A Death in the Family

Augie Weiss, 2014-2024.

Clichés are never more cloying than when you need to hear something original, or at least true. “We’re sorry for your loss.” “They’re like part of the family.”

I’m sure you are, but what do you mean, “like”? He was my family and now he’s gone.

My wife Amy and I adopted Augie in 2014, six weeks or so after he was born to a litter of Lab mixes somewhere in the Deep South. A New York-based rescue shelter had saved the pregnant mother, and the errant father’s breed remains a mystery. (A DNA test once suggested Shetland Sheepdog.) We’d driven to Brooklyn, where the shelter’s puppy-mobile had set up shop that day, to see another mutt advertised online but he’d gone home with someone by the time we’d arrived. Then there was Augie, scoopable with one hand (72 pounds as of a week ago), all beige with a noticeable lick of white starting out as wings on the top of his head and spreading down the length of his snout like an elaborate corkscrew. 

We’d come to get a dog because we’d just lost a baby to miscarriage and emotional displacement was heavily indicated. I  also thought I could use the training as a father, as I’d hoped to be sooner or later. Turns out waking up in the middle of the night, “proofing” your home, cleaning up waste and obsessively fretting about every abnormality or sign of discomfort really is interspecial boot camp.

“He was our first baby,” Amy liked to say over the next ten years, a statement that people who love their pets affirm unhesitatingly but people who don’t – surely not all of them J.D. Vance supporters – seem to politely tolerate. But the science backs up the schmaltz. A 2015 study by the Japanese Psychological Association found that a dog’s long stare increases the levels of oxytocin in the person being gazed upon, creating an effect in the latter not unlike what a mother feels for her infant and vice versa. “[P]erhaps dogs,” the study concluded, “are the only animals capable of using human-like social cues such as the gaze.” Empathy, loyalty and openness were evolutionarily selected in dogs as we bred them out of their lupine origins to make their bond with humans as intimate as possible.

Julia, our daughter, was born a year later. 

There’s a photograph somewhere of Augie sniffing her as she lay on her belly on the floor, his first imprinting of the new addition. The kid passed whatever exam was being administered, and for all I know it had more to do with the contents of her diaper than of her character. But a near-perfect track record of excited tail wags and playful jumps don’t lie. Most recently these were when Julia stepped off the school bus. (There were regretfully unphotographed moments, too. She is a toddler in a bouncy chair with her entire forearm in Augie’s mouth. His face betrays a combination of Are you fucking kidding me? and Augustinian patience. Never even clenched his jaw.)

At the end were signs superstitious and diagnostic. There always are in the rearview mirror after you lose someone you love. The first was a New Yorker article that flashed across my computer screen in early August. It was titled, “The Tail End” and ominously subtitled, “What we lose when we lose a pet.” Why are you showing me this? I thought at the time, subconsciously bookmarking the essay for later reading.

Another sign was my own sense of urgency. 

One of our local haunts, Fred’s, is a dog-named and dog-themed restaurant on 83rd and Amsterdam, known around the Upper West Side for hosting photographs of customers’ canines on its expansive walls. The place had burnt down several years ago and now it was rebuilt, along with all the pictures intact. Fred’s was the first restaurant we took Augie to, maybe a week or so after bringing him home. (A bigger dog jealously guarding his owner’s treat bit him on the nose. Amy wept. He was fine.) 

I’d always meant to get his portrait hung up in Fred’s as a way to memorialize the living and – OK – emphasize the repeat business. But something in me told me in July I had to get it done. In the event, the picture and frame were too large and heavy for the wall, which is why our boy sits there on the mantle above a nonworking fireplace, enviously eyeing your chicken fajita.

At some point, Julia discovered sirens and began asking about them, how they were different from mermaids and so on. This led to Google, which led to YouTube, which led, inevitably, to Homer. We passed each night before bed reading first The Iliad and then The Odyssey. When Odysseus makes it back to Ithaca, after twenty years of war and wandering, the only one to recognize him tricked out in beggar’s clothes is his dog, Argos, who “dropped his ears and wagged his tail, [but] could not get close up to his master.” Odysseus can’t acknowledge Argos, whom he’d trained from birth, without betraying his presence to the suitors who have occupied and despoiled his house and left his animal to ruin, and so he ignores the first creature to welcome him home. Argos dies, having “ fulfilled his destiny of faith.” Julia was full of questions: How did Argos live so long? Would Augie live that long? Would Augie die if I didn’t greet him after I got back from Ukraine?

Then came the yelping. 

