Life on the Leash

Tom painted a pretty picture for me while I was away, lest I worry myself sick about what was going on at home. “Zeke’s fine, he’s running around. He’s fine.”

I knew that “running around” hasn’t been an option for Zeke for the past few weeks, but I kept my mouth shut. Something in the way he said it precluded me from asking more questions. I had a job to do in California, and Tom knew that if he told me everything that was going on with Zeke, I’d have trouble focusing. His edited version of the facts didn’t keep me from crying before I got out of bed on a few mornings, and losing it to the make-up and hair ladies as I talked about Zeke.

I dreaded seeing Tom at the airport - I knew his face would tell me everything, and it did. We weren’t even out of the airport parking lot and he said, “He’s bad. Zeke’s doing really bad, ok?”

He gave me the rundown … the week started off fine but Zeke declined rapidly on Friday. Saturday brought a frightening seizure (his second in two weeks). Tom was so worried about Zeke on Sunday that he almost had me take a cab from the airport so that he could stay home with him.

When we arrived home Tom took Sum outside so that I could greet feeble Zeke alone. My little man hitch-stepped to me and wagged his stumpy, creaky tail, but there was no dancing. No “You’re home! Hooray!” Just a tiny tail twitch that signified that he was happy to see me.

My Zeke.

I sat with him on his bed while Tom and I talked about the reality of the situation. Zeke was now a shadow of the dog we loved.

“Let’s wait,” Tom said. “You’re home now, maybe he’ll rebound.”

And he did.

He’s gotten a little better each day, but “better” is relative. He still sleeps all day. Falls. Gets confused. (”I hear you Mom, but I can’t find you.”) He’s still eating and keeping clean, though. He’ll take short strolls with me down to the garden, but he grazes car bumpers as we walk down the street, as if he can’t quite navigate his way around them. We had some low-key fun with a ball this morning, but he had trouble finding it if it rolled away from him.

Sumner is unmoved by the changes in Zeke, and it makes me a little angry. He’s jealous of the extra attention Zeke’s getting (particularly from Tom), and he’s taking advantage of Zeke’s weakness. Sum cleans out Zeke’s bowl if he looks away for too long. Payback is a bitch in the dog world too, I guess. Sumner is finally out from under Zeke’s dictatorship and he’s loving every minute. I thought that Sum, soft soul that he is, might understand the gravity of what’s going on, but he doesn’t.

I’ve been crying for three days straight now. Bawling, to be exact. I turned to my trainer friends for advice and they offered me great comfort, and their own “saying goodbye” stories that made me cry all over again.

Zeke is sacked out in his bed right beside me. He heard me sniffling (the soundtrack of our lives these days), lifted his head, looked at me for a moment as if to say, “You ok?” and then went back to sleep.