My dog J.J. gave my family 13 good years. Now it's her time to go—but to where?
I don’t have any experience with putting a dog to sleep, but I am about to get some. Today, at 10:50 a.m. I have an appointment with the compassionate, kind-hearted Dr. Lisa to kill our beloved J.J., the mid-size mystery-meat mutt whom Cyd and I adopted almost 13 years ago. We were newly affianced and newly in possession of a home, one that had yet to be filled with children or even furniture. In that cold, dead January of 2005, our first sofa, an import from my old bachelor pad, met our first dog, a white-with-black-spots refugee from the South. We had no idea why she had needed rescuing, so we just figured that, as a Jewish dog, she had faced vicious anti-Semitism in the small town whence she came. Her anxiety seemed to bear out that theory, and we spent a lot of her first few months with us assuring her that she was now safe. She could stop running. She was with her people now.
So there we were: a young, engaged couple; a dog; and a sofa. I can’t say that the dog and the sofa got along. From the first day that J.J. lived with us, she began tearing at the sofa, first a few tufts of stuffing, soon large chunks. Trying to salvage a few cushions, we began stashing them in the bathroom before we left for work in the morning, then reassembling the sofa when we got home. In the meantime, J.J. gnawed on the sofa’s frame, and there wasn’t much we could do about that. But of course she was our child, and we all know that children destroy things. So what could we do?