Ode to Bodhi

After Joan Didion

I woke up to my mom unlocking the door to my room. My eyes flickered opened as I heard the rustling of the door handle. “I need to tell you my pain” my mom said desperately, slowly approaching my bedside. My mind wandered, thinking about all the things I could’ve done to cause her harm. “This morning Dad came into our room and said that Bodhi had pooped all over the place and that he wasn’t cleaning it up”. With a guilty conscience, I rolled over, putting my covers over my head, as I knew the next thing she would do was ask for my help.

Bodhi had been on a decline for a while, his body grew weaker as his arthritis overcame him. He couldn’t stand up without being lifted by a harness and often collapsed from his wobbly stability while walking. Yoga mats and extra carpeting lined the wooden kitchen floor to provide traction for his slippery paws. He liked to sleep next to my parents bed, as he always did for the majority of his life. With his arthritis in the picture, getting him up the stairs every night was difficult to say the least. Bodhi took over 10 pills a day and got a shot in his hind legs every Friday. On my parents’ birthday, which we celebrated as one joint day since their birthdays were five days apart, we had a family talk about Bodhi’s struggle. We acknowledged that it was becoming progressively worse and that his time was shortening. The decision we had to make was either to push him through to when my older sister Kaitlyn came home from college in December, or to let him go. Even though my dad expressed his doubts, the consensus was to push him through, thinking it would be painful for her to say goodbye without physically being present. We knew that the time period between early November and when Kaitlyn returned would be a laborious one, so we agreed that everyone had to had to take part. Most of the time the work fell on myself or my dad because “we were the only ones that could lift him”. I put that in quotation marks because everyone could it was just a question of if they actually tried. It made me mad to have to be so heavily relied on out of others’ sheer laziness.

Slowly but surely I sauntered down stairs, put on my dad’s size thirteen sneakers (because I was too lazy to find my own) and headed out the patio door. There Bodhi lie on the stone tile, head propped up, looking as beautiful and healthy as ever. That was the thing. From the outside, Bodhi was alive and well. Only when he whimpered because his feet were uncomfortably positioned underneath him or when he stopped eating his food because he could only lower his head to a certain extent without his hind legs giving out and you had to hold the bowl up for him could you tell something was wrong. It killed me knowing mentally he was the same eight week old pup he was when we first got him, but physically his body was failing him. He had good days and bad days, but that day was the worse we had seen him.

I spent the entire day trying to find in-home euthanasia vets. We wanted to do it at home to spare Bodhi’s nerves and to make sure he was comfortable. After calling about five or six, I began to lose hope, until one who hadn’t even picked up when I first tried to contact her called me back. My mom and I were about to confirm with her until my dad started to complain about the pricing. It was double the amount to do it at home as it was to do it in a hospital, cremation and all. Finally, we decided the hospital was the better option, not for me, not for my mom, and certainly not for Bodhi, but my dad’s stringent budgeting apparently had all the say on this one.  

Shortly after, Bodhi, while still laying down, pooped all over himself and my mom’s expensive silk carpet. I grabbed the “Incredible!”, a bucket of cold water, and several towels and frantically began to clean off his fur while simultaneously scrubbing the carpet. My little sister came downstairs and sat at Bodhi’s side, petting him while I scrambled to avoid a potential stain. She began to get upset, and I remember incessantly telling her “Don’t pity him, he’s not pitying himself so why should we”.

My mom, dad, and I all counted to three and hoisted Bodhi’s one hundred and ten pounds into the trunk of the car. Both of my parents went inside to grab a few things for what I would call a trip to death. “Grab a banana!” I told my mom, knowing it was Bodhi’s favorite snack. Everyone piled in the car while I ran rampant around the house trying to find the polaroid camera. I wanted a physical object to remember this day and there’s something nostalgic about a polaroid picture. On the ride there, I sat in the trunk with Bodhi, periodically petting him, listening to his heavy breathing and constant pant, thinking about how I wouldn’t be hearing those sounds on the ride home. I stared out the window, watching the street lights pass, looking into the windshields of the cars behind us, trying to distract myself. When we arrived I felt one hundred pounds heavier and an overall sense of doom numbed my body. I snapped a picture of Bodhi before my parents opened the truck for him to be lifted onto a metal table so he could be rolled into the hospital.

We were brought into a room with a couch, a chair, and a ceiling with a sky painted on it. I remember questioning the vet to ask exactly what “putting an ET tube in” meant, scared they were going to bring him back dead without me being able to say goodbye. Bodhi started crying and fidgeting with anxiety. My hurt of seeing him this way turned into anger because of my dad’s refusal for not letting us do this at home. They laid blankets on the floor and lowered Bodhi down onto them. “You guys can have as much time as you want” said the vet. “Can you come back in ten minutes?” said my mom. After the vet left we facetimed Kaitlyn in, all said our last goodbyes, got our last slobbery licks on the face, and gave our last furry hugs. “You’re gonna get medicine now Bo. You’re gonna feel so much better,” my mom and older sister assured him. It wasn’t until the vet came back in the room that I started breaking down. It’s scary knowing you have total control over an animal’s life. You question if you’re doing the right thing. You think who am I to make this decision? She began the first injection to sedate him. I rested my head on his hips as his head slowly lowered to the ground. She then started the next injection, the one that kills him. The room erupted with tears. Even my dad, who insisted he didn’t care about Bodhi, had watery eyes. She put her stethoscope to his heart. “He’s gone”.