of someone who hears the voice of the coroner on the phone. Most are changing from green to pale green. Some are turning sickly yellow and others angry red. But there's no illness or emotion in them, as there is no death in my napping dog.
But when my dog turns six, I think about the old adage about her breed: three years a young dog, three years a good dog, three years an old dog, and the rest is up to god. Our new vet, despite their proximity to our new house, is not to my liking. They upsell and overprescribe and react to symptoms. They also don't own Bernese mountain dogs, as our old vet did. So every year or so, Cap and I drive down to Kemptville to see Kelly. We went on Aug. 28, to sit in a tiny room wearing masks as Cap apprehensively showed Kelly her belly, her ears, the pads and webs of her paws, the small shaking in her front legs, and her teeth and gums. Kelly—who lives at the end of my old road, where I'd see her walking a long driveway from the mailbox to her stone house, followed by two familiar dog shapes of black, white, and tan—Kelly doesn't breed Berners anymore. "Because they are so unhealthy," she said.
The diagnosis of allergies in dogs is difficult. Beyond knowing all possible allergens and all available products that soothe symptoms, vets are as ignorant as even the most mindful pet owner. It's just a lot of guesswork. With Kelly's direction, we conducted food trials and ruled out animal proteins after eight months of potatoes and fish. With our new vet's direction, we did allergy testing and determined she'd be a "good candidate" for immunotherapy, which we've been doing for 10 months. With notes from the dermatologist who shaved her side and filled her with dozens of allergens, we put her on steroids for longer than anyone was comfortable back in the spring of 2019. Now it’s the regular administering of antihistamines, daily pills hidden in balls of ground pork, and allergy shots for dust mites every 10 days.
Capucine may one day face the "big dog" issues that all purebreds seem to attract: joint problems, muscle sprains, organ failures, cancers, and other such diseases. All these things amount to various websites saying Berners have a life expectancy of six years. Which is why we decided to make her food: ground pork, cabbage, tomato, peas, rice, sunflower oil, fish oil, and Hillary's Blend supplements. It’s why we pay attention to her little limps, her skin, her coat, her eyes, her nose, her gums. It's why I flip open her greasy ear every time I can, so it can air out. It certainly is nice to hear from Kelly: "You are doing a great job with her."
It's late summer in the life of Capucine, maybe mid-summer. But like all animals, she is unaware of her age and her time. What we see in her is what we put there, and right now I see her hairy paws spasm as she dreams about something worth twitching about. And I think she deserves a good belly rub for that.
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We do get some tail wags after all: when she sees us as we are checking out of the emerg, and later, at home, when I come to her under the table and say, “Booboo!” A tiny wiggle—I’ll take it.
She doesn’t die in her den, she gets up one last time and I help her over to the living room. She stands precariously and I debate bringing her outside, but we plop down in front of the record player. We experiment with propping her head up on her bed and with covers. She starts coughing then, around 2 p.m.
I say her name over and over, and tell her what a good girl she is. Karine runs her fingers through her fur, and tells her what a great dog she is. We read out wonderful and sad messages we’ve received from Sam Meade, John Bellefeuille, Christiaan & Sam, Tanya, Renée, Madison, Isaac, Pascal, Matt. Beautiful notes from Kevin, Eric, Jenny, Benji, Brenna, Jeff, Ainsley, Jess, Sho and the cousines.
I tell Karine something I decided to hide, about Cap almost getting flattened by a truck. She ran after a robin that went across Crozier Road and Cap stopped at the edge of the property just as the pick-up went by at 100 km/h.
“What did you give us?”
She changed my life. I’m kinder, more responsible. She helped me realized I had a drinking problem. She made me love you even more.
She made me proud, she was the best thing in my life. My best friend.
She made winters more bearable. She made me live more presently. She made me grateful for the present moment.
After 16 days of drought, the rain comes heavy. At the hour of her death, the skies pour out and thunder rumbles. The hospice vet arrives in a black mask and walks us through all the steps: saline, sedative, then the big one. I leave the front door open, so she can hear the rain. She dies with her eyes open and with a squishy face, with our arms around her. I tell her, “au lit.”
Karine spoons her, is warmed by her. I slip my toes under her armpits, like I did when she was anxious. It soothes us to see her quiet, seemingly asleep. She is okay, finally.
I find an apple seed on the living room floor right in front of her nose. I open her lip and pop it beside her gum, like a little breath mint. Take that with you. I remove the yellow tape and IV line to release her paw from this bondage, and the vet helps me wrap a little band aid around the wound.
I stick my fingers between her pads, softened from the bag balm Karine put on the day before and smell them: still smells like corn chips. Then I smell her back: still smells like Cap. Thank goodness. Oh, thank the heavens. It was so nice to smell her. Warmth. Barn. Sweet and savoury.
Capucine. We must have said her name 200 times in five hours. We lift her onto the stretcher, and the vet covers her body with a blanket. We lift her out our front door and place her in the vet’s trunk, the last of many lifts. I pull the blanket at her cheek over her face so she won’t get rain in her eyes.
We cover her face before the vet closes her trunk. She touches Cap’s head lightly too and drives away. Then we hold each other in the rain. It feels good. Not quite closure, more like balm.
Freedom, of an awful variety. Even before we got her, we knew we'd lose her one day.
“Wanna go for a walk with me?” asks Karine. And we grab our rain jackets and set off to the field, in thunder and lightning and big rain.
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I didn’t sleep well all weekend but I can’t sleep that night. I hallucinate the sounds of her breathing, sometimes ragged, sometimes dreaming, in the fan. I go downstairs to get rid of the saline shots I used to flush Cap’s line during the day. Pop those into the needle box filled with all her allergy syringes. I hear scratches that sound like her moving above me.
I don’t want to be further away from her, from a day she isn’t alive. Hence, no sleep. I have felt this space widen before and I don’t like it.
She was so youthful, even last year people would ask us how old she was and we’d say, eight, and they’d say, months?, and we'd say, no, years.
Ultimately, we never knew Cap as an old dog. Just as a young dog and, of course, as a good one.
❤️❤️❤️