It started out as first as a slight mewl when he’d jump on our bed at night – a bed that, after the first night of attempted crate training in 2014, fast became his own. Our vet diagnosed it as spondylosis, bone spurs in the vertebrae, which can occur in “senior” dogs. Even in dog years, you don’t quite figure that 10 qualifies as seniority. Life begins at 56! Seventy is the new 63! 

Everyone who’d met Augie assumed he was still a puppy or just slightly out of puppyhood. And this dog had been through some things. A cross-country relocation from Manhattan to Highland Park, California, where coyotes and peacocks rummaged in his backyard and skunks and rats noisomely duked it out for precious real estate inside the walls of our mid-century split-level. Augie in the wild was both nightclub bouncer and Slomin Shield, scaring off the unwanted critters inside and outside. Then came an unexpected pregnancy, and its unexpected end, and he was our first baby again, somehow more attuned to what Amy was going through than even I could be. Finally, a re-location back to New York — this time to my childhood neighborhood in Queens— when we all realized, except maybe Augie, none of us was a West Coast animal.

 He had also survived a miraculously non-fatal car accident on a snow-covered highway in western Pennsylvania, while we were driving home from our in-laws’ house in West Bloomfield, Michigan. This was March or April 2020 and we’d thought it advisable to ride out “peak” COVID in New York by not being there. We hit a skid on the way home on a mercifully empty highway, went up a mountain, came down back onto the highway but our Ford Escape somehow remained right side up, having only had a wheel ripped clean off its axle before impacting a downy snowbank on the opposite end of the highway. No one was hurt. The first car to drive past us belonged to an off-duty sheriff from a neighboring town. Julia and Augie got to ride in a firetruck and every townie stepped out of a Capra film to take care of a carload of refugees from Babylon.

We later discovered that somewhere along the adventure Augie had picked up heartworm even though the mosquitos that carry it aren’t endemic to the East Coast or Midwest, or the literature says. It was the only real medical problem he’d had his entire life and it was entirely our fault. In the midst of lockdown, we’d forgotten to give our first baby the one drug that couldn’t treat coronavirus in humans but could easily prevent months of unpleasant deworming in dogs: ivermectin. After that, he was fine until he wasn’t.

All summer long, we sensed something was wrong but didn’t want to believe it was true. We were prescribed pain meds to mitigate the degenerative effects of the spinal disease and told us to tell him to take it easy for a while, which we did. As for Augie’s straining to defecate and then also urinate? Possible GI abnormalities due to developed food sensitivity (another characteristic of old age) with maybe a UTI thrown in for good measure. More medicine, lots of different kibble brands to try, plus unfunny jokes about moving to Florida and early-bird specials. 

There were months of vet visits, X-Rays, ultrasounds, bloodwork, fecal analyses and different doctors, all of whom didn’t seem to understand or care what the last had told us. There was rising anger and frustration that Augie was not getting better but only worse and yet we didn’t know why or how. This dog is dying, I said for some heartless reason on what would be his last walk around the neighborhood with Julia on Saturday.

By then, we knew, because he told us. Jumping off our/his bed, he howled. And suddenly, after that howl, he looked the age everyone kept not realizing he was. 

I suppose if at any point in the last ten years you’d have told me male dogs have prostates, I’d have believed you even though I’d never once considered that part of their anatomy, much less that a cancer often curable in men is a death sentence in man’s best friend. Just our luck, and his: an organ Augie didn’t need and a disease that afflicts at most 0.6% of his cohort. (Shetland Sheepdogs are among the breeds most prone.) Prostatic carcinoma goes to work quickly; in his case, by the time it was caught, it had metastasized to the bladder and spine. A season of misdiagnosis at least kept us from the misery of prognosis. “He’s very stoic,” one of the last in a carousel of doctors told me, assuring me the pain wasn’t too bad until the very end. But it could no longer be managed; what the medical industry euphemistically refers to as “palliative care.” 

I am either looking at Augie’s final medical chart or at an early draft of Trainspotting. Alfaxalone, Buprenorphine, Codeine, Diazepam, Fentanyl, Hycodan, Ketamine, Methadone, Morphine, Phenobarbital, Remifentanil, Simbadol, Torbutrol, Tramadol. He was on all of them last Sunday but still couldn’t sit or lay down comfortably. We decided that one last night at home with him wouldn’t be good for any parties concerned. A very young and compassionate radiologist agreed, his mouth warbling as he did so. We took 90 minutes at the Animal Medical Center of New York to say our goodbyes. Then Amy and Julia left the room. “You stay with Daddy,” Amy told Augie. He did.